While unassuming, Notepad is a brilliant program for helping your methodology along, offering an indispensable stripping directly connected to its intrinsic simplicity.
Getting Down to Data
As anyone who has blogged but written their text in Word instead of directly into the blogging platform knows, Notepad is the best and quickest way to strip formatting of all kinds out of a block of text data.
Programs tend to let you keep formatting if you like, usually with some degree of degradation, but Notepad is deliciously and purely limited in what it will retain.
So, for example, let’s say you search for domains while applying some kind of filter on whatever site you’re using (eg. 7 characters or less, between $100-500). Your search results, irregardless of platform, are likely to be a paginated (meaning results across multiple pages which you can navigate through) table of results.
These results may or may not be available in an easily exportable format like .csv for Excel. If you click and drag to select the data from this table and copy and paste it into Excel, you are likely to be carrying over the formatting of the page you’ve just copied, not only making the sheet ugly but potentially so ugly that basic Excel functionality like filtering becomes non-functional.
The De-Formatting Bridge
If you take your original click drag copy and paste it into a clean notepad file, it won’t look the same as what you’ve copied, but you will see that it already looks a bit more stripped down and table-organized. Now, copy and paste from Notepad into Excel and voila, clean table. At worst, you’ll need to slightly adjust one row or column, but for the most part, the job will be done.
There are likely other places where you will need to use Notepad in a similar way. Just get the thought process hard wired, such that if you ever find yourself in general trying to copy and paste from one area to another and it looks weird, your best bet may be to cross the Notepad bridge.
One warning, sometimes you will want a bit of the formatting you lose in the transition, for example some data being in bold type. As such, you will sometimes need to make a judgement call about what you gain versus what you lose.
Just remember, domaining is a data crunching numbers game, so do your best to keep not only your data as raw and usable as possible, but your process streamlined and quick as can be.
]]>Domaining is largely about buying and selling based on a variable but approximately measurable perceived value, across a variety of value criteria. Because search engines so often represent such a significant portion of the marketing potential of a website, the domain’s connection search is inevitable.
SEO Value Tools
For those that don’t use them, there exist SEO plugins and toolbars which provide information about a given site, or the list of sites in a page of search results. This information includes domain age, number of pages indexed, Pagerank, information about other sites linking in, and more, which you can customize. These areas represent, to different extents, search engine ranking factors, meaning aspects which, when favourable, make it easier for the site to rank. Whether there is currently a site on the domain or not, this information about it is available, and can help inform you as to how valuable the domain is.
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For example, inbound links are massively correlated with ranking potential. In seeing that a large amount of links point to a domain, you see its search engine value (in proportion to the quantity and quality of those links). The more search engine value it has, the more the domain is worth.
I use this as a normal web surfer to see if a site is trustworthy. For example, if a site has 6-figures of links pointing to it, I am likely to trust it, as the web community has, essentially, validated it (you can’t really fake figures that high). Google uses backlinks to determine how much it trusts a website, and if it’s good enough for Google, it’s good enough for me.
Here are a few SEO Toolbars that friends and colleagues of mine use:
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