According to the ICANN Blog, the new Fast Track Process for IDN ccTLDs, was successfully launched on the 16th of November. The launch went smoothly, and as of their post on the 19th, they have a total of 10 requests spread over five languages. These requests are expected to be just the tip of the iceberg as more and more countries complete the request process.
For those who are curious about the process itself, there is more information available on the ICANN website, on their page dedicated to the IDN ccTLDs fast track process.
There have been no official updates from ICANN since that post on the 19th, but we will be sure to keep you up to date on any news that comes out, especially as it pertains to the availability of these new ccTLDs. If you have any questions for our staff regarding IDNs of any kind, whether you should be registering your company and trade marks, or anything else, just let us know and we’ll be happy to help.
Presently, many people are selling domain names, which presents a great opportunity for the savvy domain investor to expand their portfolio. It’s obvious to myself and many others that have been in the industry for any length of time that domain names can provide an extraordinary return on investment. Now is a great time to buy!
It’s hard to rank every single domain marketplace, because each one tends to have a unique price range, inventory size, domain quality, keyword types, domain extensions and other distinguishing factors.
That being said, the top 5 listed below are my personal favorites for 2010. The remainder of the list is not necessarily ranked in any order of importance as great domain deals can be found on all of them!
Features live domain auctions on weekdays. Now one of, if not the most, feature rich auction platform to date, Bido continues to innovate nearly as fast as they sell domain names. Great deals with opening bids of just $28.
On a tight budget? You may want to opt for registering a new domain. Finding available domains today is very tough, but if you do your research you may just find a great domain for $7.49.
The are many savvy investors who own a slice of some of the most valuable internet real estate available. If that perfect name you’re looking for turns up taken, don’t be dismayed, do a WHOIS lookup and contact the owner to negotiate a sales price.
A new service by Domaining.com which uses automated appraisal data and recquires domain listings be a fraction of their appraisal estimate. Turns out this makes for some really good deals on keyword domains.
An informed purchase is a wise purchase. FreshDrop can provide some great data on domains that is easy to browse, search, sort and filter. With pro features you can get some really juicy details on Google advertisers and keyword search data.
SitePoint’s new marketplace Flippa has taken off as a popular destination for extended domain name and website auctions.
The largest registrar in the world features their massive lot of expiring domains here. Popular “Domain Fire Sale” section features domain auctions from $5 + registration renewal cost.
Moniker features monthly themed showcase auctions and annual live auction events. Coming up, DomainFest 2010 in lovely Santa Monica, CA on January 26-28.
A leader in domain sales since the early days. This marketplace has a huge inventory of quality domains to browse.
Yea, Twitter! I started @DNMarket early this year and it has been gaining steam with 725 followers currently watching listings. Follow along and be on the look out for domain sales straight from owners.
Despite recent setbacks SnapNames remains one of the premier expired domain marketplaces and exclusive private auctions connected to Moniker.
This massive marketplace features lots of premium domains. BuyDomains consistently tops the charts in high value sales.
The largest domain name marketplace to date features domain auctions starting at $60 from private owners. Lots of domains in all extensions are sold daily.
Rick is the largest individual domain name broker in the business and publishes a daily domain deals newsletter. Latonas.com Auctions also host live domain auction events through the year and at T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conferences (see below).
Affordable Quality Domain Names is a marketplace of keyword and brandable .COM domains with development potential. You can also follow @AQDN on Twitter.
Brandstack is an excellent marketplace for high quality logo designs. Many designs are coupled with domain names. More recently, Brandstack has featured a domain names only area of the marketplace.
A premier domain industry conference founded by Rick Schwartz. Upcoming events and live domain auctions will be hosted in Las Vegas on January 21-23rd and Milan, Italy on April 27-29th.
A fun filled domain industry event coinciding with Mardi Gras in beautiful New Orleans. Feast at the crawfish boil and network with domain industry pros. The event and live domain auction take place February 11-13th.
One of the leading forum communities for domain industry professionals. Check out the platinum marketplaces for domains being offered for sale above and below $100, fixed prices, auctions and offers wanted.
