It was an interesting read and I would recommend the book to anyone interested in internet marketing, SEO and ecommerce, or indeed anyone with an offline bricks and mortar shop or store.

The book examines the theory that the future of selling online is to sell less of more and explains how endless choice is creating unlimited demand. In the past many markets have perhaps been vastly overlooked due to being so niche stocking the product in a physical shop was largely unprofitable but with the advent of Amazon (think niche books, CD’s, DVD’s etc) and Ebay who have perhaps found the ideal platform to explore almost every niche and long tail product or search term that could possibly exist.

From an internet marketing or SEO point of view, whilst not directly discussing it in the book. It certainly opens your eyes to the possibility of unlimited search phrases and referrals. Perhaps to go further down the long tail line user generated content and interaction is required, essential and a neccessity.

If my little synopsis has whet your appetite, you can purchase the book online from Waterstones for just £6.29.

There are three (well six actually!) ways of accessing an add-on domain:

Root domain name (ie. www.addondomain.co.uk)

Subdomain (ie. www.addondomain.the-hosting-domain.co.uk)

Subfolder (ie. www.the-hosting-domain.co.uk/addondomain)

Then of course you have the same three again without the www.

So in order to avoid duplicate sites being spidered and indexed, we can use a few command in the .htaccess file so that all possible names resolve at www.addondomain.co.uk.

Here is what you need to put in you htaccess file in the directory that houses your add-on domain ie. www.the-hosting-domain.co.uk/add-on/ :
Code:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^addondomain\.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.addondomain.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.addondomain.the-hosting-domain\.co.uk
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.addondomain.co.uk/$1 [R=permanent,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^addondomain.the-hosting-domain\.co.uk
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.addondomain.co.uk/$1 [R=permanent,L]

And add this to the .htaccess file in the root domain: ie. www.thehostingdomain.co.uk
Code:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine OnRedirect /addondomain http://www.addondomain.co.uk

That should work!

Please note in my example:

addondomain = Rootdomain name
the-hosting-domain = The domain name that hosts your add-on domain.

Feel free to ask any questions.

Canonicalisation occurs when a website is able to be accessed via both www.website.com and website.com, in severe cases this can cause the search engines to effectively index 2 identical copies of your site, and then whilst its unlikely your website will attract any duplicate content penalties, its simply not good practice, effectively you are forcing the search engines to choose which page is most relevant, and often they may choose the wrong URL.

Here are a couple of examples of websites:

http://bbc.co.uk - Note the BBC url, correctly redirects you to www.bbc.co.uk

http://dailyecho.co.uk / www.dailyecho.co.uk - The Daily Echo on the other hand have both urls accessible and indexed by the search engine.

The best way to avoid any Canoicalisation issues is to setup a .htaccess file in the root folder of your domain that uses a 301 redirect to redirect to only one URL for your website.

You can choose to either direct the URL to www. or just plain http://, my preferred option is always www., but thats a personal choice and will not affect your SEO in anyway.

To setup an .htaccess file to avoid any such duplication issues, simply open your preferred text browser and insert the following code into the doucment and then save the file, calling it ‘.htaccess’, then upload the file to your sites root folder.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^website\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.website.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Once you have done this, you can test that it is working correctly by visiting your url without using www., you should then be automatically redirected to the www. version of your website.

Another, softer way of fixing this issue, is using a function within Google’s Webmaster Tools section, within this handy utility is a section for you to tell Google which URL you would prefer them to index.

Of course, using this method does not fix the problem with Yahoo, MSN, Ask and all the other (non-Google powered) search engines.

Using a 301 redirect.

There are a number of ways of implementing a 301 redirect, my preferred method would be a command in the .htaccess file, but alternative ways are equally acceptable.

For a full low down on setting up and implementing a 301 redirect, this site has some great information.

http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php

Ever heard of Gumtree.com? Submitting adverts for your site to Gumtree is an excellent way of getting your site indexed in Google and can even bring you some visitors too!

Simply navigate to Gumtree.com, i often choose my local area but any Gumtree area will do.

I post a brief intro to the service or subject the site discusses and then place a non-anchor text link, ie: http://www.quickwhois.co.uk

9 times out of ten your site will be indexed, listed and ranking in Google within 24 hours.

A superb time saver for anyone who wants to keep track of their Google rankings.

He’s also created a fantastic Video tutorial for the rank checker tool.

Happy rank checking!

Namedrive Review

Namedrive domain parking services are a relative newcomer to the industry but launched with some considerable applause and managed to quickly establish a strong marketshare within the UK market. Namedrive are parking specialist and whilst they do offer some minor secondary services, first and foremost they stick to what they are good at, and thats monetising (monetizing) your domains. Their website is simple and easy to use, and their customer support is second to none in the industry, eager to help and please the customer at all times.

SEDO Review

SEDO offer a range of services ranging from domain parking, through to offering dedicated servers for hosting powerful websites, they also have arguably the largest marketplace for the reselling of domain names. The probably have the largest marketshare with the UK for domain name parking, although this is a close call alongside Namedrive. Their website is perhaps a little more refined compared to Namedrive, but also a great deal more complicated with all their secondary services also being promoted, it can get quite confusing. They also manually approve all domain names for inclusion within their service, and this can cause a frustrating wait at times, causing you an unneccassary loss in income.

