It seems that Namebio does not always record actual sales. When Namebio reports a sale from Namejet, they don’t take into account that Namejet assigns a reserve price to the choice domains that delete or expire, and they record whatever the final price was for the auction.

Take Police.net as an example, the last bidder on the domain gave up at $7500, leaving the Namejet reserve price at $7600, which is what it closed at, and so the Reserve won the auction. There was no actual sale.

Since it can not be determined after the fact that the domain actually sold unless you want to go one step further and use domain tools to research each domain sale to see if ownership changed, then it might not be out of line to assume that the price you find on Namebio is an accurate representation of aftermarket interest in the domain name.

However in the context of reporting the price under the guise of a domain sale can bring with it assumptions that can effect your pricing strategy, for good or bad, and so each example should be considered carefully.

Search Results

What are other companies doing with their domain names with the same or similar keyword domains? What are their revenue models? What can your domain offer that theirs can not? Take a look through their code, can you or a potential buyer improve on the SEO to help get a leg up on the current SERPs? Example, the insurance industry can be such a lucrative one (CPCs can be well north of $50) that you can bet that the companies in the first page SERPs in their respective niches are spending time and money to make sure they stay there.

If you can express potential ROI in your notes when selling the domain, it’ll help some people. Many domainers don’t need this kind of input and can tell utilizing their own methodologies to determine potential value. For these people, at least you might be able to gain some respect for having done a little research and that you care about providing value in the sale.

Search Traffic

Basic domain research 101, find out if anyone else in the world cares about the keywords in the domain name, other than you. At the very least, check Google’s AdWords keywords tool. Be tough here, set it to “exact”. Note the results and switch back and forth between the other options to gauge searcher expectations. There are a number of ways to use a word too, sometimes a word can sneak up on you and be used as a verb. Maybe search intentions are different than developer assumptions. This research also forms the basis for general SEO tasks.

How do the results change with the plural of the domain? Intentions change, sometimes dramatically, when a searcher uses the plural of their search query.

Sales Results

This is where your research meets up with reality. Have any other domains sold with your keywords. Ron Jackson over at DNJournal makes Wednesdays exciting with his weekly roundup of domain name sales and his insight. Mr. Jackson is one connected and respected guy and should sit in your top spot for consuming domain name industry content. Also check out Nambio.com and DNSalesPrice.com. Both are perfect for really quick results and have some of the best inventories around. You’ll sometimes find a name that is in one list but not in the other, and this can be both for current sales and quite old sales.

Domain names have appreciated over the years. If you’ve found a domain name sale example, check to see when it sold. If it was an “insurance” domain that sold in 2005 for $1000, you can expect a valuation increase. By how much isn’t exactly certain, although competitive industries may see bigger gains as consideration for keywords increases. Some industries can take off from time to time, making certain keywords more valuable now than they were 5 years ago as new products and services are introduced, and changes in spending take place.

DNSalesPrice.com
DNSP seems to have, more often than not, older records, and the search process requires some fiddling. Don’t be fooled that if you searched for “vacation” that you are going to get every “vacation” listing. Sometimes you have to try other keywords, and additional keywords. Also, you need to enter the words individually, not bound together like “ItalyVacations”, you aren’t searching by domain name, you are searching FOR domain names. Use it like a search engine and go at it from a few different angles.

Another drawback is that they list all the extensions alphabetically, Namebio groups the most common at the top. Not a huge deal, but when rapid-fire domain keyword research is taking place, these little time wasters can be aggravating. This site’s archives more than make up for it though.

NameBio.com
The best features about this site is the filtering for keyword positioning and sorting – brilliant. The Ajax auto load feature is pretty cool but takes some time to get used to. Changing keyword, position and dotCom to a second position dotOrg takes a few moments to change all three fields and wait for the auto load. Still, take in a brief glance during each change because there will be something relevant in each reload, assuming the keyword you are changing is part of the same research task.

Aftermarket

Is anyone else selling the exact match keywords but in other extensions? If so, how much money are they looking for? If someone has a dotCom for sale at $2000, needless to say that you’ll find it tough to sell your dotNet for more, generally speaking. There are some industries where a dotNet or dotOrg or others are more competitive due to the finite number of ways of expressing those same keywords, intentions or services in a domain name, or the sheer number of searches and CPC.

