What Happened to My Domain Name? - Guidelines for protecting this valuable asset
One of the most important components of your Internet presence is your domain name. Yet it one of the most neglected issues for most web site owners. Imagine the consequences if you were to lose control of your domain name. Your web site is functioning but no one on the Internet can get there because the domain name doesn't point there any more. Your email goes into a black hole never to be seen again. And no amount of effort is ever going to reach all of those customers who think your business has 'bought the farm'. It's a nightmare scenario, but one that is all too common. How can this happen? What can you do to avoid it.

Let's start by reviewing some Domain Name Basics. Your domain name is the unique part of your URL after the http://www. the extension .com .net .biz and so on are part of the name because there could be similar names with different extensions. A domain name must obviously be a unique entity, otherwise two web sites could have the same URL and your computer would not know which one to show you.

To assure this uniqueness, domain names are tracked and given out by International Agreement and these lists are maintain by a government authorized entity called the ICANN. Some years ago the government open up the selling of these names to several independent organizations called 'Registrars'. Now, for the most part, these registrars are reliable organizations and operate according to the rules set down by the government. These registrars often do not deal directly with the public, but use independent companies as sales agent. Companies such as Jenica are authorized to setup and sell domain names to the general public by one or more registrars.

Unfortunately the market has given rise to a few companies who's main purpose is to sell as many domains as possible without regard to all the other aspects of the customers web sites. All to often these companies make their money and then either sell out to someone else or go out of business. When this happens, you, the domain name owner, have a serious problem. We can tell you many horror stories about names that have expired and then were lost because the owners were never notified and worst who attempted to renew and could never get access to anyone who could renew it for them.

"How could this happen?" you might ask. Unfortunately it is way to easy. ICANN rules require the Registrar to protect the domain from being "stolen" by flagellant means. Since your agent is now out of business or has been bought out, you may have no way to access the account for your name to make changes or to even renew it. Further, to protect you, the rules make it difficult for another agent to take over the responsibility on short notice. And it is nearly impossible to do after the name has expired.

Can you just wait until it expires and then register it again? Good thought, but very likely the name will be gone faster than you can say "Bob's your uncle". You see, you can not re-register the name until it has officially passed the redemption period. And when that happens, there are vultures with very sophisticated computer systems that instantly grab the name for themselves. Their intent is to sell it back to you at some exorbitant price. Especially if it is a good name. One unfortunate victim reported that when he tried to buy it back the squatters wanted five thousand dollars. Even names that are relatively useless to other people such as a specific persons name, can have an asking price of several hundred dollars. And even if you are lucky enough to recover your name your site may be unavailable for an extended period. Can you ever recover the lost revenue and opportunities? When this happens to you, you may find your very business in jeopardy.

Can your hosting provider help. Unfortunately your hosting provider will probably never know until your site goes down and you call them for support. Some hosting companies like Jenica have customer service people who are well versed in the procedure and will do their best to help, however if the original agent is no longer around there is little that can be done in the short term and your site will likely experience some down time. To learn more see details on ICANN policies.

Use traditional advertising for your internet marketing program
You can drive viewers to your website with an online promotional strategy, but your marketing success will multiply exponentially if you combine both traditional and online marketing efforts.

RealtySticker.com recommends that you advertise your web site address on all of your marketing materials. Here are a few ideas for promoting your real estate website:

Place your website address (URL) and e-mail address on all printed promotional and advertising pieces such as business cards, brochures, press releases, sign riders, farm letters, newspaper and magazine advertisements, Open House notices and anything else you can think of.

A general guideline with respect to advertising your website

If you use television or radio as an advertising media, don't forget to include your URL. Your website should be the most up-to-date brochure about your business. Printed brochures are soon out of date, but changes to your website to keep promotional information fresh is easy and inexpensive when compared to redesigning and printing a new brochure.

Include your URL on your voice mail and pager greeting, along with a short introduction, such as "For the LATEST information about properties for sale in Anaheim, visit my website at www.MySite.com". Send prospects to your website to see up-to-date real estate information on a regular basis (as part of your conversation.)

Don't fall for the "$129.00 and we will submit your site to all major search engines, including google!" This is the worst, due to submissions being free. Also, generally, once one engine has it so will the others shortly automatically.

Promoting a Blog on the Search Engines

If you're writing a blog on a regular basis, then you're well on your way to enjoying a respectable position on the search engines. However, in order to get the most traffic you can from your blog, you should take some time to make sure your blog is set up in such a way to make it easy for the search engines to find your entries as they "spider" (crawl) your web site. Also, you'll need to make sure that if they do find your content, that they index it in such a way as to help your users find you. If you're going to be spending hundreds of hours in front of a keyboard promoting your business, you might as well spend a few hours up front making those hours count. Someone accused Abe Lincoln of saying "If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six hours sharpening my ax". When it comes to blogging and search engine optimization, we think one hour in a hundred is more realistic -- especially if you spend those hours up front.

This is time well spent, whether you're writing a real estate blog or any other kind of business blog. I'll be focusing on real estate in the examples that follow, but the basic principles apply to any kind of Blog that you'd like to promote in the search engines.

