Site buying is an advanced SEO technique that requires a good deal of skill and high-level knowledge.

Having spoken at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Advanced 2008 on site buying, created the formulas for Website Auction Hub’s appraisal tools, and been one of the first to blog about website buying and flipping, I am qualified to provide this expert SEO service.

The value of buying sites depends on the buyer’s objectives. Some people buy for revenue, while others buy for the link value of either redirecting the site to their own or adding links to it, and some others - usually fools or geniuses - buy for potential.

The site buying consulting services I offer are: site research, site appraisal and purchase negotiation.

• Researching the site: I can consult with you to answer the following issues: You want to learn more about a site’s value for SEO, or you want to discover which sites in a market would be the best acquisitions to make.

  Besides standard SEO metrics like number of links, I research the site in depth to see which pages are indexed, and what type of pages on the site are indexed. These can be signals as to the quality (or lack thereof) of a site, amongst many other signals, such as aggressive monetization.

• Appraising the site: My site appraisals focus on traffic, revenue, branding, seo and site-particular factors such as software, relationships the owner has with others in the community etc. The appraisal report offers a range of values for the site and the reasoning behind the values.

  Where a person is using my services to help them assess the potential of a site, the appraisal will focus on revenue potential to the purchaser; end-user value (as opposed to site flippers who buy to improve and sell onwards). For example, I once saw a gaming site for sale that had 20,000 visitors a month yet was completely unmonetized. Obviously both affiliates and merchants in the space would have a nice opportunity in acquiring that site.

• Negotiating purchase of the site: Many people don’t know what information is important to buying sites and what information is irrelevant. My consulting takes a holistic approach combining business metrics and technical metrics, while cutting away the nonsense metrics.

  For example, many site-for-sale listings include the [toolbar] Google PageRank of the website (on its homepage, usually). In practice, Google today relies less on PageRank than it used to, and it also distorts the publicly available data on its toolbar.

Site buying services begin at $5,000. Pricing depends on the size of the site and depth of analysis required. They run to $20,000 for a full service offering on larger sites (not including site purchase price, escrow fees or any ancillary costs).

If you are interested in professional site buying services and consulting, I encourage you to request a proposal.