Domain Parking Tips

In order to maximise your parking revenue, it is important to experiment and try different types of domain names with different parking providers, as suprisingly the revenue can vary considerably.

Take time to familiarise yourself with each companies methods of allowing you to optimise your parking pages, with careful optimisation for each domain name, revenue can increase sharply. (Namedrive in particular will often help you to optimise your portfolio if you ask!)

Firstly i use a combination of tools, my own Bulk Overture Keyword Tool, Google’s Traffic Estimator (Great for traffic and income guesstimates!), Google Trends (For higher traffic subjects), a whois tool and SEO Quake (a plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer).

Lets take a little more detailed look at each of these tools in question, and how i use them to find a domain name:

Overture Keyword Tool

This tool is great for generating list of keywords, i usually start with a fairly generic word, so in this example i’ll look at the keyword doors or door (Note: Overture does not handle plurals) and we get back a list of results as follows:

door 85177
automatic garage door 27180
garage door 22766
door including lock product security shutter 10441
the door 9919
girl next door 8858
patio door 8344
french door 8207
kitchen door 8124
door handles 6915
dog door 6018
internal door 5727
window and door 5464
upvc door 5372
3 door down 5090
exterior door 4798
shower door 4504
pet door 4356
next door nikki 4202
front door 4149
interior door 3780
sliding door 3472
next door man 3357
door knob 2630
sliding wardrobe door 2619
garage door opener 2584
fire door 2539
door lock 2481
door furniture 2364
replacement kitchen door 1991
back door 1910
electric garage door 1779
external door 1754
door chime 1720
door mat 1639
chrome door handles 1634
wardrobe door 1615
door security 1588
folding door 1520
door bells 1509
door hinge 1445
wooden door 1443
door canopy 1425
oak door 1355
milf next door 1302
next door 1299
roller garage door 1247
open door 1095
dat door 1046
bifold door 1045
door hardware 1030
stable door 1024

Essentially this list provides me with ideas of keywords and keyphrases that involve my search term ‘doors’ , the figures provide an estimate of search volume for each term. Its important to realise that Overture data is unreliable to say the least, with figures often being wholly unreliable and phrases being scrambled.

Google Traffic Estimator

Next up after selecting a few keywords or phrases from our list we then delve a little deeper, for this example i’ll pick the following phrases that at first glance at overture data look appealing:

• garage door
• automatic garage door
• patio door
• door handles

Although usually if i’m solely looking for a site to form the basis of a Mini Site i’d look a little closer at more of the phrases.

The next step is to work out alternative phrases from the search terms like:

• Garage Door / Garage Doors
• Automatic Garage Door / Automatic Garage Doors
• Patio Door / Patio Doors
• Door Handles / Door Handles

Next lets plug some data into the tool, a hint here is to set a imaginary high budget for both PPC and daily budget, i also always tailor my results to the UK, and i get a set of results back like this:

This tool offers us a much better estimate of potential traffic, so straight away we can take an educated guess that the Overture traffic estimate for ‘Automatic Garage Doors’ was an anomaly, Google telling us that the combined terms only receive 5 - 6 clicks a day at the top of the paid search results. Its also offers you an idea of how profitable a niche may be, by providing a rough guideline to potential advertisers PPC spend.

Some of the other results are a little more interesting, so on to the next step and i’ll narrow our keywords down to only two sets, Door Handles (& Door Handle) and Garage Door (& Garage Doors)

Google Trends

A Google Trends search for these terms shows steady and stable traffic flows, to get the most from Google Trends its handy if you know the volume of traffic for a well searched top ranking site to compare the traffic volumes.

So Google trends in this case has confirmed that there is indeed a nice flow of traffic for both these sets of search terms.

Now we need to see if there are any suitable domain names available.

Whois Search

So its a case of plugging in a few domain combinations into the appropriate tool, personally i’m only interested in .co.uk, .org.uk or .me.uk domain names, but by using 123reg’s tool they will show a number of alternative domain extensions that may take your fancy.

As you might expect from the search volumes, Garage Door is a pretty popular term, all derivatives without hyphens are taken in all .uk extensions, door handles however offer a few possibilities and could be used as a fantastic base for a Mini Site.

We find doorhandles.org.uk, doorhandle.org.uk and doorhandle.me.uk all to be free and available to register.

Before diving in head first and registering one of the domains, i’d always take a quick look at the search engine results for each phrase, with SEO Quake enabled, this allows me to take a quick snapshot look at the possible competition.

SEO Quake

SEO Quake allows me to quickly assess the possible strength of any set of search results, I can instantly see figures such as number of pages indexed, number of links and age of domain aswell as a number of other figures all at the touch of my search key.

In this example, Door Handles (& Door Handle) we find a number of fairly well established sites, however there is definite scope to hit the the top ten with relative ease, and of course there is the potential for long tail traffic too!

I’ve taken doorhandles.org.uk but the other two are still at the time of writing available, so feel free to join me in the SERPS.

