Expired Domains Mean Opportunities

If you have a website, you want traffic; lots and lots of traffic, as a matter of fact. You are well aware of the fact that there are now millions of Internet users out there, and among those millions, there may be at least one or two thousand web surfers every day looking for the exact services or products that you’re selling. But there’s a problem. How do you reach out to those potential customers and make them come to your site?

You probably have been very busy already with your Internet marketing. I would assume that you have submitted your site to the search engines, bought a few ads in a variety of e-zines, and perhaps even put up a couple of banners. So are you satisfied with the results you are getting from your efforts? You may have tried all that you know about promoting your site and your products, but are you getting the traffic that you wanted? If not, then maybe you need to look in other directions.

But don’t worry; you won’t have to resort to illegitimate methods just to get the traffic you need. There is a perfectly ethical and legitimate way to get traffic to your site, and it’s very effective, too. But what makes this method even better is that over 95% of the people on the World Wide Web have absolutely no clue about it at all. So, have I got your attention? Let me explain it to you a bit more in detail.

Have you ever considered using expired domains for pulling in traffic to your site? Probably not yet, but let me tell you, this is a great (but oftentimes overlooked) opportunity for you. Expired domains have a lot of wasted traffic coming to their site, and this traffic could be put to better use for you instead. If you’re lucky, you may even find a domain name that’s related to your business in Yahoo. This could save you an instant $200 off the Yahoo listing charge.

Think of the possibilities here. For the cost of a single domain name, there could be loads of traffic just waiting for you! It costs less than $10 to register a domain name nowadays, and coupled with the potential immediate traffic, you cannot find a better deal than this. It’s estimated that over 3 million visitors are hitting an expired domain every day. That is mostly targeted traffic, and I’m willing to bet that you’d like to get a piece of that action. If so, then it’s time to start working and get those wasted traffic to your site.

But why did these domains expire in the first place? There could be several reasons. Sometimes webmasters just get weary of all the work involved in developing and maintaining the site. Perhaps they become too busy with work or with their personal lives. Others may have carelessly let their domains expire without knowing it, and several may have met with financial problems, so they just stopped maintaining the site.

One good thing about this whole situation, though, is that the traffic that these expired domains have generated since the time they were active just keeps on coming. If you’re a virtual realtor in cyberspace, this could make for some very attractive real estate indeed. Registering expired domains need some careful research on your part, though. Most important of all, you have to be certain that the domain’s traffic isn’t coming from websites that you’d want to avoid at all costs, like porn sites or such.

Now, if you have done your job and made sure that the traffic is satisfactory, you have two options for taking advantage of your new domain. First option is to redirect the traffic from the previously expired domain to your own site. Second option is to sell off the domain, which could be very profitable for you, depending on how heavy the traffic is.

Link Building Basics

A good analogy for links is votes, each link to your site is a vote in your favor and the sites with the most votes tend to get the highest rankings. Google & Yahoo place a lot of importance on the quality of your links in determining rankings.

In this article I will be sharing with you some important info on link building and some strategies to help your one way link building.

Before we get started, it's important to understand the fundamentals...

Beginning with the very basics, a link is a way of navigating from one webpage to another. To have a link within the same website is called an 'internal link'. An 'external link' takes you from a webpage in one website to a webpage in another website. The meaning of 'backlink' is that your site is being linked to from another website.

There are 4 different types of links:

* URL Link - This is simply a website url that is a link.

* Text Links (aka static links) - This is the most common type of link (when you click on a word or phrase and it is a link)

* Image Links - An image link is simply an image that you click on to navigate to another webpage.

* Dynamic Links - These types of links are in another programming language called Javascript and while they also take you from one webpage to another, they have 'extra codes' to perform special functions.

(these types of links can appear in many different forms)

It is important to be able to recognize these types of links, even if you are not familiar with web design and programming. You don't have to memorize the codes, just learn to identify each type of link.