Anyway, find out who and what the competition is like. If no one else is selling their domains with those keywords, then you’ve got a small window of opportunity to be the only kid on the block with the exact solution.

Availability

Popularity should never be considered the measuring stick of the value of anything. The inherent issue is that, once something becomes popular, its usually too late to take advantage of it, which is where the domain drop comes in. This isn’t a case of someone buying an unopened pack of 1911 T206 baseball cards and forgetting it in the attic for 100 years and you’ll never find it, domain drops are available to anyone, and you just have to look through them.

So find out, is the plural available? other extensions? If you have the dotNet, how much negotiating power will you have if the dotOrg is still available for registration? If the dotCom drops how will this effect your dotNet? Can you score the dotCom instead?

Another consideration is, ‘who owns those other extensions?’. On the surface of it, it may appear like the keywords are valued because all the extensions are registered, but when they all drop because they are owned by the same guy, then that is important to know and opens up a whole can of worms. Regardless, knowing what the expiration dates are of the other extensions can shed some light a little on the value of the keywords to the owner(s).

Try using the search traffic results data from AdWords to see if there are other domain name keyword combinations available that are better than the one you are interested in purchasing / registering. Perhaps your investment can be better made elsewhere. Each domain name comes with an annual cost (albeit small but it all adds up) and administration expense, and for most domainers that is personal time required to research and collect data, and marketing the domain.

Each domain name is an investment and requires looking into the details, no matter how small they may be, you never know what you’ll find. Keeping a streamlined portfolio will make it easier to manage.

Brandables

If you are looking at a brand-able domain name, then, generally speaking, the dotCom is mandatory. The world has been told for years that the dotCom is the king of domains, so don’t fight it, succumb. A domain name made up of some funky words and word combos, words that are tough to remember, tough to spell, not searched-for or words fused together already have a road to climb as it is without being a dotInfo.

If someone has to be taught (through marketing) about your domain / site, then go easy on them, for they will go to the dotCom anyway.

For more info on domain sales issues, check out the DotSauce article on 10 Reasons Why a Domain Won’t Sell

What does this mean for domaining? Well, it means that writing SEO content without using semantic language is like going to a gun fight with only one bullet. To illustrate with a real world example, lets go to the Traffickerz.com development whipping post domain case study InlineSkate.ca as a site that suffers from severe Semantic Index Deficiency.

When searching for ‘inline skate’ in Google.ca, the first position goes to the landing page on Wikipedia for ‘Inline Skates’. The bold keywords in the Wikipedia search result title and the description are ‘inline skates‘ (plural) and ‘inline skating‘, neither of which are exact matches to the query.

Semantic SEO is a technique that will garnish both a greater breadth of organic search results and make the site more relevant for a variety of keywords, each giving strength to the other.

For Google in this case, ‘skate’ could be both a noun and a verbal adjective, also called an active participle, as it is describing the noun (skate) performing the action in the verb (skating). Without any additional data or modifiers, the Google algorithm basically reads the index for all the sites that could warrant a place in the search results and then scans for latent context to determine the most relevant results for the active participle ‘skate’. Aside from their authoritative rank, Wikipedia’s ‘Inline Skate’ page is a strong competitor for a wide variety of active participles and why it gets consideration for a broad search result over other sites with exact matches.

When searching Google.ca for the semantic ‘skating‘, if the content was optimized properly and all other things being equal, the search results would almost be interchangeable between ‘skate’ and ‘skating’. The sites that appeared in the top five search engine positions for both ‘skate’ and ‘skating’ include Wikipedia (same lander in both), SkateLog.com (different landers) and InlineOttawa.com (same landers), so their content, intentional or otherwise, is unique and indexes well for semantic language.

Semantic keyword search results tend to suggest that pleasing Google with exact keyword matches isn’t vital to be considered for first place in the search engines. To write purposeful SEO content for a site means writing enough that you can identify the primary keyword(s) to Google, and then use semantics to shape and coerce Google’s understanding from a number of angles so that the site has the best chance of being discovered for a particular topic, not just for a keyword. It also has to be written in a way that you can do all this and make is readable for the content consumer.

