Websurfers are Typing-in their Search-Terms

A forum member posted about how he believes people are using the search engines less, with less searches being done in his opinion.

I don’t necessarily agree about search declining. However, web-surfers are in all likelihood realizing most every keyword phrase, product, service and search-term now resolves to an active website so as time goes by they are more inclined to typein with more and more frequency the keywords they are looking for directly into the internet browser window or entering the same term (without spaces, with domain extension) in the search box. They do that by entering the search term, most iften followed by .com extension, with .org being next in typein popularity, i.e. Word1Word2.com or Word1Word2Word3.org. etc…

Wondering About the Knowledge of Domainers?

There are a lot of mysteries with domaining such as how often expired names sell at places like Snapnames for $60 or more but no sale for $20 before expiration at forums, etc.

However, the oddity which really has me wondering about the knowledge many domainers really have is why I keep on running into health and medical related domains available in .org but already reg’d in other extensions which have far less likelihood of traffic vs dot-org?

I can say based on lots of experience the only 2 tld’s which work nicely with health names are .com and .org. In fact, depending on the name .org can sometimes do as well or even better vs .com in health/disease related names. All the others are poor with very rare typeins.

Just this afternoon I was doing research using Google’s Insights For Search and discovered a real nice 3 word health term which seems like it would get both search and typein traffic.

I figured it would be taken in dot-com and dot-org for sure and maybe even other extensions but upon checking was surprised to see it unregistered in .org but taken in .com .net .biz .info .us and even .eu so I quickly registered the dot-org.

Why is it not better known that dot-org works so well in the health, wellness and disease category? Just one of life’s many mysteries I guess.

Pros & Cons Site Development vs Parked Domain

Many domain name owners are now saying the smart money in 2010 is on website development.

It appears most everyone is saying development is best but the fact is it can be much tougher to get revenue vs a ppc parked page.

Several reasons for that including the fact Click-thru-rates (CTR) is often 4 or 5 times better on a parked page which means the developed site will need 4 or 5 time more traffic to earn the same revenue, assuming the Earnings-per-click (EPC) is about the same comparing say Adsense/YPN vs the major parking firms.

With that said, a nice advantage the developed site has is the ability for site traffic to increase (but that can easily take many months or even years), whereas the parked domain is unlikely to ever get more traffic.

I have more developed sites vs parked domains so I also believe strongly in development but the strength of the keyword name is a big factor, imo. In addition, development involves vast amounts of time and work, including the site/domain server setup, content, hosting, seo work, site maintenance and monitoring, not to mention the hosting cost and time involved and many months or years of waiting for traffic to slowly build-up over time.

Keep the following example in mind if you are developing a good keyword name which gets say 100 typein visits/mo and earns say $2.80/mo at parking (based on 20% CTR and .14c EPC). Once you make it a developed site you will start-out with approx the same 100 typein visits but more often than not your CTR will drop to roughly 4% (or even lower) which means your revenue will decline to just .56c vs $2.80 on parking.

That typical example scenario in-effect means your traffic will need to skyrocket to 500 visits/mo to equal the same $2.80/mo revenue when parked. Can you imagine the time and work involved increasing your traffic from 100/mo to 500/mo!

Coming Events Cast Shadows in Search-Terms

Our server has two excellent stats program running which tells us most everything possible about how visitors arrive at this website, including the search terms used in the search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo and others.

The popularity of the beautiful Alexis DelChiaro (photo above) as far as search results coming from our server stats program is quite surprising. Upon checking our statistics today we see Alexis DelChiaro is the most searched term. Making that more surprising is the fact most of the searches relate to the possibility of Alexis and husband (Chicago Cubs pitcher) Sean Marshall being separated or divorced, with 15 of 20 looking for information about Alexis and 12 of 15 regarding separation or divorce.

Here are the top-20 search terms (non-Alexis search terms are not shown):

alexis delchiaro divorced
alexis delchiaro
alexis delchiaro separated
alexis del chiaro separated
is alexis del chiaro divorced
sean marshall divorced
is sean marshall divorced
is alexis delchiaro divorced
alexis delchiaro age
alexis delchiaro divorce from sean marshall
alexis delchiaro sean marshall separated
did alexis delchiaro get divorced
alexis del chiaro
alexis del chiaro fox news separated from sean
alexis delchiaro and divorced

As discussed before in this blog, “coming events cast their shadows” which indicates to me it’s very likely Alexis is at a bare minimum having problems with her marriage and separation or divorce is likely. After all, why would these search terms be so common unless there was some truth to it?

As a side note, there was a popular old article with a series of comments published here about Alexis Delchiato which I believe are indexed in the search engines so I am sure that is at least one of the reasons some of the separaton or divorce search-terms end up being referred to this blog.

Please note, personally I am not interested in this or care about this subject at all, and only reporting about this as far as my strong interest goes in search engines, web site traffic and search term statistics.

Jets.com was a great bargain at only $375,000

To someone who may not be experienced with domain name values the internet domain name Jets.com recently selling for 375k must seem like a ton of money. If it was purchased to try and take advantage of the New York Jets football team as was once commonly believed (until the actual buyer became known) and maybe to run some sports advertising on it and make a few bucks from running PPC ads (and taking a chance on a big trademark lawsuit or WIPO case), then I agree that 375k is a lot to pay.

However, the name was purchased by an end-user firm who rents jets and other airplanes according to what I see on the website today. Since jets both rent and sell for big and small fortunes the price was incredbly low. I believe just one sale or a few 25-hour rentals of a corporate jet would probably recover the domain purchase price in profit or commissions. After the first few transactions take place from the website traffic (and its typeins) it will be all gravy for a lifetime for the lucky owner and and 100% profit with every future airplane transaction. So the price was in actuality a tremendous bargain.

