Domaining gets a pretty bad reputation. And I can understand why – you dont need to be a rocket scientist to figure out how dodgy some domainers are. But  on the other hand, buying and selling domains, speculating or testing keyword rich domains are part and parcel of the web.

If you are into Black Hat SEO, or into Affiliate Marketing, domain purchasing is potentially a daily business. I am not going to go into the merits or issues with buying keyword rich domains for either SEO or black hat purposes, nor will I discuss why affiliates need these tools.  Any smart SEO will own at least a few gems in their life, either for profit or for fun. What I would like to share is two absolutely awesome Firefox powered tools that can really ease the domain discovery process.

Domain Lookup

Domain Lookup

Ever read a phrase online and think: “that would make a great domain name”? Domain Lookup is a Firefox extension that helps you discover desirable domain names while surfing the web.

Domain Lookup offers three ways to search for domains in your browser:

• Contextual Search
• ‘Server Not Found’ lookup
• Search Box lookup

Not only that, it also has over 60 domain registrars plugged in and ready to go. I think that one of the reviews of the extension pretty much covers it:

You just have to love this tool if you are a domainer – find a phrase, right click, buy! Does it get easier than that?

Take for example, I am reading a news story about an upcoming Disney Film, The Princess and The Frog, and my affiliate hat says “hmm there could be potential in an affiliate site for DVD’s, toys and stuff related to the film. Wonder if the domain is available? ” So all I do is select the text, and right click. Presto! A new tab appears with my chosen domain registrar, running the domain lookup.

The Princess and The Frog - Interesting Domain

The other really useful feature is being able to grab domains that may not exist, but have a link to. While you are running through your normal browsing behaviour and follow a link, what would be your response if you see a “server not found” message? If it’s from a really good website, I would probably be tempted to grab that domain if available. This happens more often than you think – when common misspells find themselves linked to, without a website available. With Domain Lookup, you have the option to check immediately if the domain is available.

Server Not Found - Lets Grab that Domain!

Domains By Volume

Although Domain Look up is pretty cool in its own right, its a tool intended for single domain research. Sometimes a guy just cant get enough and wants to grab loads of domains at one go. Or wants to know what the keyword volume potential is.

Domains By Volume

Domains By Volume is a Greasemonkey Script that was built to finally simplify the process of finding keyword based domain names. Built as an add-on to Google’s Keyword Tool that is used by so many to find relevant keywords and their associated search volume.

In essence, check for .com/.net/.org availability in real-time while on GKT, with the capability to register at either GoDaddy or NameCheap. Installation is pretty straight forward. Once you have, you should be able to see the Domain Look up options on the Google keyword tool:

Integration with Google Keyword Tool

I dont think I have to explain the benefits of the tool for a real domainer – this is keyword research domaining on steroids to be perfectly honest.  On the fly potential of a keyword rich domain saves me the extra step of jumping to my registrar to see if its available.

As you can see with the demo below, I managed to find a pretty interesting domain based on my parent query “Disney”.

Disney KW Research

"Disney Characters" = WIN

My Poor Wallet

The two tools have a few known issues, but both Quality Nonsense (Domain Lookup) and Oliver (Domains By Volume) are nice guys who I have spoken to, and have further plans to develop the tools with additional features. For example, Domains by volume will soon support more registrars and other popular TLDs. I think Oliver is also working on a fix for running searches for “Exact Match” which seems to be a bit buggy at the moment.

Between the two scripts, it’s pretty easy to identify domains that are available while you are web browsing or researching keywords. I think by already deflated wallet is going to painfully decline further while accelerating my ever growing inventory of domains…

If you are interested in Domaining news, ideas and potentials, I think Domaining MindMap is a pretty useful site.

You ought to checkout Awesome SEO Tools for  other useful SEO/Affiliate Tool reviews.

Well it seems that Search Engines are giving more and more prominence to helping people do better SEO. I haven’t (yet) personally tried the Microsoft tool kit, but it definitely qualifies as a good free resource. Especially for Small Businesses. To balance the equation, I have also linked below to the Google Guide to SEO, and one of my favourite at a glance SEO tools, SEO xray.

SEO Tool Kit by Microsoft

Microsoft SEO toolkit

Download here: http://www.microsoft.com/web/seo/

You can point the site analysis tool in the Toolkit at the top-level URL of your web-site, and it will automatically crawl your site like a search engine would – following each link, reviewing the HTML on each page, and generating a report of every SEO or content violation it finds on the site – along with suggestions on how to fix each of them.

Google SEO Guide

Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

Download here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

This document first began as an effort to help teams within Google, but we thought it’d be just as useful to webmasters that are new to the topic of search engine optimization and wish to improve their sites’ interaction with both users and search engines. Although this guide won’t tell you any secrets that’ll automatically rank your site first for queries in Google (sorry!), following the best practices outlined below will make it easier for search engines to both crawl and index your content.

SEO Xray for FireFox

SEO for Firefox: SEO X-ray

Download here:  http://www.seobook.com/seo-firefox-now-seo-x-ray

You must use Firefox 3.0 or above to see these features, but if you want to see…

• how the on page optimization of any page looks (headings, meta description, page title)
• the keyword density of the page and popular phrases on the page
• how many links point into a page (total links, or links from external resources)
• how many links point out of a page (as well as the anchor text of these links, nofollow vs follow, internal vs external – all exportable in CSV format)

then this new feature makes it quick and easy to do all of that. Simply right click on the page you are viewing, scroll down to SEO for Firefox, and click on SEO X-ray.

David Szetela is pretty well known in the SEM field, and his free ebook is a great guide to advertising on the google content network. I highly recommend downloading it (free!) here:  “Profiting From the New Frontier of Content Based Internet Advertising”

Summary Profile on David Szetela:

Online Advertising expert David Szetela founded Clix Marketing in 2003, following a 25-year career in technology sales and marketing as an executive at Apple Computer and Ziff-Davis Publishing. He is active in the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) and was the author of two lessons in SEMPO’s Advanced Search Advertising course. His writing has been published in his weekly column as a Search Engine Watch Expert, Profitable PPC , in the SEW Blog, in online publications like Search Engine Land and in the Clix Marketing Blog. His weekly Webmasterradio.fm show, PPC Rockstars, is broadcast every Monday at 4 PM Eastern time. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences like PPC Summit, Marketing Sherpa B2B Summit, SMX and Search Engine Strategies.