Synonyms
Active participles aren’t the only part of the language that Google takes into consideration. Synonyms are another way to teach the search overlord more of what the page is about, and as you know, are simply other words that basically mean the same thing, such as ‘coaching’ and ‘teaching’, however the index is less likely to respond to synonyms given the heavy use of participles and the greater the relative strength that they offer to the query keyword.

Put that in your pipe, mass development.

Google’s data has been telling them for a while now that the long-tail is increasing and that it has, on the average, increased to over three words and that their formula for ranking relevant indexed sites is woefully outdated. They’ve responded with an updated ranking algorithm that better accounts for sites that have the greatest relevancy with the lengthened search query. It also has an impact on deep indexing.

What this means is that, to recapture all that organic traffic you have relied on, you may have to go back to the drawing board, dig deeper, and redo your traffic studies and realign your SEO to accommodate. This translates into increasing the volume of content, and you can’t just syndicate more content to make up for it because you’ll make any unique content that you do have significantly less meaningful, which will upset Google’s allowable balance for duplicate content.

If you want to translate this change into more practical terms then try this on for size – clicks generated from searches of 5 or more words earns a significantly higher revenue than those generated by smaller terms. This isn’t news but the change will effect how sites who originally received those five word searches get ranked. A recent Chitika study of 41 million search traffic impressions indicates that 17% were 4 words queries, 26% three word, 19% two word and 14% one word. This means that 24% of search queries are 5 words or more. In a nutshell, 24% of traffic generates the most CPC revenue for website owners.

Maile Ohye, the senior developer programs engineer at Google announced the update at the recent Search Engines Strategies Conference in Toronto and is quoted to reiterate, “In a nutshell, content is king”, and “you can’t just add a bunch of keywords on a page and expect results just on that”.

The change took place on April 28, just in advance of the Caffeine launch which dealt more with the infrastructure of the index, the depth to which they can look and the speed at which the index is updated.

Anyway, here was the chance for anyone throughout the entire domain development community who are laboring their brains out to build web projects, to submit a site to arguably some of the most knowing people behind the (unfortunately) holy grail of organic traffic, and get their opinion as to the good and bad in a site’s SEO tactics and what improvements can be made.

Well, as it turns out, it would have been a complete waste of time. I watched this video optimistically awaiting new information, dissecting their words, scanning for understatements, even innuendo, but nope, nothing useful. For the most part, the team talks about usability and visitor experience, and important as it may be, hardly the concern of SEO in the context that they were offering SEO feedback, but let me quote the promo;

“Attendees: Perfect for web developers who want to learn more about search engine optimization (SEO)”.

The questions at the end tend to support the notion that the crowd would have liked to have seen something more. Matt does say something that is always good to hear though, which is that Google doesn’t take the TLD into consideration when indexing and ranking sites.

If you can get by the lame banter and the uncomfortable moments when Matt wishes someone would shut up, then here it is, comments more than welcome.

Case in point, Amazon affiliate plugin tool Amazon Press. In the hopes of being convinced that a remote Amazon store is a decent development path (static SEO for referral income vs. remote shopping cart with a call-to-action) I’ve been poking around to see how and why anyone would do such a thing when I ran across some code in one of the plugins that I thought was interesting;

‘LocaleTipTag’ => ’546246187-20′

Huh? What the hell is that? This is part of the API call to the Amazon DB. I did a little research and it turns out that the plugin was copied from another creator and rebranded, with the tipping option hardcoded into the php class, and depending on which version you are running, the developer of the script could be earning revenue from your sales without your knowledge.

So the lesson here is that, if you aren’t looking through the code that is part of your revenue stream, such as third-party plugin Amazon code that you installed, or worse yet, paid to have installed into your blog, how do you know you aren’t getting ripped off?