A mini site is a small web site with a single purpose or topic, the site sits on its own domain which is often keyword to the topic or purpose. Such sites have many uses ranging from assisting other sites to being an independent resource scheme, in this article we hope to cover some basic of mini site strategies which while simple show that using mini sites is not only more profitable then parking them but provides massive benefits to our other sites as part of a long term strategy.

Mini empires

Most web site owners have one or two main sites that they run, be it a large information portal to ecommerce store these sites often provide the owner with their main source of online income. Mini sites or satellite sites as they are in this scenario provide dedicated landing pages for users we wish to attract to our main site.

Each satellite site is targeted at one product or information type, with the goal to sell or push the user to the main site. The key to satellite sites is to get them ranking well in search engines for that specific target product.

A satellite site is simply a couple of pages dedicated to the product or service ideally with a targeted domain name. Each satellite pushes a singular product area on the main site in an ecommerce scenario the buy now buttons would add the item to the shopping cart and take the user to the product area on the main site, Information portal would link through to a broader section on the parent site.

The key with building a satellite empire is to target high search terms with satellite sites using Wordtracker, or Google trends such tools can compare which of your main sites products has the largest number of searchers which can be used to determine which products should receive their own satellite.

Buy to Sell site development

Just like property markets buying domain names with the intention to sell them is becoming big business the mini site is the perfect development tool in this scenario. The developer buys a domain name, either new or pre-existing and then develops a small site with 5 or 6 pages does some basic link building, allows at least 90 days to go past then they hopefully are ranking well for the keywords they are targeting and sell the domain with content for hopefully with a healthy profit.

This type of mini site is highly effective but is very much like property development, the key comes not so much in the structure but the décor keeping the content bland and informational makes the site appeal to as many customers as possible the perfect content is the writing equivalent of magnolia. Prospective buyers are unlikely to be keeping the content anyway but by creating a mini site and getting it ranking will bring in far higher profits then just selling the domain. When selling such sites it is often tempting to use places such as Digital Point forums to sell the site however it may first be worth contacting those sites that rank around the mini site in the targeted keyword. Such sites have an interest not only in the subject but also will not wish a new party entering their field and may well buy the site simply to block any such competition. Buy to sell mini sites are a very effective way to make money on the web but again like the property market have pitfalls the key like satellite sites is to research the area you are entering you wouldn’t want to try and sell a replica weapon site immediately before or after a ban on such items for example.

Publicity machines

While there are many more strategies with mini sites the final one discussed here is perhaps the broadest the publicity machine such sites are designed to promote a company, product or service normally there sites are gimmicky and aimed at people who would not normally visit the main site. Such sites are different from satellite sites in that they are not aimed at pushing traffic to the main site rather containing the traffic. These sites are also normally a pretty short term affair up for only a few months. Examples of publicity mini sites includes; competition sites, free tools and Christmas promotion sites. In many respects they have a similar design to a satellite site though where a satellite is for all intense and purposes a part of the main site, with similar branding and feel for a seamless transfer while the publicity machine has few limits when it comes to style and look.

A publicity machine site is good way to gain links, for example if the main site is a mortgage company then the publicity site could be a small site detailing the top 10 most expensive houses in the world. People are far happier to link to this site then the corporate site and so the mini site becomes a good source of links.

When it’s over

Satellites, publicity sites and even buy to sell sites which have not managed to be sold have a final purpose. In the publicity machine strategy we discussed the possibility of using our mini site as a non corporate face to attract links the problem is the links are pointing at the mini site not our own site luckily most web servers have a method to let a browser and search engines know that the content has moved to a new location. The server technique is called a 301 redirect (the 301 refers to the code that is sent from the old server to the browser or search engine bot) with it we can tell users browsers and bots that the site content has moved. With our strategy we simply move the content on to the corporate site rebranding as needed and redirect the old site both people and search engines visiting will arrive at the content on the corporate site any links pointing to the mini site would also count towards the page which the users are being redirected to.

My thoughts on the matter? Why not have both?

Its a little like asking ‘Which do you prefer Cheese or Toast?’ Neither, but Cheese on Toast is great! So why not have a big or main site, but also several mini-sites aswell?

This is why you should use mini sites to support (and market) your main site!

* Targeted domains names - Allow you to rank for more competetive terms whilst your main site builds up autority and trust with the search engines.

* Targeted Links - You can feeds targetted links straight through to your main site.

* Link Building - Building links to ‘homepages’ is often easier than building links to internal pages of sites.

* Once your ‘main’ site is established you can always 301 redirect your mini or satellite sites to the main domain.

Contratory to popular believe Mini Sites don’t take alot of maintenance or upkeep, infact one of the beauties of mini sites is that once they are setup you can almost leave them with zero maintenance, thats right no maintenance.

Infact, if you’ve set your mini sites up to support your main site, once the mini sites are established you can use 301 redirects to redirect the mini sites URLs to relevant pages on your main site, meaning all future maintenance will be with your single and main site.

So what do you think? Are Mini Sites a waste of time? Do you use Mini Sites? Lets hear your views on the subject!