DomainMagnate.com is now on facebook
If you are using facebook and like this blog – feel free to add the page to your favorites 
This is one of my little experiments to try to utilize facebook’s massive traffic. Social networking/bookmarking is next generation of SEO..
I’ve been getting these emails by the dozens lately. A new spam/scam type is out: partnership proposal emails. I’m still not sure what they want as they never seem to answer when you reply back, but here are some of the emails:
Hello,
I just came across your website – wcasinos.net and I want to ask if I can sponsor a text link on your website.
Please e-mail me back and I will send you additional information.
Best Regards,
Todd McGregor
Advertising Consultant
Business Development DepartmentIf you do not respond to this email you will not receive any additional emails from us. To permanently delete yourself from our list, simply reply to this with a blank email and you will not receive any communication from us in the future.
—————————————————————-
Now that I’ve found the designers and content writers, after a bit of testing the mini site building is proceeding at full force. Most sites are just 7-8 pages, but I’m also doing a few that will have a substantial amount of content, some 20-50 pages, articles, videos, news, flash and other elements.
Here are a couple finished mini-sites: Go Oslo, about the Norway capital with a few short articles and MyNamibia.com – about the Republic of Namibia in Africa.
Next step is to add links from some other sites, directories and social bookmarking services to get them all indexed and well places in google. It’s also good to avoid the nofollow links as they don’t contribute much value in google and are used by most social bookmarking and news sites, like digg, propeller, wikipedia etc.
The Bethel Park site I’ve posted about earlier is getting 75-85 uniques per day, but while the adsense clicks are rather high, the ctr is not so good. Probably the ads are too “blended in”, so I might change that one.
What do you think about the designs and content?
As many domainers have noticed in the past few days the old google keywords tool is gone for good and instead there is only the new one. This is actually bad news for most domain sellers as the old tool used to show much higher search counts “allowing” them to show higher counts and ask for a higher price for their domains. Google’s explanation for this was that the old tool included data from Google partners compared to only data from Google in the new tool. This is however hard to believe, for many keywords values were considerably higher on the old tool, frequently even 3-10 times more searches – an unlikely possibility since Google controls round 70% of the search market.
I mostly used the new keyword tool so this is not a big problem for me, however it was nice having the option to double check and compare values. Another option for that I use now is gTrends from WordTracker – the daily traffic estimates can hardly be taken seriously, but the data is good for comparisons on search volume between different keywords. Another good keyword tool allowing for an additional separate point of view on the keywords popularity is Keyword Discovery – they have a free account option with limited number of searches allowed.
An important issue to consider with the Google keywords tool, that apparently many domainers aren’t aware of is the “Match Type” option. There are 3 options: Broad, [Exact] and “Phrase”. The first one broad is the default and shows the highest search counts. However it’s deceiving since it pretty much sums up the whole niche and shows an estimate of many searches are performed with the current keyword being part of the search query. The “phrase” option shows results where the phrase appears as it is and the [exact] match option is the actual and relevant option which shows the searches for this exact keyword.
[exact] is what should be used when evaluating exact match domains to get a better idea of how much traffic top ranking can bring for that keyword. Exact is what I always use when buying domains for development. While the phrase and broad options can be good for category defining domains to get an idea on the market and search volumes for the niche.