The largest domain industry forum features fixed price, make offer and auction marketplace forums. Occasionally NamePros will host a live auction event through the member chat room where domains can sometimes be found on the cheap.
Hope you enjoyed the list and are able to find some great domain names! Be sure to bookmark this article for future reference and pass it on to your web savvy friends.
If you have any comments or suggestions for buying domain names, please leave a comment.
This article is from DotSauce Magazine.
WordPress is an excellent tool for publishing websites and blogs. This widely used CMS software does alot of great things like creating posts, pages and tags with clean URLs, linking everything internally and generating valid code.
Oddly enough though, the majority of SEO responsibility is placed within the hands of third-party WordPress theme developers as well as yourself, the site owner.
Some theme designers may not be familiar with SEO best practices, so you should take some time to examine your site for any ways to improve it’s effectiveness on search ranking performance.
I’ve come up with several common WordPress SEO mistakes that I see day in and day out. I hope you can use these tips to improve your blog or website!
One of the simplest concepts goes overlooked on even the best of blogs. The title tag is essential for ranking well on search engines. Consider looking into the effectiveness of the way your title tag is currently displayed on search results.
The following method has proven to work wonders for me in getting posts to rank well on Google.
Luckily, this is a fairly simple, but important issue to correct. The code below will feature only the title of your post as the title tag of the page.
With a few simple statements in your WordPress header.php file you can make sure that titles on all posts and pages are properly formatted. Replace your current <title> tag with this code:
<?php if ( is_home() ) { ?><title><? bloginfo('name'); ?></title><?php } ?>
<?php if ( is_search() ) { ?><title><? bloginfo('name'); ?> - Search Results</title><?php } ?>
<?php if ( is_single() ) { ?><title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title><?php } ?>
<?php if ( is_page() ) { ?><title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title><?php } ?>
<?php if ( is_category() ) { ?><title><?php single_cat_title(); ?></title><?php } ?>
<?php if ( is_archive() ) { ?><title><? bloginfo('name'); ?> - Archive</title><?php } ?>
<?php if ( is_month() ) { ?><title><? bloginfo('name'); ?> - Archive</title><?php } ?>
If you must have your website name in the title of every post, then place the most condensed version of your name after the post title separated by a simple, search-friendly dash.
Repeating the same keyword or phrase over and over again will eventually hurt your rankings as search engines will recognize this as “keyword stuffing.” It’s a bad idea for usability as well, you don’t want to bore visitors.
Adding supporting keywords keeps content fresh and readable. This practice may show search engines that you have been doing your homework and deserve to be listed as a credible resource for a specific subject.
As mentioned in the previous article here on DotSauce, the new Google AdWords Keyword Tool (Beta) has just been released. This is just one of many great tools for finding complimentary keywords and phrases to use for blog articles.
We’ve also featured SEO Blogger, a free keyword suggestion tool for Firefox. This tool opens up as a sidebar and suggests keywords as you write posts!
Love it or hate it, the nofollow tag is helpful for publishers to direct mindless search engine indexing robots to your most important content.
It is very important not to abuse this link attribute. Slapping a nofollow tag on every external link is not the way to go about it. Here are some basic guidelines on when to use nofollow.
A sitemap is a cleanly defined list of every post and page on your website. Search engines use sitemaps to quickly and efficiently find and index all of your content.
Unfortunately, WordPress does not come packaged with a site-map solution. There is some good news though! This is one of the easiest mistakes to fix.
Simply visit your WordPress admin, search for and install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. You will find there are options to exclude certain categories, posts, and pages that you don’t want indexed.
This plugin will also ping search engines whenever your website is updated with a new post.
Yes, just one simple image can have search ranking benefits and I’m not talking about appearing in image search. Adding images is one of the most valuable things you can do for a blog post.
Take note, virtually all of the best online publications and blogs include images in their posts.
Your readers will love the accompanying graphic and will be much more inclined to read the post, share and potentially link to the post.
WordPress takes care of uploading media and clean image markup. So, you just have to take the initiative! Spend just a few minutes finding a cool image, crop and re-size it to fit nicely above or alongside your content.