What a lot of domainers don’t fully realize is just how much time it takes to create this content, which is why it costs money (all things like SEO skills and research skills being equal) and is why many companies don’t offer it. Domainers who have yet to understand or buy into this concept aren’t willing to pay for it, and automated mini site domain developers can’t make much money on it and the administration of its creation is a small nightmare.

Building unique content is a must, and the process goes something like this;
First, you have to research the domain and the keywords to see what you are dealing with. This enables you to determine the position the site might assume within its niche, and what you are up against for competition for the same keywords and search engine result positioning. Then follow that up with some fairly niche research to see how diverse the domain can be while remaining in the sweet spot, and not become too general that Google doesn’t know what the hell the site is talking about, or too rich that they consider the site spam.

Once the research is completed, you begin to write something, and unless it is a topic you know really well, then you are going to have to research facts and trivia and other elements of the content which will ultimately lead to something interesting to be consumed by site visitors. But, “interesting” isn’t the only virtue of good content, there can’t be any spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, and other editorial requirements such as paragraph and page lengths, to keep the visitor not only interested, but perhaps to also find value in passing that content to someone they know who also might be interested.

Finally, once all the content is completed, it has to be SEO’d properly so that Google also finds it interesting, which in itself comes with a whole lot of rules and issues to deal with.

Spending an entire day on this sort of endeavor is not uncommon and is an integral element to domain building and can not be avoided. To be able to offer this skill in addition to all the other elements of decent domain development, and to include features like hosting on top all for one low price is extremely difficult. This is where mass domain development stumbles. I have the pleasure of being privy to a mass content creation service in the works and sense that the road ahead will be an uphill climb unless domainers realize that it is the cornerstone of successful development and deserves greater attention.

What about syndication?

Borrowed content can help out, but all other things being equal, battling with another site for a good Google search result placement using that content as the weapon, the tie goes to the content creator. So, the question begs to be asked, why bother borrowing content? The words may be borrowed, but they are still part of the formula used by Google to determine the topic, nature and context of the domain for serving it up as a search result.

Some sites like our DNHeadlines project isn’t interested in unique content, it is for the love of the industry and compelling content aggregation that is the service offering, and this is fine for now.

Although Google does allow for a certain amount of content to be borrowed from other sites without penalty, the site must maintain a particular balance. Failing to do this means that Google (specific niche long tail searches aside) will not reward the site with the borrowed content at all. Don’t forget that Google’s primary concern is to provide the user with the best search results possible relative to the search query, and it is simple math for Google to determine who that is from content’s index date.

It is possible to beat the content creator to the punch for their syndicated content, and for the most part it is luck of the draw, but it can also come down to Page Rank. Page Rank can influence how often Google indexes a site, so it stands to reason that a more frequently indexed site that has favorable SEO for a given keyword search will have a greater chance at being considered for that content before the creator, but this consideration will more than likely wear off until the next instance.

The experience I’ve had with developing eBay API affiliate stores is that often I’ve been able to have content indexed and removed (because the auction closed) and get the credit for the keywords. For me, this is one of the leading factors in prioritizing the eBay API over the Amazon API even though Amazon has the juicy (for some products) call to action.

Having said this, many plugin developers do not keep their plugins up to date as fast as hackers are at writing new methods for hacking the blog. Some WordPress updates offer changes that aren’t compatible with the plugin and if it is a core plugin script like something that promotes featured content, layout plugins, or worse yet, DB backup plugins, then updating the blog to the current version can render the site useless, or at the very least, ineffective. Both WordPress and Google (for some reason) mention a few times that blog owners should update their blogs as soon as possible, but how long do you wait for your plugins to be updated before potentially moving beyond their version compatibility?

There is a reasonable solution. Run a dummy blog site and use it as a test bed for plugins and updates, and simply beat the hell out of it. Another benefit this brings is that the dummy blog can also be a theme repository, housing all the themes you’ve run across so that you can review them at a later date.

Building a new project with a new style will be a lot easier when you have a style to use for modeling, right off the bat.

It is reasonable to assume that the low cost of entry is almost exclusively responsible for the low expectations that domainers have and are thus willing to pay for. What we are left with then are asset holders that want to give as little as possible to the people they rely on for their income simply because they want to stretch their investment dollar. They unknowingly (or stubbornly) stretch the budget to the point that each site in the development plan is on unstable ground with the content and SEO.

