It is very strongly believed in the SEO world that the age of a domain registration has a positive effect of search engine ranking for that domain. A domain that was created 10 years ago and has no or few changes in ownership or IP address, will be viewed favorable by the SE algorithms as a stable and trusted site.

If you are creating a new domain, of course you do not have that option of age, but you can help yourself by registering it for a longer period of time than one year. 5 to 10 years would be suggested. The reason is that many people who use websites to spam the search engines will register a domain for as short a time as possible, knowing that the effective life of the the website is short. (Once the search engines catch on that it is a spamming site, it will lose its ranking and no longer be of any use to the spammer, who will then shut it down and start over again with a new short-lived domain and spam site. Some spammers have been know to take advantage of the “30 day-money back guarantee” type domain registrations to create dozens of spamming sites, closing them down at 30 days and getting their money back.

By the way, we recommend www.register4less.com for the best in domain registration services.

In essence: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it–and these days that means putting in a lot. It is much more difficult to get good search engine rankings and attract and keep quality visitors. Also, design elements are getting much more sophisticated and require more specialized skills to implement.

As the owner of a new website, you can expect to do or pay for a lot more writing of content, quality inbound link building, and attracting visitors and links through blogs, social sites, and other Web 2.0 techniques.

Content: You may have heard the expression, “Content is king.” This is true, the more content you have on your website, the more fodder there is for the search engines to chew on; the more you are able to emphasize your key search words and terms and the more likely you are to be considered an “authority” and thus attract links from other websites.

Link Building: In bound links from other websites that are older, have more Page Rank, are of a related subject, and are respected by the search engines, are the best way to increase your rankings in the search engines. It is a lot of work, but well worth it. Google is becoming a lot more discriminatory on how it places value on links from one site to another. So one good quality in bound link, may be worth dozens of low quality extraneous links. Paid links are a no-no. Some directories charge a fee to review your site before inclusion–those are OK, but going to a link farm and paying to have 500 links created to your site is a waste of time. The search engines will most likely just ignore them. Trading links is OK as long as you do it with a site that is related in subject to your site.

Blogging: If you create a blog that you contribute to regularly (daily or weekly**), you will have the opportunity to create good fresh relevant content and links to interior pages on your site. If your blog posts are good and interesting, you may create comments on other people’s blogs and sites, that in return creates more in bound links.

Web 2.0: Then there are all the social sites, Youtube, Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, Flikr, etc. Any content you can create on these sites can enhance the visibility, traffic, and links to your site.

All of these techniques take a great deal of effort. But remember, there are people out there doing these things, and they are your competitors in both the search engines and in visitors. So let’s all get to work.

Video on websites is becoming more prevalent and necessary. We recently ran across a software company that makes it very easy and inexpensive to add a Flash video player to your website. For about $50 they offer three programs that are easy to install on your computer and very intuitive to run. There is a program to convert your video into .flv format (Flash video, that is so widely used), another to create the player, and a third that will produce a multi-video player if you have more than one video you want to offer using the same player. We highly recommend them. EasyFLV.com