Check out the WP Smush.it plugin to compress image file sizes on the fly.
Be sure to include 2-4 keywords that are related to your article and image as the ALT attribute of your image. This may get your original images indexed within image search.
Sometimes we have to trade off search engine value with usability, as is the case with most “Home” links. Website owners don’t won’t to rank for the keyword “Home” but it is good practice for usability.
Using proper keywords as link anchor text is important as it reinforces the keyword or phrase you want to rank for.
Identify the root keyword phrase of the page you are linking to. Check Google Analytics often to stay on top of what keywords are driving traffic to your articles. You will want to reinforce rankings that are doing well by using those exact keywords as anchor text for the article.
For example, a post entitled “55 Active RSS Directories to Help Promote Your RSS Feeds!” would benefit from using the keywords that are sending traffic to that article (i.e. RSS Directories). This is much better than using the entire article title as anchor text.
Make sure the links are readable within the context of use in an article. Users clicking through is ultimately more important than search ranking.
Know of any other common WordPress SEO mistakes? We’d love to hear your tips or success stories. What works for you? Comments are always open. Thanks for reading.
This article is from DotSauce Magazine.
The AdWords team have rolled out a completely overhauled keyword suggestion research tool. Smooth user interface and updates make using the new tool a much better experience.
In this article I will share some alternative uses for the AdWords Keyword Tool and run down the new features in this beta release.
To access the new beta AdWords Keyword Tool login to adwords.google.com, click the “Opportunities” tab, find the current Keyword Tool link and then click the (beta) link.
The general purpose of this tool has always been to help advertisers find relevant, popular keywords.
As it turns out, the AdWords Keyword Tool is pretty useful for publishers and developers to get a glimpse at this data for various reasons.
The new AdWords tool enables you to search by keywords and a URL simultaneously. Additionally you can filter or browse results from popular defined categories found in the sidebar.
Also new in this beta release is the ability to search broad matches (the original standard) as well as Exact Match and Phrase Match keywords.
Once your searches are complete and you’re satisfied with keywords you see you can download all data for each keyword result or the entire table and let further research begin.
This article is from DotSauce Magazine.
There is a new WordPress resource site that I’ve been introduced to through the great WordPress community on Twitter.
With so many options available today, selecting the right WordPress theme for your website or blog can be a daunting task. ThemeGrade was created to make finding quality themes with the features you want much easier.
ThemeGrade is not your typical WordPress directory. Quality themes are selected to be reviewed (2 per day) and are then scored against over a dozen critical points related to theme design and search optimization.
Each theme is given a bronze, silver or the coveted gold seal of approval. Gold rankings are awarded to themes which excel across the board in general usability as well as enhanced design features like browser compatibility, threaded comments, and designer support.
ThemeGrade also makes sure that top ranking themes perform well for key factors that effect search ranking performance.
Searching ThemeGrade is very simple. They have implemented a nice selection box theme fetcher. I’ve never seen this style of search on a WordPress site, very cool! Simply select the boxes related to your interests and go.
ThemeGrade features both free and premium (paid) themes from select designers.
Sort by design structure (1 or 2 columns, magazine style, portfolio style, etc.) or by theme category (Business, Art, Nature, Internet, etc.).
And, of course, you can select themes by their gold, silver or bronze rankings.
ThemeGrade Tip:
Don’t be discouraged by themes with low SEO ranking.
Proper title tags and other factors can be corrected with a few tweaks to theme files. Stay tuned to DotSauce for more on that very topic soon.
Be sure to check out ThemeGrade WordPress Themes now and follow along by RSS or @ThemeGrade on Twitter as new themes are reviewed.
This article is from DotSauce Magazine.
Since launching my Twitter forum community, TweetSocial, and accompanying Twitter directory early this year, I have been keeping watch for innovative and useful applications that enhance user experience and productivity on Twitter.
While scouring the web I’ve discovered some amazing web based tools that I don’t know what I would do without today. So, I thought I would share with everyone what I think are the most useful apps (in no particular order). Enjoy!