Regardless what controversial feedback it has been receiving lately, I’m a fan of micro / niche site development, and I’m suggesting a paradigm shift for domainers, by increasing expectations, developing fewer domains but spending more money on them, and finding a way to build growth into the formula. Create something that could be achieved only by adding more time and research to the project.

The internet the world over is becoming more and more compartmentalized as competition for “the general” heats up, not just for the traffic but for the domain names themselves. The only way to compete is to become “the specific”. Specialization is where it is at, and lets not forget that higher revenue comes with long-tail keyword searches for niche and targeted sites. Specialization breeds a natural keyword focus, and the greater the success any demands will be that you place on your visitor — they’ve sold themselves on consuming your content by virtue of their long-tail search keywords matching your results and showing up for more.

All of this requires a degree more time and effort and cost than what the notion of the mini site has become.

Morgan Linton posted a similar observation with regards to domainer expectations on building directory sites.

SEO opportunities.

When an eBay seller enters their content into eBay, they are encouraged to use as many descriptive words as possible in as few words as possible. What this means for a generic product domain name is that the title will more than likely have the manufacturer, model, model number and any other information that might be pertinent to the product, including succinct descriptions. This is hugely helpful for the domain owner as it can provide the keyword structure for short and long-tail searches.

The way eBay stores their data allows for some simple yet highly tuned data calls, perfectly suitable for domain development for a couple of reasons, one of which is the absolutely massive inventory of products for auction. The likelihood of generating results for even the most remote product array is there. When developing with SEO in mind, a page with a set of seriously niche keywords can allow for a site to really take over a particular keyword search in the search engines.

User experience features

The way eBay compartmentalizes their data leads to an ease in layout and design. In pulling small amounts of teaser data like the image, product title, price and if you want to generate a sense of urgency, the time remaining on the auction, it enables the site to be tailored to look like any store selling their wares online. The shape, look and feel of the site doesn’t have the responsibility of training a new user as to how to use the site or what to expect, and this impression helps with the CTR. Since eBay stores your affiliate code in relation to the visitor, then any business they do with eBay or PayPal while that relationship exists is credited to the site owner, and eBay tracks this relationship for a long time.

No worries about gaming

eBay has implemented a quality-click pricing model. This means that clicks are rewarded if they lead to sales, so they don’t care how many clicks you drive to eBay, in fact the more the merrier for the domain owner since, frankly, the more relationships you can have assigned to you, the greater chance you have at making a sale, today, next week, three months from now, whenever.

Any downsides?

Amazon fans will jump up and down over the fact that I’m sending people off to eBay and losing any potential loyalty, and I’ll debate that on a number of levels (please also bear in mind that I’m dying to be proven wrong).

I think that the work required to earn the loyalty needed to generate a sale is tougher to earn than the casual click-through of a curious visitor, and I’m passing them off to a site with loyalty and goodwill up the yin-yang that has a greater likelihood of moving the user through to a sale than a modestly-priced Amazon remote affiliate store.

Another point of contention is that Amazon’s inventory is horrid and stagnant. I’ve tested out API calls to Amazon to see the data it brings back, and it almost never changes. Also, the inventory is really lacking and in no way can accommodate some really interesting and lucrative niche markets.

Here’s an example: The research on the yet to be completed GoaliePads.org site yielded a number of natural categories for the menu, but Amazon couldn’t come up with the range or variety of products I needed to display per page. Not just that, but the Amazon products never changed, so I’m going to get hammered by Google over the duplicate content, but at least with eBay, I get an inventory that turns over fairly regularly. I get to maintain the keyword density I need because sellers are encouraged to use the best keywords possible to describe their product, and Google keeps seeing new content with each index.

A search for Goalie Pads yields, at best, 83 items in the Amazon inventory and almost 600 different items in the eBay inventory at all times.

See more about the generic product domain name eBay affiliate site development details.

I’d love to get some debate on this because, as I said, I’m really interested in someone arguing for the benefits of developing an Amazon affiliate store.