There are countless techniques that go towards improving your results with search engines. Each one does its own little part. Some are simple and cheap. Some are more involved and can get expensive for some budgets. This is an example of a cheap if not free one.

One of the main things that Google looks for is things that you cannot fake. An example of that is how long your domain name has been registered. If it has been around for ten years, that shows more stability that one that is one month old. As my uncle likes to say, “it is what it is.”

So the problem is that you are a new business owner. A legit business owner with a legit business website, not one of these pop-up fly-by-night Adword hit mongers. In fact, you have extensive experience doing what you do, you just happen to have been working under a different umbrella for the last X years.

Unfortunately you cannot control how long your domain has been registered. But what you can do is control how long it is registered for. This is important because there are companies out there that use the 5-day grace period on domain registrations to test the marketability of a domain. It’s called Domain Testing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting). There is also Domain Kiting which is using those periods back-to-back to tie up the domain.

Where you come in is by registering your domain for the long term. This does a few things. First off, if you get too close to your expiration date, Google may drop you thinking that your domain will be expired before they are set to spider your site again. Not good. It also shows Google that you are here to stay and in it for the long term. Good. So add a few extra years to your domain. Make it five. It’s only about $10 - $20/year, so it is very inexpensive.

We initially registered www.AgniTEK.com for 10 years in 2000. It is set to expire next year, so I’m off to eat our own dog food. Here's to 10 more years! More details about domain registration including Choosing a Domain Name on our website at http://www.agnitek.com/webservices/domainnameregistration.

All for now. Have a great day!