• Let's Get On the Same Page(s)

  Your first step is to start thinking about your blog not as a catalog of your moods or a monument to your accomplishments, but a set of pages, with links to other pages (both inside your blog, to your web site, and outside your blog). Then, while still making your blog interesting to your readers, you want to make the pages friendly to the search engines. Thinking about your blog as a set of pages and links is a good way to begin, since after all, that's the way the search engine "thinks" about it.

  From a search engine perspective, the most important pages on your blog include your blog's home page and your individual post pages. And -- as we'll discuss in the next tip -- the most important links are those the search engine will follow and that will give the engine a hint about how to index the target page.

  Though your home page and individual entry page are the most important pages in your search engine marketing plans, your category pages and your archive pages also have a small but substantial role to play. Each category page title is potentially another good keyword phrase, and both category and archive pages help your blog entries stay available to be spidered long after you've moved on to many new posts.

   

• Make Sure Your Post Pages Have Static URLs linking to them

  Put simply, a static URL is a URL without a question mark in it, in contrast to a dynamic URL, which does have a question mark. For example, here are two links that point to the same place:

  • Dynamic: http://www.particlewave.com/?p=82
  • Static: http://www.particlewave.com/2005/using-directories-to-promote-your-blog_82.html

  When you navigate to a post by clicking on a post's "permalink" link or the post's title (depending on how your blog is set up) , you want to see a static URL in the address bar of your browser. You want the static version not only because the search engine is more likely to follow a static link and index the page, but also because the static link repeats the title of your post again, and this helps it show up for the keywords you want.

  The good news is, if you're using Blogger or Typepad, you probably have static links already set up by default. On Wordpress you'll need to check out the Wordpress help (Codex) for "permalinks" and follow the instructions there.

   

• Watch Your Titles

  From a search engine perspective, the most important tag on your page is the title tag. The title of a page is what shows up in the blue bar at the top of your web browser window. My experience shows that your blog should be set up this way:

  • Your blog's home page should show your Blog's Title, e.g. "Mytown Real Estate". Your blog's title should have the keywords a potential client would search for right up front. You want "Springfield Real Estate" (or maybe "Springfield Homes for Sale" or the like). Not "Edgewood P. Tuttle's Amazing Guide to the Sprocket City of Springfield".
  • Each post page should have as a page title the title you entered for that post, and nothing else, e.g., "New Listing in Oak Park". It should not be "My Real Estate Blog : New Listing In Oak Park". If you have any control over your blog's appearance, avoid repeating the blog's title in your post title.
  • Category pages should show the category title, e.g. "Market Updates" or "Springfield Real Estate Listings".

  As you write your blog, try to write titles that match what you would search for if you were searching for real estate in your area. If you need help thinking about how people search, two great resources are Overture's Keyword Suggestion Tool and WordTracker.com.

  A common formula that I use is town name plus something. "New York Condos", "Turtle Bay Real Estate Market", etc. Don't be boring about it, don't hackney the same locations, and do match your titles to your posts.

   

• Learn About Other Tags

  There are other tags besides the title tag that are important to your search results, the main one being the description meta tag. Getting into some of these is beyond the scope of this article, but as an aside I do have code for getting the title tag and description tag "right" (according to me) for Wordpress if you're interested. All of other tags put together probably don't equal the title tag in importance, however, so glossing over them here is all to the good.

   

• Integrate Your Blog and Your Website

  If you already have a real estate web site, I believe your blog should be integrated with your existing site as much as possible. That's where your listings and your lead generating forms are, or at least, I hope that's where your listings and your lead generating forms are. You want your visitors to go there, and you want the search engines to pick up the "internal links" to these pages as well. The best case is if your blog software runs on the same server and can use the same navigation elements, etc. Failing that, you may find a service that can match your web site's look and feel and host your blog externally. (If you can't find such a service, let me know, perhaps I'll start one).

  If you can't run blog software on your server and you don't have much control over how your blog is configured, there are still some things you should be doing in your blog. First, make sure every page of your site has a link back to your web site (an easy way to do this is through your blog roll). Second, if your site has been updated in any way, blog it! Did you take a new listing and is that listing on your site? There's a great blog entry for you.

   

• Don't Overdo It

  Though you should have the search engines in mind as "one of" your readers, you shouldn't write exclusively for the search engines. If you have something interesting to say with no redeeming search value, go ahead and say it! And even in those posts where you are going after search appeal in both your title and content, you still need to write with a human visitor in mind. Keyword spamming will defeat the purpose on two levels -- your human visitors are sure to surf away, and the search engines may penalize your content anyway.

  Although the search engine optimization community sometimes gets into a good-natured debate over the relative benefits of incoming links versus on-page content, the great thing about a blogging regularly is that you're going to be getting both as time goes along if your content is worth reading. Put in a little time up front, and write naturally and consistently, and you may see tangible benefits in as little as a few weeks.

Source: http://www.particlewave.com/YourBlogAndSEO.php