Lets start with something familiar! Bit.ly is a phenomenal resource for Twitter users because of their comprehensive click and re-tweet analytics.
Quick tip: Add a “+” symbol to the end of any Bit.ly short URL to view it’s stats. Also read our article on how to use the bit.ly sidebar tool to find interesting people on Twitter.
Tweet Positioning System or TPS Report takes the prize for coolest app name ever! It’s also pretty darn useful and fun to see where in the world people are talking about you, your business or your products.
If you have multiple Twitter profiles and haven’t found a great solution for managing that mess, Splitweet is for you. Very simple way to post to an unlimited number of profiles from a central location. You can also track @replies and messages from the dashboard.
A simple tweet search application with a twist. This one goes way back beyond the 10 day official Twitter search archive. Can’t find that old Tweet you or your friend posted last week? Have Snap Bird find it.
A super cool application for managing your Twitter background image and profile photo. Awesome feature alert: TwiBack can update your Twitter background for you at an automated time.
I’m just waiting for someone to make a morning & night themed switching background.
Very handy for managing and viewing detailed data on your followers or the people following you. Clean tables are sortable by followers/following, follow ratio, # of tweets, etc. Bulk unfollow or block if needed is very useful.
This killer app is stomping out spammers by the thousands each day and is working to make Twitter a safe and clean place for us all.
I definitely recommend you scan people following you and see what shady individuals you find. Bonus: Big red block & report buttons can be fun and help keep Twitter clean.
For those times when you just can’t be at the PC. FutureTweets will automatically post messages at set times on your behalf.
Note: This is not for posting the same tweet over and over again. Pre-load your stream with tweets for the weekend and take a vacation!
The premier application for routing blog / website RSS feeds to automatically be published on your tweet stream. Through this year Twitterfeed has added some pretty cool features including click analytics, feed customization and more.
Hummingbird is the best selling Twitter automation software and is in full compliance with Twitter TOS.
Note: This one is for small business, bloggers or people who have a product to sell online. Hummingbird is a valuable and professional resource for automatically following keyword targeted people.
Quality resources are featured daily at the TweetSocial Twitter App Directory.
Be sure to share these useful apps with a friend! Is there a Twitter app you can’t live without? Leave a comment, we’d love to hear about it.
This article is from DotSauce Magazine.
eBay’s latest online destination is a vibrant magazine style blog dubbed The Inside Source which features just that, eBay insiders observing and reporting timely trends from the world’s largest marketplace.
If you are a trendhunter or a member of the eBay Partner Network this could turn out to be one of your favorite new blogs.
Imagine the search data! eBay has 88 million users, 25 million of those are sellers who are posting 200 million live product listings and turning out several million sales daily. From this can be derived global e-commerce trends that only eBay can offer.
The Inside Source keeps a watchful eye on all of the actions, daily searches and sales and reports trends for top categories like technology, home and garden, automotive, pop culture and fashion.
Alongside editorial style blog posts are various widgets featuring top eBay product info.
I’ve already found some interesting data. One of the introductory posts from Insider Source Tech on eReaders closes with this juicy info:
On eBay you can find eReaders from Kindle, Sony, Hanlin and iRex, although the most popular is the Kindle. In the past 60 days, there were over 23,000 Kindle listings with the average selling price around $113.
That’s the kind of detail and insight into e-commerce trends I would like to see more of! Definitely consider subscribing to your pick of the various RSS feeds or following @TheInsideSource on Twitter to stay updated.
This article is from DotSauce Magazine.
November is my favorite month of the year. The winter holidays are just around the corner. We’re all working towards rounding out a solid year of growth and preparing to tackle 2010.
I don’t get to promote my own portfolio very much. As a matter of fact, the majority of these domains have never been offered for sale before.
Browse the unique categories below to find what interests you. There are a lot of quality domains, priced to sell!
This sale will only last through November 30th.
Domains will be sold on a first come, first serve basis.
Please use this contact form with any questions or to purchase domains.
$99 Your Choice!
