domainmacher.com

By Adam Stetzer, Ph.D.

Coming to the domainer world as an outsider, I like to think I can bring a fresh set of eyes and observations to those knee-deep in domain name parking. From what I’ve learned, the market for domain names has seen ups and downs. With the economy as a whole in a severe recession, the market for domain names is also currently soft. I’ve also learned that the majority of traffic for domainers comes from “type-in” traffic – a term that didn’t exist in my lexicon before Andrew educated me. It’s called “type-in” because people literally type it into the URL address window of their browser. I know, this is old hat for those reading this. But it’s sometimes refreshing to remember that information you may take for granted is completely foreign to those on the outside.

The current issue for domain name parkers is one of dropping ad revenues. Specifically, lower earnings-per-click and tighter rules from the large advertising companies (i.e., Google). Again, this is what I’ve gathered from the little research I’ve done. Intuitively, I would think another issue currently facing domainers is the finite number of words. The dictionary is only so-big. Really. First we ran out of single word .com domains. Now two-word phrases are becoming hard to find. Unless some the newer suffixes really take-off, I would think that domainers will hit an issue related to long names. I have a hard time believing that the type-in traffic is any good for a three-word domain name.

My trade is SEO. And of course, when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. So my first reaction is that domainers should be embracing SEO as the next-generation of domain name parking strategies to increase revenue. As I understand it, people who buy domain names as an investment tend to do so in bulk. They then hold these assets with the hopes of appreciation as well as some level of revenue for the years while they hold ownership. The parked domains I have visited usually have very simple content structures and are really not built for SEO. To me this seems like a huge missed opportunity.

A little history on SEO

In the late 1990’s, SEO was firmly in the charge of the technical crew. The clever webmaster soon learned that if they stuffed keywords in all the appropriate places on their sites, the search engines dutifully categorized their sites and sent free traffic. As in all free markets, an easy lunch doesn’t last long as new players are attracted to new revenue opportunities. As more and more websites were brought live on the Internet, the on-site SEO techniques were discounted by the major search engines due to heavy manipulation. Google, in particular, lead the charge to redefine the rules of SEO in pursuit of the highest-quality user-experience for their searchers. And this has been a game-changer.

In a similar fashion to the domain name parking industry, the scale of SEO has grown exponentially. There are currently between 45 and 80 million active domains on the Internet (depending on who you ask). There are approximately 250,000,000,000 (billion) links on the Internet. By now everyone within a stones throw of Internet marketing knows that links reign supreme as the core ingredient for good search engine rankings. Several high-profile SEO analytic shops have developed tools to help the search engine optimization community understand why certain sites rank better than others and which links are most helpful. There are copious websites that purport to offer you the secret to great rankings – some of them are even useful. Here are a couple bottom line conclusions about the evolution of SEO:   (Read the full story here)