I’ve always been of the opinion that it is important to host your own web site or sites, ever since I first started studying how search engines behave.

At the moment there are lots of free and paid web site building services, aimed predominantly at the small business and personal user sectors.

They have a place in the market, as many smaller companies and hobbyist individuals don’t have the resources to go out and build themselves a site and many more don’t have the budget to employ a company or Internet hotshot to build one for them.

I took the time and trouble to learn all I needed to know very early on, so these days, playing catch-up with newer technologies isn’t that big a deal and after more than 10 years of being online, I can still achieve top ten Google ranking for my own sites and convert those rankings into money.

But now, with so many instant site builders on the market, it’s easy to see why people will be tempted to use them in preference to employing somebody or having to learn everything from scratch.

The prospect of being able to simply log in to a web site, add some text and pictures and have a web site published instantly is tempting to say the least.

However, Yoast.com has today published a very strong argument against usingsuch site builders and highlights the case of GoDaddy, which charges its customers for using the site builder, but then adds a number of links by way of anchor text to the bottom of every web site it produces – all pointing back to them of course.

It is possible to turn them off, if you know how, but of course, we are dealing with Internet newbies here and it’s highly probable that they don’t know how to turn such links off.

It’s not illegal (as Yoast declares), but is questionable practice to say the least and of course GoDaddy aren’t the first to use other people’s sites and web properties in this way.

Google say that footer text isn’t an important factor in search engine ranking terms, but Yoast’s research along with the help of  Search Metrics suggests otherwise.

Read the article here and while you’re there, download his excellent SEO plugin – it’s the only one I use these days.

As we approach the end of 2011 and get ready for the works Christmas party (tomorrow as it happens), I thought I’d take a quick look back at 2011 and see whether things got better or worse and define what worked.

Two of the best pieces of software I have used this year have been Yoast’s SEO WordPress plugin and Gravity Forms. Both of these plugins have made my online life a lot easier and have definitely added positively to my bottom line. Those links are clean and are not affiliate links. If you’re not using WordPress, wat’s wrong with you?

Dropping the idea of starting my own domain development service in February helped me gain some focus after seeing some of the crap I was being asked to get involved with. No offense people, but honestly, 99% of the names that were put forward as being “premium”, I would not have paid registration fee for.

I realised at that point, that my development skills were best kept for my own sites, promoting my own business.

Finally getting my UK commercial property portal up and running properly in April helped a lot. It’s only now starting to have a real affect on the business and is getting noticed by some very useful people. I have resisted ALL temptation to accept any kind of paid advertising or links on the site and will continue to do so through 2012.

Buying a van was a unusual thing for me to do in June, but again, that relatively small investment helped me focus on the business more than anything else. It’s a van for business and I feel now like we have a proper one. For years, I’ve been saying that I don’t work because I enjoy what I do so much. Having a van adds a strange sense of working class somehow in a way that turning up to client sites in a Mercedes doesn’t. I think it’s because it makes my partner and I look less like sales people and more like doers – must be the ladders we have on the roof rack.

Honestly, it’s horrible to drive, but gives us an edge that others in the same profession as us don’t have and can’t convey.

Profession. There’s a word. I belong to a profession now. Not an “industry”, though for the life of me, I can’t understand what industry there is in my previous life of domaining, nor recruitment which I wasted more than 15 years doing.

Yes, dropping my “domainer” tag in july turns out to have been the most important thing I did back in July 2011. I still have my domain holdings and will continue to hold them, it’s just they are a lot more focused now. I am an end user of domains, the bloke that domainers (including myself) have been searching for all these years.

Dropping the domainer tag has enabled me to focus exclusively on my surveying business and the results in the last half of the year have reflected that. Seriously, if you want success, concentrate on a niche you’re comfortable with to the exclusion of everything else, business-wise of course. Try it for 6 months and see what happens.

My “saying no” experiment that I began in August, whereby I switch off all computers and mobile telephones at 5:30 and weekends has worked. I never needed those distractions. Emails can wait and they do. Did you know that if you don’t read an email the moment it comes in, that it’s still there the next day? It’s taken me more than 12 years to figure that one out.

So those are things that worked and continue to work. They are what I shall be taking into 2012 without too much further meddling on my part.

Our staff (even those in my partner’s other business) all have work wear now – branded with the name “BuildingSurveys.com” and for the first time ever, we are using proper printed stationary and business cards. It all feels real because it is. What started out as another domain name acquisition is now a fully fledged commercial operation and you know what? It has credibility and gets us to the top table in the commercial property world.

Domains are not the be all and end all. Developed correctly and applied in the right manner, they are a wonderful tool, but in all honesty, they are just the start of the journey.

So what didn’t work out as I’d have wished in 2011?

Only two things really. My new iPhone4 – I sold it on eBay after two days and didn’t even look at the 4s. And then there was my iPad. Yes, it works, but what’s the point really? I took it to Kenya thinking it would be useful, only to discover that a notebook is far more relevant. I haven’t used it since. It’s going on eBay I think. What a waste.

Happy Christmas if you celebrate it and if not, then happy 2012. I won’t be around again now until then!

Update Note: It took precisely 32 minutes after posting today’s entries for me to receive TWO offers from people wanting to know if I’d be interested in buying and developing their domains. I didn’t want to be rude about the names in question, but not only can’t these people read, but they also need to do some research about what makes a name suitable for development. (Clue – it’s not the domain, it’s the business behind it).