$199 Your Choice!
|
$249 Your Choice
$449 Brands
|
$149 Your Choice
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$449 Your Choice
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$149 Your Choice
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$249 Your Choice
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$149 Your Choice
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$449 – Think logo + portfolio…
$249 Keyword Phrase
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$89 Your Choice
$249 Your Choice
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$299 Your Choice
$349 Websites |
$89 Your Choice
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$249 Your Choice
|
$99 Your Choice
$149 Your Choice
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$199 Your Choice
$349 Your Choice
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All domains are registered at GoDaddy for a quick and easy transfer of ownership. Payments will be accepted through PayPal for verified buyers.
Please contact me directly by email at mark@dotsauce.com or, if you prefer, use this contact form with any questions or to purchase domains.
This article is from DotSauce Magazine.
It’s about time that Canadian domain owners finally stand up for themselves and have a voice to protect their rights against those who wish to take them away, as well as encourage the development of the Canadian internet. Fortunately, a new organization, the Domain Owners Association of Canada (or DOAC), has just been formed to do this.
The DOAC recently held its first meeting of members, which I attended. I think that this organization has a lot of potential to improve the Canadian internet landscape in a way that is beneficial for all stakeholders.
The DOAC’s mission is the promotion of internet business and investment in Canada. Let’s face it – the better that the Canadian internet does, the better it will be for all participants.
At the meeting, the DOAC went into more details, and discussed its mission statement, which includes:
1. To promote the registration and use of dot ca domains in Canada and globally.
2. To protect the rights and interests of dot ca domain owners.
3. To encourage the ethical and responsible use of dot ca domains.
4. To bring the collective voice of all dot ca stakeholders to CIRA.
5. To lift the dot ca presence requirements.
The DOAC also elected its directors: Frank Michlick, Harold Simpkins, Peter Maxymych, Rick Silver, Jeffrey Behrendt, and Larry Franschman.
The officers of DOAC were elected as well:
President: Rick Silver
Vice-President: Peter Maxymych
Vice-President of Communications: Frank Michlick
Treasurer: Harold Simpkins
Secretary: Jeffrey Behrendt
Zak Muscovitch, Canada’s leading domain name lawyer, is handling the legal aspects.
If you own a .ca domain, or provide services to .ca domain owners (such as hosting, web design, technical support, marketing, legal, etc.), then you should join the DOAC. It’s free and easy – simply complete the form and click submit. You owe it to yourself (and your clients) to stand up for the future of the Canadian internet.
It’s about time that Canadian domain owners finally stand up for themselves and have a voice to protect their rights against those who wish to take them away, as well as encourage the development of the Canadian internet. Fortunately, a new organization, the Domain Owners Association of Canada (or DOAC), has just been formed to do this.
The DOAC recently held its first meeting of members, which I attended. I think that this organization has a lot of potential to improve the Canadian internet landscape in a way that is beneficial for all stakeholders.
The DOAC’s mission is the promotion of internet business and investment in Canada. Let’s face it – the better that the Canadian internet does, the better it will be for all participants.
At the meeting, the DOAC went into more details, and discussed its mission statement, which includes:
1. To promote the registration and use of dot ca domains in Canada and globally.
2. To protect the rights and interests of dot ca domain owners.
3. To encourage the ethical and responsible use of dot ca domains.
4. To bring the collective voice of all dot ca stakeholders to CIRA.
5. To lift the dot ca presence requirements.
The DOAC also elected its directors: Frank Michlick, Harold Simpkins, Peter Maxymych, Rick Silver, Jeffrey Behrendt, and Larry Franschman.
The officers of DOAC were elected as well:
President: Rick Silver
Vice-President: Peter Maxymych
Vice-President of Communications: Frank Michlick
Treasurer: Harold Simpkins
Secretary: Jeffrey Behrendt
Zak Muscovitch, Canada’s leading domain name lawyer, is handling the legal aspects.
If you own a .ca domain, or provide services to .ca domain owners (such as hosting, web design, technical support, marketing, legal, etc.), then you should join the DOAC. It’s free and easy – simply complete the form and click submit. You owe it to yourself (and your clients) to stand up for the future of the Canadian internet.
