Let's talk about domain names. Many marketers out there who want to put something up on the web simply log on to their favorite domain register and start looking at what domain names might be available. After registering their catchy domain name, voila, another site is born on the Internet!

There is a better way to register your new domain: choose a soon-to-expire domain that's already been around, got abandoned, has backlinks on the major search engines and "used" to have a good amount of traffic when it was alive and kicking. For whatever reason, its owner abandoned the site, went out of business, checked out or forgot to re-register it.

I like to grab domain names before they expire for the simple reason that they risk a smaller chance of having their PR zeroed out by Google after expiration. Sometimes you can get away with "expired" domains without losing all the links that are still pointing to them. However, soon-to-expire domains seem to work best. Ideally, you will want domain names that are Dmoz or Yahoo listed. These can be as good as gold.

Make sure you do some background checking on the domain you intend to acquire so you know what the site's original content was all about. Use http://www.archive.org to research the site's history. For an expired domain, all you do is re-activate it under your name and take advantage of

previous "bookmarks" and traffic originating from sites that linked to that domain. Sure beats a brand new domain with nothing but a wish and HTML appended to it.

Why start from scratch with a new domain name and optimized site that might take 6-8 months to get anywhere near the top of the Search Results? Some SEO experts say that Google's indexing and ranking algorithms consider the age of your domain as a form of age-filtering function. So it makes sense to purchase a domain name that's been past this 6-8 months age filter.

Google seems to like stability and time on the market. So, choose a domain name accordingly. If you have a domain that's been around for a long time, it shows Google that your site has stability and is unlikely to be a temporary, throw away site, possibly designed for spamming purposes such as mass-generated doorway pages.

Reference: http://www.rightclickwebs.com/seo/google-aging.php

After you've nabbed a soon-to-expire domain name, add the best "focused" content and keyword phrases to represent your new site. Also put the best keywords on your Title tag. Try to stay away from obscure domain names. Find names that are easy to remember. Keep the theme of your new site and target audience the same as what was previously on your new domain.
About the Author

Mario Giordani writes about different topics of interest. He can be reached at http://bravotraffic.com/ You may use this article as long as it is unchanged and all links are active.