Links provide navigation for human visitors and for 'spiders' (aka: crawlers, robots, bots). Simply put, a spider is a computer program that goes to websites and gathers information. Search engines use spiders to visit and 'index' your website. This means that they gather information about your site in order to list it in their search results.

When the search engine spiders index your website, they follow the links to get from one webpage to another. It's important to know that search engines cannot follow 'dynamic links' and do not follow html links that have a special code in them that says 'no follow'.

The place where 'no follow' is commonly found is in the "meta tags" section of the website. Meta tags are basically information that only the spiders see and not for the human visitor. You can see the code for any website in your browser by choosing 'view source'. (From Internet Explorer, choose Page » View Source. From Firefox choose View » Page Source)

If a search engine spider cannot follow a link from another website to yours, you can still receive visitors but the link will not have any value from a search engine optimization perspective.

What different kind of links could you get?

There are 2 types of links that you can get:

* One-way links - A one-way link is when another website links to you and you don't link back to them.

* Reciprocal links - A reciprocal link is when a website links to you and you link back to them.

One-way links are more valuable in the eyes of the search engines. However, each link has its own individual value based on: how relevant it is to your site, the text in and around the link, how much authority the website that links to you has, etc.

However, there are links that the search enginges rates as 'no value' links, even though they are bringing you boatloads of targeted visitors every day...

Generally speaking, the more websites that link to you the better. Link building is a time consuming task and to put your energy on getting 'high-quality links' will give you more value back on your invested work. 50 high quality links can be much more valuable from a search engine optimization perspective than 1000 'low quality links'.

What's a high quality link? - Links that brings you Page Reputation (which shows the search engines that other related websites consider you to be important), and links that give you PageRank. Sometimes both together and sometimes not...

To get high rankings on your website, you want to obtain links for targeted keywords. For this reason it's necessary to start with Keyword Research.

If your website is about "bird watching", the first step is to 'do keyword research' and find out which keyword you should aim for. While you could just start getting text links for the keyword phrase "bird watching", if no one is searching for that - you won't get any visitors. There's no sense in ranking on the first page for a keyword that no one is looking for.

Or, if there is a lot of competition for that keyword, you might want to pick a "lower hanging fruit".

This is an excellent free keyword research tool. (The numbers you see are searches/day.)

Another important part is making sure your page is optimized for the keyword you are targeting. If you are focussed on building one way links to your site but the links have anchor text which doesn't even appear on your page, you will likely be wasting your time. (I say likely assuming that you have some competition for your targeted keywords, if there is no competition then it doesn't matter).

In this case a site that has fewer one way links but much better on-page optimization is likely to rank higher. Or maybe you are building one way links to your site but they are just url links and not anchor-text links. Another site that has less links than you but better quality (anchor-text) will be likely to rank higher.

Ideally, you want to build a lot of one way links that have anchor text which includes the primary and secondary keywords that your page is optimized for. Google also uses Latent Semantic Indexing which (in a nutshell) means that they study the synonyms of the keywords on your page. This is to prevent spammers from just loading every second word with their keywords. Their algorithm looks at all the words on your page and how they relate to each other.

So, there's no sense in building one way links if your content is not worthwhile. The first thing you want to do is to optimize your sites for you visitors. Then, you can go through and "sprinkle" your keywords. Then, go out and get one way links with the anchor-text of your targeted keywords, ideally getting most of these links from websites that are related to yours.

Yes, Google looks at how the content on your site and the content on the site you link to relate with eachother. Fewer links to your business site from other business sites will be more valuable link-wise than more links coming to you from a site about video games..

Don't make these link building mistakes:

* Don't spend all your time getting one way links from sites with no Page Rank. One or two links from related Page Rank 5+ sites can be worth more than 100 links from sites with no PR.

* Be careful about buying links or you can get banned. Site Wide links is something you should be extra careful about. To go from having only a few backlinks one day to having hundreds one day later is something that can lead to penalizion by Google.

* Don't spend all your time building one way links that are url-links, you want to get anchor-text links.

*Important is to NOT get "No-Follow" links, since they don't bring any value to your site.