I am waiting for my designer/developer to build my website. Is there anything I can do in the mean time in terms of SEO? I was thinking of putting together a quick site on my own and then start creating backlinks, directory listings, etc... Then somehow transfer the benefits over. Is it possible to transfer any benefits over, like position on search engine? I'm not very technical, but I was thinking of simply forwarding or redirecting to the final site. Does a site loose backlinks or anything else when you just redirect it? Also do you guys think it is a decent strategy to buy many long tail keyword domains for the purpose of easier search engine ranking then point them all to a "Main" site? For example "Free oatmeal raisin cookies .com,Freechocolate cookies.com, freedessertts. com and have them point to Joe's Bakery LLC? or should I conduct business on those seperate sites if possible ( not too ideal for brand awareness of Joe's Bakery)
Ranking a new site is a process, not an event. Buying a bunch of new domains and building low quality backlinks (directory links) aren't going to do much, if anything. Pointing a bunch of domains to another domain puts your "good" domain at risk. You need quality links, and those are much easier to get with a quality site. I would just wait until your site is finished - the process of ranking can be a year or more for highly competitive keywords. Find a another developer if you can't wait for them.
thanks for the advice. When you say "the process of ranking" does that mean getting a PR # or getting 2nd,3rd, etc.. on the first page of google for example? (those are different right?) I'm not buying the domains for the purpose of backlinks or creating link farms. I plan to put up the same content of would put up on the final website. Maybe even do some pre-selling on those domains. Lets assume that I was able to get 1st or 2nd spot for a certain keyword phrase. It would hurt my "main" site if I forwarded the domain of the prep site? What I was worried about was maybe having the prep site loose position once it was forwarded or redirected. What damage would it do to the main site?
You aren't going to rank in the top 20 for any competitive keyword with a new domain and a bunch of low quality directory links. For all practical purposes, a ranking 20+ isn't going to bring you any traffic. No one is going to give a quality link to a new site that was thrown together. Run of the mill free directory links are worth about zero. Redirecting a new domain to another new domain is not going to do you any good, and google is wise to 301 redirects - you could risk both domains. It's not worth it. Start with one domain and make a quality site - one that deserves to be in the top ten. Once you start ranking in the top ten, then think about doing another site. Google has over 10,000 people that are doing manual reviews of sites and you don't want a penalty that forces you to start over again. Most people fail because they don't have patience to build a quality site and wait. Domain age/backlink age is an important part of the google algorithm - ranking for competitive keywords is going to take time - plan on at least a year and if comes sooner, then you'll be surprised.
Lets assume I am in the top ten already. My question was to tackle the issue of maximizing that good fortune. It still does no help? I appreciate the extra SEO tips you've shared though. "Redirecting a new domain to another new domain is not going to do you any good, and google is wise to 301 redirects - you could risk both domains. It's not worth it." So I guess my question is : is redirecting several "top 3" result domains to a new domain recommended? Are you saying no still because google is wise to 301 redirects still? If that is still the case regardless of how good or poor my position is then thanks for the help.
Matt Cutt's from Google has indicated that redirects for purpose of rankings are not a good thing to do. Now if you had an established domain and had a good reason to redirect one domain (say you acquired a premium domain) then you would probably be ok. Redirecting more than one is probably asking for trouble. If you had a top three domain, then you should just keep it a separate site - especially if the keyword you are ranking for is in the domain. Even if you didn't get a penalty for a redirect, you are not going to get the same ranking benefit when you redirect it - so no, you wouldn't likely keep those rankings.