SedoParking.com allows you to park your unused domain names and earn money. Sedo also allows you to sell your domain names with the asking price of your choice.

Each visitor to your domain name hosted at Sedo Parking will see a “parking” page full of advertisements and a search box. You can select the keywords you want your domain associated with (eg. Trading, Business, etc.), as well as 3 categories your domain name or web site should be listed under.

You get paid each time a visitor clicks an advertisement on your domain’s parked page.

My Experiment with Sedo Parking

I own a lot of domain names and the majority of them are not currently being used. Some of my domain names are in use, but not being used effectively. My experiment with SedoParking is to see how well SedoParking performs in terms of impressions (hits or visitors to the site), and Sedo’s pay outs for ad clicks.

Currently I have 9 domain names listed as SedoParking.com. I have just added these domains and I have yet to see any real or useful statistics information.

The goal of my experiment is to gain statistical information regarding the click-through, pay out, and impression performance of parked domain names. I have many questions and this experiment should help to answer most or all of them.

Some questions I have: Is it better to park an unused domain or to develop a site quickly / cheaply / poorly? How much money will Sedo generate for my parked domains? How does Sedo compare with other domain parked services? I cannot find out the answer to how Sedo compares with other services until I sign up with a competing service such as GoDaddy and park one of my domains there.

Why SedoParking?

SedoParking.com seems to be the premier domain name parking service in which you, as the domain owner, receives a majority of the advertisement revenue your domain name generates.

I have also listed each domain as being “for sale” with the maximum price allowed, which is $10,000. As a domain name seller you have absolutely no obligation to sell your domain. But, if someone offers me $10,000 for some of my domains I would be heavily inclined to sell.

Also, SedoParking.com displays ads using Google’s advertising service. Google is the king of internet advertising. I display Google ads on some of my other websites using my Google AdSense account. I would like to see how well Sedo and Google ads perform on these parked domains – part of my experiment.

My Initial Thoughts on Sedo

The account creation process is extremely simple and there are no setup fees whatsoever for the domain parking and domain selling services. No initial fees is a definite plus.

The domain management page displays a lot of stats and you can customize your view. I am currently using a customized view which displays the following: domain name, current keyword, unique views, clicks, $ per click average, click rate, and total revenue. These items are displayed for each domain name I have parked, allowing me to compare different domains, keywords, and categories and how they perform against one another.

Related Links

• SedoParking.com – park your domain names and earn money
• Google AdSense – display Google AdSense ads on your website or blog
• GoDaddy – register new domains, park domains, many additional services

Search Engine Optimization is the art of getting high placement and rankings on search engines. Higher placement means your website will come up higher in the results pages. More web traffic will be driven to a site with high rankings. More traffic means more money.

Search Engines

The main search engines are Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search. SEO is primarily concerned with gaining high placement on these engines. Other search engines and directories include: Alexa and DMOZ Open Directory Project. The list goes on and on.

Google

Google is the most used search engine. Thus, you should spend a majority of your time optimizing your site for the Google search engine. Google uses PageRank to rank individual pages based on a combination of content, keywords, linkbacks and updates. Linkbacks are how many other sites are linking to your site or pages. Google monitors sites for updates — the more often your site is updated, the higher your site will rank.

Google Page Rank

Your Google PageRank (PR) can vary from 0 to 10, or N/A. PR of 0 means your site is in the PageRank system, but it has virtually no linkbacks and weak content, keywords, and few updates. PR over 5 is good. PR 8+ means your site is doing everything right and traffic is flowing in. If your PageRank is N/A this means your site is not even in the PageRank system. This likely means your site has poor content, keywords, linkbacks, and updates.

Improving Your Content

The content of your site determines not only if your site will show up in search results, but also it’s position or ranking. If your site is about widgets, you better have a lot of content, information, data, and articles about widgets. If your site is about the stock market, your site may include a brief history of the stock market, company data, stock prices, and stock broker information. However, your site does not need many different sections or areas of focus. The depth of the content is important. A 10-page article will usually contain more search engine relevant content than a 1-page article.

Improving Keywords

Keywords are associated with search queries. You need to choose keywords that are relevant to your site, and that complement your content. Keyword density is also important. Keyword density is the amount of times your keywords appear in your content. This can be calculated as a ratio. The higher the density, search engines think your site has more relevant content.

Gaining Linkbacks

Linkbacks are other sites that link to your site. For example, 10 different stock market message boards link to your article about “Beginning with $5000″ for new traders and investors. If these 10 stock market message boards are indexed by a search engine — for instance Google — your site (or your article) will have 10 links to your site. The more links, or linkbacks, your site has, the higher your site will place on search results pages and in the Google PageRank system.

Update Your Site Often

Updating your site on a regular basis is extremely important. Search engine robots will contstantly scan your site. One thing the robots look for are changes to the site — new articles, new sections, updated news, new downlods, etc. Differences to the site — changes, updates — show that your site is actively used.

Helpful Tools

The following sites can help you improve your search engine rankings or see your current rankings.

• URL Trends – displays a lot of stats from various search engines and social networking sites, as well as showing your sites past history.
• Alexa Traffic Rankings – see how much traffic your web site receives
• Check your Google Page Rank

I have developed a new tool to assist stock market traders and investors in finding the most popular and active companies traded on all of the stock market exchanges: Market Clouds.

Market Clouds allows stock traders to quickly scan and identify the most actively traded and popular stocks, using different font sizes for levels of activity.

How Market Clouds Work Market Clouds utilizes data from across my network of websites as well as forums and IRC chatter talk to build a list of stocks people are currently and actively requesting quotes, charts, and news for.

Why are some stock tickers bigger? The most popular and actively traded stocks have the largest font sizes. Less active or popular stocks have smaller font sizes. The stocks with the least amount of activity have the smallest font sizes.

How Market Clouds Helps Traders Large font sizes allow us to scan the entire list of daily hot stocks or stocks that are very active. Traders can quickly identify the most active – they have huge font sizes and are easier to spot and read than the less active stocks. Less active and popular stocks have tiny font sizes, allowing market traders and investors to easily cut out the noise.

Put Market Clouds on Your Website or Blog! I have created a Market Clouds service I call MyCloud, allowing you to include a customizable Market Cloud on your own web page. View Market Clouds’ MyCloud in action in my sidebar on the right!

As with any research you do, you must perform Due Diligence on any potential trade. Market Clouds should be used to identify possible trades, based on their trade activity and popularity. These are the stocks people are requesting quotes, viewing charts, or reading news about. Market Clouds should be used in conjunction with other research tools and analysis. You should not buy a stock simply because it is the most active or popular stock with the biggest font size. It could be this stock is actively trading because people are selling all their shares!

Check out Market Clouds – All Stocks, the Market Clouds – Top 100, and the Market Clouds – Over the Counter Bulletin Board Stocks (OTCBB). Put Market Clouds on your website or blog with Market Clouds – MyCloudI welcome all comments and criticisms. If you have an improvement I can make, let me know. I hope you enjoy Market Clouds as much as I do!