How to get a head start on your SEO?

I am sure you have heard of SEO professionals who claim magic pills that will push you to No. 1 on Google if you take them twice a day for a week. If you haven’t, then you are better off. SEO is no magic pill and in general there are no overnight winners in SEO. But if you are thinking of opening up a business or a Weblog, there are things that you can do to reduce the work needed to get good rankings on major search engines. One of the things is trying to snap up popular domains on auction sites such as Sedo. Aaron Wall, the author of SEOBook, had a good post a few days back about the company that bought searchguild.com for $8000. Not only those guys got the backlinks associated with searchguild.com, they avoided the possibility of suffering from Sandbox effect that Google enforces on brand new domains.

Of course, you may ask yourself, is $8000 domain worth it? It depends. If you are starting a website on online grocery and searchguild.com is your domain, then you are probably not going get a good ROI. But of course, an SEO themed website would do much better than that. The challenge with less known domains is that you need to know what the owners have done with them. This is especially true with expired domains. You can generally snap up expired domains for cheap, but avoid deals that sound too good to be true. If someone is offering you smallbusiness.com for $6, would you take it? Should you take it? On the paper, it looks like an amazing offer, but what if the domain has been banned permanently by Google and other major search engines (I would still take the domain for $6, but I doubt anyone in their right mind would offer such a domain for that low of a price). But as you add zeroes in from of that $6, then the stakes get higher. You absolutely want to avoid getting into the whole Google sandbox trap, but at the same time you don’t want to lose your wallet for a worthless expired domain. Think about it! If people can’t find you on search engines, it doesn’t matter how good and short your domain name is.