You’d have to be trying really hard to have failed to notice that next Tuesday, people all across the USA will go to the polls to elect their next President.

Every detail of the race has been covered online, on TV and radio, in the newspapers and on the web. So if you’ve already heard enough about it, you should probably stop reading this now.

Still with me? Great. One of the things I’ve found most interesting about the whole thing is the way the web has played an absolutely key role. Both candidates have been using the internet to try and energise and mobilise supporters and raise campaign funds, with varying levels of success.

And a plethora of sites offering coverage, mashups and opinions have sprung up. One of my favourites has been Current TV’s Hack the Debate, which broadcast each presidential debate live and allowed users to send in comments via Twitter. These were displayed over the video of the debates in real time.

Excellent online magazine Slate has also offered lots of innovative coverage, including its poll tracker and map the candidates, which shows you where the campaigns have visited and what they did while they were there. Read the rest of this entry »

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Links are the holy grail of any website with aspirations of being ranked in the top 20 results on Google, both in terms of quantity and quality. How you go about getting those links is the area of SEO that sets one site apart from another. Bought, traded or mutual links can only get you so far, eventually you need to take it to the next level and have sites linking to you because you do something so awesome that they want to, with nothing asked in return.

To encourage sites to link to them, savvy site owners create content that is known as ‘link bait’. These are stories, articles, tools, freebies, comment etc that have been created pretty much with the sole aim of other sites linking to them and are so useful, controversial, funny, original or insightful that another website refers back to it and says ‘go here to have a read’. Below are my top 6 examples of link bait (if you know of some other good examples, leave a link below):

1. www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
Their whole site is littered with link bait (although they are an SEO company, so you would expect that), but this piece stands out for me. An in depth and comprehensive analysis of SEO factors from the industry’s leading voices. You could charge for this and people would buy it.

2. www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
A great example of a site offering a scaled down version of it’s tool for free. Even this version is good enough for most small to medium sized sites.

3. http://www.carling.com/ipint_details.html
I own an iPhone and this was one of the first apps I downloaded. By offering something quirky and original (although the makers of iBeer might question that) with the wow factor, Carling has created a great link bait generator off the back of a branding exercise.

4. www.designerstoolbox.com
A great resource for anyone writing creative briefs or designing for the web, I would argue at least 90% of this site is link worthy because it offers so much useful content for free.

5. www.useit.com
This site breaks quite a few rules. For example, it looks ugly and the content is updated irregularly, however, when it is updated, more often than not it has something new to say about website usability that anyone can apply to their website, and it is free.

6. http://www.123-reg.co.uk/blog/archives/chris-anderson-free-long-tail
I couldn’t resist adding this one , but I honestly believe it is a good example of using an interview with an industry insider/ leading voice to generate interest, traffic and links. It worked for us!

Do you have any other examples of great link bait? Has anything on your website brought you a ton of traffic? Leave a comment to let us know.

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We’ve spotted a couple of domain name stories in the last couple of days, both of which contain some salutory lessons for website owners and anyone who’s ever bought stuff online.

GMTV website disappears

Regular readers will be aware that every now and then we stumble across a story of a high-profile brand or company losing control of their domain name expiring. This generally results in a well know website going offline for a bit. It’s previously happened to Emirates and Comcast.

This time, The Register is reporting that the GMTV website was briefly replaced yesterday by a page containing links to other websites. It looks like this happened because the domain name gm.tv was allowed to expire. The GMTV site apparently returned to normal once the domain renewal had been paid for. Read the rest of this entry »

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Rob Taylor is a domainer with twelve years experience of internet development. He’s been actively involved in the domain community for seven years.

Rob runs ‘Hey‘, a company which provides domain name brokering and acquisition services along side building useful websites on great domain names such as Comedy.co.uk and Music.co.uk. We recently chatted to Rob about domaining, the business of buying domain names and selling them for profit.

There are two main criticisms levelled at domaining:

a.  It fills the web with sites which consist solely of pay-per-click links, cluttering up the internet and making it harder for people to find what they’re looking for.

b.  It artificially inflates the price of domain names, making it hard for people with good business ideas to afford a decent URL for their website.

Do you think these criticisms are justified?

“Excellent questions, let me address them one by one:

“a – Domaining is not solely domain parking. Lots of domainers try to create mini or even full websites that have great information for the user. One thing to bear in mind is that often domainers have a big list of names, and although the intent to develop out domains is there, sadly there are not enough hours in the day.

“Similarly it does cost a fair few quid to run networks of sites and thus income needs to be created from somewhere.

“Parking pages, or site with pay-per-click adverts can be seen as internet clutter, however, if someone types in a domain name is it better they have a site that shows people or companies that want to pay to get that user to click, or a 404 ‘Page not Found’ error? I think former is more useful for the user.

“As for B, I believe there has to be a realisation that it is the year 2008 and 99.99% of good domain names have been taken. Much like I would love to have a top highstreet store for 1920′s prices, it won’t be happening any time soon.

“Often I get told that my domains are not worth more than a tenner, but when I tell them that’s fine with me and point them towards something.me or genericterm.info which are often available they do not want to know. It seems certain extensions are more desirable than others, and thus have a premium attached. To me that is not artificial but just normal market forces at work.

“One further element puts a more understandable value on domains: the targeted traffic! I have a music related domain name that gets considerable traffic. To rent a high street store with similar ‘footfall’ would cost 6 figures a year and that’s not including rates and other such costs. Again some may see things overpriced compared to registration fees, but in the wider context domains are still very cheap.

“Leasing and rental of domain names is growing and is a good way for start-ups to get a top dollar domain names at a lower outlay and I would suggest readers explore that option if prices are unaffordable.

“Domaining often gets a bad reputation, but like any industry there are cowboys out there and genuine business people. Domainers have a responsibility themselves to ensure that the reputation is cleaned up and cowboys are not welcome!”

Can you explain the process by which you make your money from registering domain names?

“Domaining has several models for dealing with fresh registrations, usually focused around either the resale, development or speculative value of a domain. As it is 2008 it is very very rare to be able to hand register a great generic or short domain, so often the money is to be made either by dropcatching those that do
expire, or focusing on keyword rich domains.” Read the rest of this entry »

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