I was particularly intrigued that Business Week listed a company set up to game the search engines as one of their “Most promising startups”. If you have been developing domains for any length of time, you probably have come across techniques designed to game Google or other search engin...

How many times do you get an incoming link using your website name? To succeed with a website these days, you must have plenty of good quality inbound links with good anchor text. This is where many websites fall down and fail to get the organic traffic they could potentially get. But how do you [.....

An SEO (search engine optimization) manta that still seems to be doing the rounds, was to put a keyword in a headline, in bold and in italics. I was asked recently if this is why entertainment websites such as NME and TMZ have stars names in bold font. With everyone trying to get an edge [...]...

Cross-linking your own websites is an issue that comes up quite a lot. It seems logical to cross-link all the websites you own to spread the traffic across the website network and maximize the return on your traffic. However this can look spammy to search engine bots and it can result in links being...

I missed the announcement earlier this year that WordPress and WordPress MU would be merging. The less well known multi-blog WP MU is my workhorse supporting many websites on one codebase, perfect for developing many domains. BuddyPress, a set of social networking plugins for WP MU that I have used ...

What have you done to secure your websites? One of the common suggestions is to hide the version number of your software. The argument goes that if you haven’t upgraded your software, showing the version number allows hackers to identify out of date software. Now there is a new wrinkle as Goog...

A short sweet post. These are the kind of stories that keep everyone going. A lot of hard work finally paying off. Dublin-based company behind  Hostelworld.com has been bought by a US private investment firm. Web Reservations International, founded 10 years ago, sold €350m of accommodation online...

I attended an advisory board meeting yesterday and it reminded me that we all need some independent advice on our strategies and businesses, no matter what size they are. We all try to see the upside of our businesses and get emotionally entangled whether it be with our 5 year business plan or a dom...

You may have heard the joke about two men faced by a hungry lion. One starts putting on running shoes. The other says “Those shoes won’t help you outrun the lion”. He answers back “I only have to outrun you”. With a difficult business environment, it is easy to hang on ...

With so many computers connected through fast Internet connections, multimedia is having a major impact on Internet use. The co-founder and CEO of YouTube Chad Hurley announced that three years after its acquisition the video sharing website now hosts over one billion page views per day. Multimedia ...

Thank you for your emails and queries. I haven’t been actively blogging recently for various reasons but I am planning to blog at least sporadically from now on. I want to continue to add tutorials, resources and commentary on domaining and website development. Hopefully what is already here o...

A/B testing is one of the standard ways to test two different products against each other. Savvy ecommerce business owners use this regularly to maximize their profits. It is also used to test landing pages for those who run ad campaigns. This kind of testing is not just for big business. You too ca...

Often when people are developing websites, they want the best design and layout and it is a natural impulse to develop the nicest looking website possible. Interestingly though, the prettiest websites do not always make the most money. Pretty websites Visually appealing websites are often the goal o...

Joel Ohman contacted me regarding his new domaining tools website, Domain Superstar and I thought it might be worth checking out the tools he is providing to domainers. I should say up front that I am not getting paid to make this post nor did I sign up for the affiliate program. Domain Superstar is...

Image search is a much underutilized SEO technique that you should consider if you are developing a website, especially in a competitive area. Image search has become integrated into the top three search engines and images are presented at the top of a search results page even if the user did not ...

Some people really do get rich on AdSense earning tens or hundreds of dollars a month from their websites. I came across a post from a couple of years ago about AdSense superstars on The Worst Business Ideas blog and it is not the only one to name some of these top AdSense earners. The [...]...

I was reading an article on seasteading in the English Times and it brought to mind the whole Kentucky gambling website situation and moving off-shore. Seasteading is the idea of creating communities at sea and that can include being outside the reach of government regulation and law. The term cover...

Most websites are coded quite sloppily. Luckily the search engine bots and browsers are designed to deal with malformed code. However how do you know that all of your websites and all of your pages are being indexed properly? Is malformed code making the bot hiccup and causing you to lose valuable v...

The nominee for Assistant Attorney General for Anti-trust at the United States Department of Justice, has said that she considers Google to be a monopoly. She also said she was “deeply troubled” by Google’s purchase of DoubleClick and its proposed purchase of Yahoo’s search b...

I was reading an interesting article on Trendwatching.com about Generation G. That’s G for Generous. For those speculating on domains for new trends, this has some interesting predictions. They discuss the disgust at the excess in the corporate world, bad corporate leadership and current finan...

I have been reading both Rick and Sahar’s blog posts recently on auctions. I come away wondering if auctions are really the best model for buying and selling domains. Are auctions bringing new money into the industry or recycling old money? Is the industry growing through new domainers bringin...

Quick post to let you know that there is a new tutorial showing you how to style your headlines in CSS. I have also added better quality video to replace the video about how to make a website banner in Photoshop. I will be adding more tutorials as time permits Bookmark to: ...

Forums are a legitimate way to develop a domain but I rarely use them. Proponents argue that the content is created by users and it brings life to a website. This is true but does that outweigh the negative aspects of forums? In my experience, forums are rarely worth developing except in certain cas...

I decided to create some tutorials to help with the basics of customizing WordPress. I added a tutorial link to the menu above. This tutorial shows how to create a banner or logo for your website. I used the photos that I used to create BoneThinning.com so you get an idea of how that was [...]...

Many people are using WordPress to develop their domains including me. Finding themes that I can use “out of the box” is very hard. Finally I found a theme that I can use to develop a domain quickly and I have used it to change this blog into a cleaner simpler website. The theme is [...]...