Domain development part 2	1.7/5.0 (3 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
Barry Goggin April 29, 2008

The mini-sites I discussed in my last post are really designed to generate income with minimal effort similar to the domain parking strategy. The next strategies I discuss focus on development to increase purely resale value.

Turnkey sites

Here you construct a site that has as little as a simple layout and logo and market it to those who do not feel comfortable building a site. Sites can be cloned and only the logo and name changed effectively mass producing these sites.

Personally I am not a fan of such a strategy nor do I participate in such a strategy and i might even go as far as to say, this is the spam of website development. The plan involves selling off a volume of these sites to make a reasonable profit and generally does not involve good domain names.

Domain Flipping

If you want to develop to purely increase resale value, then domain flipping may be for you. This involves building out a domain and using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to gain good search engine position and traffic.

Reminiscent of house flipping, you need to set a time limit and budget (money and resources) and you need to have a clear idea of the market in which you are going to sell. There is no point in spending $2000 developing a domain and then try to sell a website in a market sector that will not support more than a $500 price point.

You can learn more from the Domain Flipper blog on this strategy.

A combination of technical skills, marketing and luck are involved in this strategy. SEO is mostly experience in my book. The rules that search engines use to rank sites are trade secrets and so it is only by trial and error that optimization techniques can be found. Also these techniques can become useless if the search engine ranking rules change, as they in fact do.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Here is a thumbnail sketch of SEO as I see it.

• The domain name key words can help but as the site matures, this plays less of a role.
• Title and description should contain the keywords you are targeting on that page as should the text on that page. Everything should read normally and you should not stuff in keywords.
• Links to and from that page should contain the keywords also but again they should look natural
• Incoming and outgoing links should be related to the theme of the page where possible.
• Text should focus on a theme and not be too short. 200+ words are usually fine.
• Text should be original and unique. Duplicate content seems to get penalised in rankings and indexing i.e. only one copy will likely get indexed and ranked
• Inbound links that are on topic are a major factor in SEO. One-way inbound links from on-topic authority sites are considered the most valuable. Note all the qualifers in the previous sentence.
• Domain age seems to play a role. The older the domain and especially the longer there has been a continuous on-topic search engine indexed website on that domain, the better.

This is not a comprehensive list nor are there any guarantees in a world where such rules are search engine company secrets but these guidelines have helped me rank sites in the search engines.

Mini-sites and domain flipping represent examples of the extremes of development strategy i..e development for income versus development for resale. Other strategies fall somewhere on that continuum.

More on those in the next post.

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