This is a mixture of both how to buy parked domains and a rant about why I really hate domain parking. If you’re not in the mood for a rant, skip straight to the ‘how to’.

The rant

It really gets to me how there’s some great domain names just left parked for the sake of profit. It annoys me so much to see domains wasted that could be used for providing real value to people whether that be through shared information or the sale of products.

I know the domain name is just a small part of the equation and it’s the content you create that makes the real difference, but why should people be forced to buy obscure domains with a tenuous relevance to what the website is actually about when people are sitting on the really good domains and asking stupid amounts of money for them.

The internet is about freedom of information right? If so, we should be able to get the tools that allow us to publish that information at a reasonable price.

Personally, I think parking domain names without a legitimate reason other than to make profit should be banned. And anyone parking a domain for longer than 6 months should have the ownership revoked and their money refunded.

The how to

Don’t get too attached to one particular domain. If the owner is stubborn or greedy, accept that it’s time to let it go or you could end up spending an unreasonable amount of money.

Before you start contacting companies or individuals about buying parked domains, you should have at least 6 different domains in mind so you can compare the prices given to you and use it to your advantage to negotiate with sellers.

Browse to your chosen domain, sometimes you’ll see that the domain is up for sale and contact details or instructions of how to go about buying it are listed on the website. Other times, you may just get a holding page which has been put up by the company the domain was bought from.

If there’s no clear indication that the domain is for sale, do a whois lookup to try and find the contact details of the current owner. DomainTools is really good, there’s some interesting stuff on there. There’s one other way of looking for contact details if the whois information is incorrect or if the owner is using whois privacy. You can use the Wayback Machine to browse websites that used to be hosted on that domain name. On them, you might be able to find more contact details.

Don’t sound desperate for the domain or the owner will crank up the price. Just let them know you’re considering a number of different domains and would like a quote on the price. You could try searching for the domain on DN Sale Price to get an idea of how much the domain has sold for in the past.

Once you’ve negotiated a price and the sale has been confirmed, in most situations the owner will be reluctant to transfer ownership to you before receiving payment and you may be equally reluctant to transfer money to someone without a guarantee that you’ll actually received what you’ve paid for. In this situation, it’d be good to use an escrow service. Escrow.com and Moneybookers.com are couple of examples, I’ve never used either of them so do your research first.

If you think about the semantics of the HTML header tags <h1> and <h2>, <h1> is the main title of the page and <h2> is the subtitle.

So if on every page you have your blog name in <h1>’s, then semantically every page on your website is about your blog name, and your blog post just becomes secondary, rather than it being the true topic of that page.

There’s a problem. The post title is one of the most important pieces of information you can serve to the search engines about what an individual page is about. It should be marked up accordingly with <h1>, the most prominent header tag.

If you’re serious about SEO for your blog, you should be using <h1>’s for the post title on any page showing a single post. On static pages, your “About” or “Contact” should be in <h1>. While on a homepage showing multiple posts, it’s ok to use <h2> for each of the individual post titles.

So that might leave you thinking, “how should I mark up the title of my blog then?”. If you take a look at Darren Rowse’s problogger.net and Chris Pearson’s pearsonified.com, they’ve both used a separate <div> with its own id just for the logo itself, and in it put a link to the homepage. In the CSS, the background of the <div> is set to the logo of the blog.

The difference between them is that problogger has some text inside the link and pearsonified doesn’t. The text is then hidden using a text-indent: -5000px.

If you’ve noticed, my blog’s still incorrectly using <h1>’s for the name of the blog! I’ll be changing that soon.

It’s easy to back up your blog.  With a backup you can easily reconstruct your blog if anything goes wrong or jump ship to another hosting provider.

Back ups are essential in the corporate world of IT, so much time and money is put into ensuring there’s a reliable backup and disaster recovery system in place. In the world of blogging, its a rarely mentioned topic.

You should especially do back ups if you’re running a new-ish blog still on relatively cheap shared hosting. 123-reg, Bluehost, Gatorhost, whatever. You get what you pay for, and obviously if something goes wrong due to your fault or the hosting company’s, it’s doubtful they’re going to put in the time to recover your files.

Here’s a weekly back up plan for your blog that takes no more than 15 minutes to complete. Well worth it to save losing hours of hard work and leaving you looking as depressed as that mule.

1. Download your Wordpress export file

Under ‘tools’, ‘export’ in your Wordpress admin you can download your export file which will contain your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags.

2. Download all the files in your website directory

Download yourself a free FTP program such as Filezilla, set up FTP access to your webserver and pull everything off into a folder on your laptop/PC. If you don’t already know what FTP settings to use, check on your hosting provider’s website.

Okay, so the download may take longer than the 15 minutes, but once it’s started you can go away and do something else.

Get rid of dates, use categories and post titles instead

The default wordpress permalink format is to use post numbers, which is the worst option you could use. It can be confusing and isn’t very descriptive to the reader or search engines. Some blogs use the date along with the title of the post, which is slightly better.

To change permalink settings go to ‘Permalinks’, under ‘Settings’ in the Wordpress admin to setup your custom format.

The best option is to select ‘custom structure’ and enter one or more of the following:

%category% – displays the category the post is filed under

%postname% – displays a hyphenated version of your post title

%author% – displays the author of the post

When entering the custom permalink format, you have to include the leading and trailing forward slashes. So to just show the postname in the url, enter: /%postname%/

Wordpress is installed to the root of my website, but I wanted the blog to appear to be in a subdirectory. So my permalink format is /blog/%category%/%postname%/.

If you have multiple people writing posts for a blog, you could also try out %author% to group all posts by that author together.

Use hyphens instead of underscores.

Wordpress is good and automatically uses hyphens out of the box. If you’re using any other blogging software, ensure that individual words in your urls are separated by hyphens and not underscores.

The reason for this is that Google treats words separated by underscores as one word, while it understands that words separated by hyphens are separate words.

The problem with that is if you have an url that contains grey_cat, the page will only be returned if the user searches for grey_cat. However, if your url is grey-cat, the page is returned if any of the following are searched for: grey, cat, grey cat or “grey cat”.

And of course, if you write a really informative, relevant page on grey cats, your url could be irrelevant but still rank really highly due to relevant page content.

Matt Cutts, a Google engineer has written a more in depth article about it (hyphens, not cats) here.

The number one tip I would have for anyone planning on creating and running a business blog or website is: focus time on getting things finished and working, rather than trying to understand how they work.

Most of the hard work has already been done to achieve what you’re looking to do. Whether that be changing your blog/website layout, displaying your most recent blog posts on the homepage or setting up an image gallery. There’s no need to go digging into Javascript and PHP to understand how to program all this stuff, all the tools are already available to allow you to implement the infrastructure quickly, allowing you to concentrate on producing content that will add real value to your blog or website.

95% of it exists as Wordpress plugins and the other 5% can be found in the form of PHP, Javascript or other code snippets through a quick Google search.

If something you’re trying to achieve is eating up time and holding you back, look into how the same end result can be had in a different way. For example, when I was trying to find a way to display the most recent Twitter updates, I first came across the ‘Twitter for Wordpress’ plugin. I’m sure it works fine for a lot of people but to cut a long story short, I spent around two hours trying to troubleshoot a PHP error that it kept generating intermittently. In the end I ended up using the official Twitter HTML Widget which has worked fine.