The DomainFace Blog

Before I dive into today’s post I want to share a few thoughts with you.

I remember when I first started renovating aged domains, that it was around this step of the process that I began to feel a little discouraged. Things can get a somewhat technical when it comes to setting up sites and everyone seems to have their own way of doing things and it can get a little confusing with all the conflicting advice on offer. The key for me was to stick at it, find out who was the best at what I needed to learn and take their ideas and run with them as fast as I could. I went off an studied anything I didn’t understand until it made sense.

You can waste so much time and money chasing the next guru showing you the way to online enlightenment.

My advice is to find a teacher you connect with and give their material a chance to work for you, ….or not. So many of us spend too much time chasing the non existent silver bullet to quick online success, jumping from one course to another and never actually doing anything other than making these guys rich.

If some of this process sounds a bit geeky, that’s ok. All you have to do is note the parts that you don’t quite grasp and go and find someone who has mastered it and learn.

In the last post we went through the finding and buying process. Today I want to show you what I do with my newly acquired aged domain.

As I mentioned in a previous post, it’s crucial to leave the domain on then same registrar that you bought it from. The website you’re going to build can be hosted anywhere you like. I always make sure my sites are hosted on good cpanel hosts that haven’t been modified by the hosting company. This ensures that I don’t have any issues with installing through wp direct.

The first thing I do after I take over a domain is point the DNS to the new hosting account and setup a cpanel account for the domain. I always use word press for my blogs and I’ll install the blog through word-press direct, but you can also use fantastico which is free and comes with most hosting accounts offering cpanel. Just check with any potential hosting company to make sure they offer it.

If you’re new to all this, there are some great YouTube videos on the subject and of course you can learn all this over at the challenge.

When renovating an aged domain you want to keep as many of the links that were pointing to the domain as possible and the best way to do this is to put similar or even better content on your new site.

Remember, you only own the domain and have no rights to the content that was on the site, so you can’t just copy the old content.

I do this by either looking through the site on Way-back Machine at archive.org or entering “site:whatever the domain is.com” into google and going through the cached pages  and populating the site with content. Lately, I’ve starting using the SEO plug-in for google chrome and it works really well too.

Also, If you’re using Market Samurai you can find all the site’s anchor text links for yahoo there and use that to recreate pages.

It’s important to make sure your keyword is in the Page URL, title tags and header tags to get the most SEO value.

It can take time, particularly if it was a large site with lots of pages, but if you spend the time it can really pay off.

One of the main reasons I like using wordpress direct is that the initial installation sets the site up with some great SEO plug-ins to help manage and build the site. However there are a few that I like to add myself.

When building sites on aged domains, there will always be links coming into pages that you haven’t accounted for and these will result in 404 error messages and lost links if you don’t fix things fast.

I use the Redirection plug-in, which is a complete 404error and 301redirection solution. Basically a 301 redirect works by passing a URL through to any another URL you want, thus avoiding any dead ends and lost links.

This is only a short term solution for any pages I have missed in the setup and if I don’t recreate the original page on the new site, I will eventually lose the links to that page.

I know, it’s a confusing explanation , so let’s look at our “blowupdolls.com” example.
If the old site had a page titled ” puncture repair kits for blow up dolls” (apparently it’s a common hazard) and I don’t have that page on the new site, I’ll set up a redirect and tell the search engines that the page is now at the homepage ” blowup dolls.com” or any other page I think appropraiate. Now instead of an error message and a dead end, the homepage will appear and I’ll keep the link, giving me time to recreate the original page.

Once I’ve taken care of the house keeping, the fun can start.

These days there are two  plug-ins that I just can’t live without. They’re not free, but worth every cent.

The first is RSS Bomber which comes with a free copy of the second, Link Daemon.
I won’t go into too much detail about the plug-ins, other than to say I have had smashing results with them both and they come with great ” how to guides”.

RSS Bomber turns every post on your site into it’s own RSS feed. Normally a site will have one RSS feed for the entire site, one for comments and bigger, more complex sites might have a couple of extra feeds set up.

What happens now is that your site has as many individual RSS feeds as it has posts and it’s a matter of submitting these new feeds to as many RSS directories and aggregators as you like.
You can now grab multiple top ten positions in google and dominate the first page.

With Link Daemon you set up a system of internal links via pre-selected anchor text, linking to any page on the site you want.

Internal keyword linking to pages you’re trying to rank can produce amazing results!

In the blow up doll website example, let’s say we have a keyword phrase “doll puncture repair kit” and a page  we want to rank in the search engines. We set up link Daemon so that every time  the phrase “doll puncture repair kit” is mentioned anywhere on the site, a link to that page will appear.

Repeat this for all your keywords and over time you have a huge internal keyword  link network.

Internal links are very relevant. Don’t ignore them!

I also like the Yet Another Related Posts Plug-in, which gives the reader a list of related posts that they can then read on the site.

That’s pretty much all I do to get things up and running. In the next post I’ll talk about content, back linking and setting up the site to sell.

cheers,

Danny