Welcome back!!

So now we can assume you have a domain name registered and in this is part one of my series of tutorials we will talk about hosting.

The first thing we need to get is Hosting. This is the place where your website files will be stored.

There are two options for us. Free hosting or paid hosting. It’s absolutely up to you which you want, however, from personal experience I found that going with paid hosting puts you mind at ease because:

1. It’s very secure and less susceptible to hacking attacks
2. It’s very reliable so the uptime percentage is very close to 100%
3. Reliable help and support available right away

As a company of preference I use Hostgator, although there are several options out there available on the market. Other companies I’ve heard a lot of good reviews about are ASO (A Small Orange) and BlueHost. I will stick with Hostgator since it’s easier to manage, work with and uses cPanel.

I would advice with going with the smallest, cheapest package to start off with since it will most likely cover your needs, and if needs be, you can always upgrade when you feel you have to. So in Hostgator’s case, this would be the hatchling plan.

Sign up for a year or more (Make sure it coincides with however long you plan to register your domain for) and follow the steps they have on-screen.

Chose package

Enter domain and coupon

You can save 25% with Hostgator right away using this coupon code: ASG25OFFNOW

Fill in the billing details and pay up your preferred method of payment. Personally, I’ve always stuck with Paypal.

Next up in my series of tutorials is showing you how to link your domain and hosting accounts together.

If you like what you see and want to stay updated, please follow us on twitter or like us on facebook to get regular updates straight away.

Enjoy

Abdul

Hey there,

So you want to set up a website.. well you’re in the right place since I’ll be walking you through creating a website from start to finish!!!

First thing we need is a domain name. I’ve always used GoDaddy and it’s a habit I am going to try and get you into.

So in the form below, enter whatever domain you’re thinking of getting and we’ll see if its available to register or not and if it’s unavailable we’ll see what GoDaddy can do for you.

.com .us .biz .info .net .org .ws .mobi .me .CO.UK .IN .at .asia .com .us .biz .info .net .org .ws .mobi .me .co.uk .in .at .asia

Once you have a domain name registered, we will proceed to obtaining hosting for your website, so see you at the next step!!

If you like what you see and want to stay updated, please follow us on twitter or like us on facebook to get regular updates straight away.

Enjoy

Abdul

Dear Readers,

In a previous post I promised you an article in which I would attempt to explain the best way to maintain the pagerank of a dropped domain.

What I’ve been noticing a lot of lately are lots of expired domains with pagerank available to register. However they are all ORANGE meaning that they are not indexed by google, could be for several reasons. The main two are:

1- SEO blackhat methods used to obtain this PageRank. However there would be several indications for that such as an unusually high PR or the text being RED and telling you where it redirects to.

2- The index has been removed purely because Googlebot has visited the website and found nothing, which consequently leads to it being removed.

What I will effectively be showing you in this article is how to get THAT domain re-listed into google and as a result the reinstatement of the PR. Clever.. eh..

The first thing we need to do is establish what was on that website before, the page and internal link structure. Now I know some of you will be thinking.. but hold on.. how can we go back in time and look at all that… the google cache page is probably removed too. Well I tell you to fear not. A lot of people haven’t heard of or seen the wayback machine. It’s a great tool to show you the history of any website and how it changed over time. Some records even date back to the mid-1990′s which I think is pure awesomeness. The design of some of the big websites of today does look truly hideous when you look back at it. But I feel I am going astray from our main topic, so back  to it. We need to establish what the inner pages of that domain were and whether they still have traffic/links/pagerank. I have a tool which I plan to release for sale very soon to help with this matter.

If we look back at the process of domain expiration, let’s say asgsoft.net (which I used to own and lost due to lack of experience) it had a period of 30 days which I lost all control over DNS management, unless I renewed it. During that time it was in the hands of the registrar (such as Godaddy/Name.com etc.) and they would publish a standard parking page saying something along the lines of “asgsoft.net has expired. The owner has 30 days to renew the domain name from the expiry date.” And that is true. The owner has 30 days to renew it after it’s officially expired without any problems what so ever.

Assuming the 30 days are up and I don’t renew the domain then it enters the final phase more commonly known as “Pending-Deletion” which is a 14 day period during which I don’t have control over the domain at all. Now it’s gone, and that period is for backorder companies to allow them to place pre-orders on it, so once it drops it’s picked up straight away, which unfortunately happened with asgsoft.net.

