In today’s economy, a business needs to make the most of the marketing tools that are available. Your web site and domain name(s) can play a vital role in maximizing your exposure to potential customers on the web.
A recent in-house audit revealed we had been sitting on several domain names purchased for future projects but which were otherwise sitting unused. This is like buying ad space and then letting other people advertise in that space. What do I mean by that? Well, it’s pretty simple. If you purchase a domain name and don’t use it, it will most likely be placed on a ‘parked’ page where your domain registrar will place pay-per-click advertisements for ads relevant to your domain name. It is essentially providing income to everyone but you (maybe even your competitors) and you’re the one that paid for it.
The good news is there are steps you can take to make those domain names work for you instead.
- most domain registrars provide domain managing control panels. Use yours to mask and/or redirect the domain to your web site. Make sure to utilize the ‘title’ and ‘meta’ tags of the redirected domain to aid search engine optimization.
- host the domain and create a mini-site with links back to your main site. Maximize your new mini-site with custom title, meta tags and key-word driven content. This increases your coverage on the web, increases your key word coverage, adds valuable link-backs to your site, thereby helping increase your main site’s search engine ranking. You need to be careful with this one. You don’t want to create a duplicate site to your main site as search engines will consider this an attempt to manipulate your rankings and could get your site(s) removed from the index(es). For more information, see Google’s ‘multiple content’ page.
- create a blog (like this one) on the domain for current news, sales and link back to your main site.
- create a mini-site with content relevant to your domain name and then use Google Ad Sense, Yahoo Publisher Network or similar programs which place relevant ads on your page and pay you based on click-throughs and converted sales from your site.
- park your domain with a company that parks your domain and then pays for clicks or converted sales clicks.
For our unused domains, we decided to create mini sites and then link back to our main site since the overall goal was to maximize key word coverage and help boost our main sites search engine ranking. The project was only recently implemented and is currently ongoing but for each new domain we activate, we submit the URL to major search engines and add them to our site monitoring so we can track the results.
It will take some time, 30 to 60 days minimum, to be able to compile enough data to show any quantifiable data or trends and compare to previous date but we’ll be keeping an eye on it and let you know how it’s going.
If your interested in taking advantage of your unused domains, or maybe picking up one or two more for your domain portfolio, we are having an ‘Everything Is On Sale’ Sale on our web products store. Check out our post in the ‘What’s On Sale section of our news page.
If you would like help with putting your domains to work for you, give us a call – (904) 443-7800.
UPDATE:
Some recent reading in this topic has found debate in regard to:
- micro sites: specifcly pertaining to micro sites on the same server or I.P.
- Duplicate Content: there is debate as to whether sites are actually penalized for duplicate content, or it is simply a matter of search engines comparing the two sites and only offering up the more relevant or popular (link-backs) of the two (or three, etc).
Since putting duplicate content on a site, rather then developing for additional organic content seems a waste, it probably remains a non-recommended practice from our point of view.