Dear Readers,

How about that! An Expired Valid PR4 domain yesterday for you. Whoever registered it must be so pleased.

Anyway I wanted to write this article for a while now and here it is. I wanted to say what you will need to do once you register a domain. This is what I think in my opinion and is what I usually do with nothing withheld from you.

So I have registered an expired domain with a Valid PR4 like the one I had yesterday. Now what?

What I would do firstly is find some hosting and add some contents, that would be several pages of unique content.

Secondly I would add Google Analytics so I can monitor current traffic and see what it’s sources are. I would also usually use Domain-Pop that gives a decent breakdown of the domains backlinks. The only problem I find with it is that it takes some time to get the PageRank of the backlinks in order.

I then would leave it alone for a week to see what current traffic is like, the sources of traffic, percentage of returning to new visitors and where I can improve them.

After the week passes I would check if it’s indexed in major search engines such as google,yahoo and MSN (Live) by entering these search queries:

Google: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Adomain.com
Yahoo: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fdomain.com
MSN (Live): http://search.msn.co.uk/results.aspx?q=site%3Adomain.com

If it’s listed then GREAT, you got indexed within 7 days, otherwise don’t worry, we’ll get there.

This step is a must to ensure constant indexing and a good SERPS for your domain. You would need to generate a sitemap for your website. What this does is generate a network of all the pages on your website and present it to search engines as if to say “Look here, I’ll save you the trouble of looking for pages, here is a list of the pages for you to index“. The best free tool I found is http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ which to be honest is great in every aspect of the word. It’s Free, Easy to use and has a nice interface.

Once you upload it you then submit it to google by going to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview?hl=en which is the base google uses to communicate with webmasters.

Recently MSN launched a similar service which does the same think, but instead, just for MSN at http://webmaster.live.com/.

Once you did that I really recommend the next step. Semi-Automatic Directory Submission for FREE. Digixmas have developed an amazing piece of software that will send it to 150 directories for free. You will only have to copy the CAPTCHA code, select the category and press OK. Their link is: http://www.digixmas.com/

Finally, to let everyone know about your website I really recommend adding it to Stumble Upon and Digg as they are visited by a lot of people with wide range of interests, and if someone finds it interesting they will for sure check it out. There are other networks out there but not as big as both the ones I mentioned.

After you did all the steps mentioned above give it 2-3 days and use google analytics to monitor traffic.

Let me know what you get if you followed these steps.

Do you do anything extra? or cut out any of these steps?

I hope you like this list

See you on Monday with another list of expired domains

Enjoy

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