Domains are crucial and have a very strong bearing over almost all the facets of SEO – and undeniably the most important part for targeting keywords for your SEO project. A domain name which has continuously been registered and is “live” either with only a landing page or a whole website for a long time is commonly known as an aged domain. Such domains, in most cases, demand a higher price as compared to newly registered domains distinctly because of their age. Aged domains are searched for by a number of business owners, as they are perceived by Google as more authoritative and are unlikely to become subject to any age penalty, which is referred to as the ‘Google Sandbox’, and restricting the website from reaching the top of the search engine result pages (SERP’s) purely on the basis of its age.
Websites such as godaddy.com is one place where one could find reliable aged domains, which conducts an auction to help you find the domain you’re interested in. While there is no long list of annoying rules and regulations for buying and selling aged domains, there are certain things which should be followed when selecting one.
Chances Of Growth And Development
The first vital thing is to determine how the domain name would prove to be useful for your purpose. Is there a particular name you are looking out for in an online community? Or, a product selling page, is it a directory or a site for personal purposes or some other uses. This knowledge will help you in planning the content marketing strategy which will be relevant to your purpose and the domain name. A well planned strategy will enable you to fetch a good price if you plan to sell it in the future.
Length of the Domain Name
Though there are a number of mixed responses as to how long a domain name could be, the common belief is that, the shorter the better. It is possible to register a domain name of up to 63 characters, however in order to stream in traffic to your website, keep your domain name as short and unforgettable as possible.
Traffic coming to the website
If you are planning to buy an aged domain or the one which has expired, one vital thing to look out for is how much traffic does the site already have. The knowledge of this will help you in developing the domain. Also, it is of utmost importance to determine what kind of traffic comes to the site. The most valuable of all kinds of traffic is the organic traffic that comes via the search engines. At the same time, getting back links from pertinent sites is also a vital factor, as this only means one thing – a higher place in Google’s SERP’s. In order to find out how many backlinks a given website has and also it’s page rank including other important metrics, a number of tools are available viz. Majestic SEO, Ahrefs tool, Open Site Explorer, to name a few.
Relevance and Keyword Popularity
If compared, a domain name using popular keywords that are related to niche markets and are in current trend will prove to be more valuable that those domains which do not. One more important point is that Google tends to give importance to domains which contain these marketable keywords, when ranking of the domains is concerned. This point has already been confirmed to Matt Cutts from Google. Wondering how to find out the most popular keyword which are related to your industry? There are a number of tools available, but why not try out Google’s Keyword Planner at first!
Spelling
Spelling plays a very important role to determine if a domain name is suitable and will prove to be a memorable brand name.
Check out the spellings dicitionary to see if the words are mispelled. Double lettered domain names are more often misspelled by web users. It could prove to be one big task to rank for certain keywords if the aged domain that you have selected has a number of spellings, punctuations or grammatical errors.
How great a feeling it is when you start your website flipping with the domain which is aged, has a good backlinks profile, is indexed by the search engines and also has a substantial PageRank!
