There is a great deal of effort that goes in to building SEO for a site, many, many hours can be spent writing code, authoring content, creating images and logos.
Some of this effort is applied directly to your website, some is applied indirectly. When you inevitably part company from your SEO consultants, who will own all of your SEO Content & Property?
Links to Your Domain and the Content it Points To can all be lost, if you are not careful. So it is very important to make sure you maintain control.
For this website's domain, we pay for the domain, we have access to the registrar (UK2) and we can control where the domain points. You should have the same set up. I will explain further:
If you do not pay for your domain (annual or biannual subscription) it will expire and someone else could take it. If you pay for your domain indirectly through your web developer or similar then if your agreement with them lapses who will pay the domain subscription fees?
This is why we would help you to set up your own account with a registrar of your or our choice to make sure that you have control of your most important web asset.
When you buy a domain you enter contact information. If a domain is about to expire or if any important information regarding the domain crops up, it will be forwarded to you. IF the contact details are yours.
A domain points the viewers to the server where the web files are stored. A web server is a computer somewhere which is always switched on, and much like the folders we see in windows, it holds your website in a file structure, which you and your customers can view through a web browser.
Whoever owns the domain, and whoever controls the "direction" in which it points, effectively owns all the SEO work that may be applied to that domain. All "trust" is attached to the domain, and associated pages . . . if it were pointed at a different server (which may not house your website) then you loose some gained "trust" and SEO goodness.
It should be pointed out that a great deal of the value in you site is in the content, but loosing your domain can be highly disruptive.
We give you complete ownership of your domain from Day 1. We will set the domain up, and then forward your account details, you can then change the password, and the domain is yours. All contact details associated with the domain will be yours and yours alone.
If you would rather we oversee the entire process start to finish, then we can do this, and will happily enter in to a contractual agreement that states you as the domain owner, and that we must provide access to the domain given notice by you. This is an honest and transparent service we aim to provide.
The visible content of your website and the hidden code and data bases are all very valuable. The money you will spend in creating this content will be lost if you do not own it.
If you were to head over to Google Webmasters, you will see a broad selection of code that can be implemented in to you webpages. Much of this is time consuming to implement and is page specific. It takes a lot of time and expense to implement. It is important that this is not lost owing to a change of ownership.
Some webpages which include page specific SEO coding, quality content and media can represent many days of work. . . for a single webpage. A webpage therefore could be worth a great deal in terms of the time spent on it.
Back Links certainly do help with Search Engine Rankings, but who owns these back links, and the associated content? If for example a blog or separate website has been created to support your main business's site and provide back links it is important that you own this site as well as your own "main" website.
All external content we create will be clearly described in our initial agreement with you. We will give you all access to the content when we part company, at the end of our agreement. A email will be sent to you containing all relevant log in information for domains, web servers and data base servers.