Total time that a registrar’s parking page has been displayed now on asgsoft.net is 44 days! Now, if a domain has a PR1+ it must mean that it has an OK-ish set of backlinks. That would mean that Google’s spider (Cleverer than your ordinary spider) is visiting on a regular basis, and has most likely detected the change in the contents, maybe from a unique contents page to a more familiar parking page.

My theory is, once the parking page has been detected then the domain is ear-marked and once it remains on display for X amount of days, then the domains, which in that case is asgsoft.net is removed from the index. Yet the PageRank remains unaffected, but again, that is only for a set certain number of days say Y after it has been removed. Google is not commenting on this theory and unfortunately I don’t have exact values for the X and Y days.

I also think it’s extremely possible to convert an ORANGE domain to a valid PageRank domain in less than a week. Last month, I bought an expired domain PR2 I published here which wasn’t indexed in Google. I placed a small simple contents page and linked to it from a PR3 site, submitted it to major search engines using this tool and to Google itself, set up a sitemap and also added it there and also to Bing and waited. Within a week it was back re-indexed and the PageRank has been validated. It now is a Valid PR2 domain which I got for $1.99

So how do I get my domain re-indexed quickly?

1. Submit it to major search engines using this tool
2. Submit it to Google directly using this link
3. Create an account for it with Google Webmaster Tools
4. Link to it from other websites/directories
5. Have some content to the website

One thing I forgot to do was to add a Google Analytics code to it to monitor its traffic, so I shall be doing so in the next experiment I conduct.

What are your views??

If you like today’s tip, follow us on twitter or like us on facebook to get regular updates straight away.

Enjoy

Abdul

Dear Readers,

How about that! An Expired Valid PR4 domain yesterday for you. Whoever registered it must be so pleased.

Anyway I wanted to write this article for a while now and here it is. I wanted to say what you will need to do once you register a domain. This is what I think in my opinion and is what I usually do with nothing withheld from you.

So I have registered an expired domain with a Valid PR4 like the one I had yesterday. Now what?

What I would do firstly is find some hosting and add some contents, that would be several pages of unique content.

Secondly I would add Google Analytics so I can monitor current traffic and see what it’s sources are. I would also usually use Domain-Pop that gives a decent breakdown of the domains backlinks. The only problem I find with it is that it takes some time to get the PageRank of the backlinks in order.

I then would leave it alone for a week to see what current traffic is like, the sources of traffic, percentage of returning to new visitors and where I can improve them.

After the week passes I would check if it’s indexed in major search engines such as google,yahoo and MSN (Live) by entering these search queries:

Google: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Adomain.com
Yahoo: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fdomain.com
MSN (Live): http://search.msn.co.uk/results.aspx?q=site%3Adomain.com The Kingdom Flightplan hd

If it’s listed then GREAT, you got indexed within 7 days, otherwise don’t worry, we’ll get there.

This step is a must to ensure constant indexing and a good SERPS for your domain. You would need to generate a sitemap for your website. What this does is generate a network of all the pages on your website and present it to search engines as if to say “Look here, I’ll save you the trouble of looking for pages, here is a list of the pages for you to index“. The best free tool I found is http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ which to be honest is great in every aspect of the word. It’s Free, Easy to use and has a nice interface.

Once you upload it you then submit it to google by going to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview?hl=en which is the base google uses to communicate with webmasters.

Recently MSN launched a similar service which does the same think, but instead, just for MSN at http://webmaster.live.com/.

Once you did that I really recommend the next step. Semi-Automatic Directory Submission for FREE. Digixmas have developed an amazing piece of software that will send it to 150 directories for free. You will only have to copy the CAPTCHA code, select the category and press OK. Their link is: http://www.digixmas.com/

Finally, to let everyone know about your website I really recommend adding it to Stumble Upon Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels download and Digg as they are visited by a lot of people with wide range of interests, and if someone finds it interesting they will for sure check it out. There are other networks out there but not as big as both the ones I mentioned.

After you did all the steps mentioned above give it 2-3 days and use google analytics to monitor traffic.

Let me know what you get if you followed these steps.

Do you do anything extra? or cut out any of these steps?

I hope you like this list

See you on Monday with another list of expired domains

Enjoy