Making the Most of Owning Multiple Domain Names - From an SEO Point of View

Domain names are often considered something of a catch if you land the perfect keyworded url or one that you have been waiting for, for ages. Many webmasters make the mistake of buying up hundreds of domain names and never use them correctly, as sometimes people think just owning loads of domain names will help you to rank highly in the search engines.

Below, we take a look at some things to think about when you decide to purchase domain names for future use.

Choose Carefully - Choose your domain carefully. Buying domain names for the sake of it is pointless; you need to make sure that they have some relevance to what you are doing. For example, if you were selling furniture then buying a few domain names for chairs, tables and desks is a great idea, buying generic ones that have no value or relevance to what you do is not so.

Hosting - Having a domain redirected to another website does not mean you have a "website" earning ranking. If you have a domain name it must be hosted and actually have content on the site to actually be indexed and be treated as a website. Having hundreds of domain names means nothing to a search engine, they have to be hosted and have some sort of content to be ranked and therefore help you to rank with other sites as well.

Holding Pages - If you have 30 domain names then if you can afford to it is a good idea to get them hosted and have a holding page for each, even if it gives you a chance to start working on them over the next few years. Domain name history and site history is a big factor in ranking placements, so if you can get all of your domain names earning some kind of history then this will only benefit you in the future. You do not have to buy individual hosting for each if you have this many, consider buying a reseller account from a company like Heart Internet which only works out at about £35 a month for unlimited hosting, but do bear in mind they normally will have the same IP which will affect linking purposes.

Different Content - So many webmasters think that owning loads of domain names and simply replicating the content, or changing just a couple of words or page names will be good enough to give them "unique" ranking and everything will be ok. Any website you produce needs hard work, you need have completely unique content and all need to be fully optimised. Just owning lots of domain names doesn't mean you will get great ranking for all of them; you must make sure you put hard work and effort into all of them.

Link Building - Owning multiple domains can be a good way of building links between your network of sites, but the one thing you need to do is make sure they are relevant and hosted of different servers. For example, a kitchen appliance company could own four domain names:

Ovensonline

Kitchenappliancesuk

Cheapdishawashers

Discountwashingmachines

As long as all of these were hosted on different servers to make sure they had different IP address, you could quite happily link them to each other to build up some links, as long as they are good quality websites, have good content and you are not doing this for spam purposes.

Ian Spencer works for Clear Web Services, a SEO Web Optimisation and Web Design company serving the Forest Of Dean, Gloucestershire and South Wales.

He has worked in the SEO and Internet Marketing world for many years, and working in partnership with another company has launched the new SEO business.

http://clearwebservices.com/ For More Information, please call 01594 835 857 or email info@clearwebservices.com