The new jets.com web site offers these prices: U.S. 2009 Pricing: 25 HOURS CARD MEMBERSHIP. Aircraft Price. Hawker 400 XP $114,500; Hawker 800 $125,000; Hawker 1000 $149,000; Gulfstream III $189,000; Citation X $189,000; Challenger 601/604 $199,000; Gulfstream IV $279,000.

This is what Yahoo! Answers says about the costs of jets: “Best Answer – Chosen by Voters: (buying and owning a jet) is very expensive considering all the FAA rules on rebuilding engines every so many hours whether they need it or not and a pilot is gonna cost you in excess of $100,000.00 per year and then you have the hangar charges which are like $3,000 a month, and then jet fuel which was $3.79 a gallon and then the insurance is expensive . There is an old saying at my rolls royce dealership – if you need to ask the price or the gas mileage you can’t afford it and I have found over the years how true !!!!! Byy the way cheap starter jets can be bought used for like $300,000.00 and up whereas the new ones like a 4 seater are probably going to run 1.5 million dollars or higher to start.”

Lower Domain/Website Income vs Higher Costs

Most everyone in the domain name and website development industry is reporting sharp declines of from 65% to as much as 85% in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising Revenues compared to a few years ago. The income declines appear to go well beyond the overall decline in the economy, with several other factors involved in the big declines.

Making matters even worse is the future scenario of sharply higher cost domain name yearly renewals since it looks like the domain registry operators will be able to soon charge whatever they want for yearly name renewals, with non-fixed and non-regulated pricing looming on the dark horizon.

The double edge sword of low income combined with expected greater costs could easily put an end to the domain name industry as we now know it. Comments on this bleak outlook are welcome…

Google to Allow 3rd-Party Ad Networks in Adsense

Google has announced to AdSense publishers they would soon be opening up accounts to allow Google approved third-party ad networks to run ads on publisher websites, in addition to Adsense ads. Up until now the AdSense ads are from advertisers who bid on keywords using Google’s AdWords system. With the new advertising system it becomes much more open likely resulting in higher paying click prices from the third party firms who may possibly appear on your web site ahead of Google’s own Adsense ad.

In our opinion, this bodes well for publishers since Google will allow a different ad network to run PPC ads on our websites, assuming they will be paying more per click vs Adsense. This also seems like the competition could easily cause publisher revenue to increase as time goes by. with the various networks trying to get more publishers displaying their ads by offering extra revenue.

Sales Should Be Atributed to the Correct Website

Regarding domain name sales reports I noticed AfternicDLS gets credit for more sales than deserved. For example, I personally purchased a good health related dot-org domain last week but it was listed in DNjournal.com as being sold by AfternicDLS (even though Afernic.com had nothing to do with the process). It appears credit for many of the sales in both DNjournal and in other media too are often attributed to Afternic when the BuyDomains landing page was responsible for the sale, having nothing to do with Afternic’s name.

The name above and several others I have purchased this year were always a direct result of typing on the domain name and seeing the BuyDomains landing page. The landing page has the BuyDomains phone number at the top announcing the name is for sale and inviting a phone call to the BuyDomans toll-free number, or clicking the link for more details or making an online purchase it goes to the BuyDomains.com website, with Afternic not mentioned on the web-page from what I can see. In fact, I don’t believe Afternic is mentioned at all during the sales and ordering process which appears to be done only under the name BuyDomains.com

Of course I realize they are both divisions of NameMedia.com but it seems like the Afternic.com website gets undeserved credit for far more sales than warranted and greater marketing benefit than is due them. In fact, I would be willing to bet BD landers are responsible for many sales, especially to end-users and higher priced domains) compared to Afternic which is believed to have a lot of sales mostly to domainers and resellers.

The reason we mention this is that Afternic.com is obviously getting more marketing and advertising credit plus greater overall publicity than justly deserved for domain sales. On a more personal note, I dislike the Afternic.com web site which has been riddled with various bugs for ages, lacks certain important features such as bulk operations, and unfortunately has offered poor support for a long time). In fact I removed my domains from there some time ago.

Do Regular Changes to a Website Improve Traffic?

A member of one of the forums has posted about how her traffic and revenue had recently spiked-up without obvious reason. There has been talk on that board about that subject and conjecture by the members where they believe changes to website content and possibly changing the nameservers too may be responsible for sudden and unexplained traffic/revenue spikes.

The jury is out on that issue however assuming that is valid it would seem like someone could develop a script which automatically substitutes the index page on a regular basis (i.e. weekly schedule)? It appears that could be accomplished based on two different home-page versions with diverse content in the folder (i.e. index1.html & index2.html) and proceeds to rename one or the other index.html. In addition, the script could access the domain registration account and modify the nameservers on the same schedule (i.e. alternating between NS1. Example1.com & NS1.Example2.com).

Every ‘X’ number of days (i.e. weekly) the script could rename the index pages on a rotating basis.  Next the script automatically goes into the domain registration account and change the nameservers too on the same rotating schedule. It would seem like a fairly easy script to have programmed and implemented but who knows for sure? The end-results would certainly be interesting and the search engine and traffic improvement theory may or may not be proven valid and could turn-out to be little more than urban legend.

Importance of Domain Name in Search Engines

A keyword rich domain name is of little doubt a major importance with the search-engine ranking algorithm used by the major search engines. Most domain name and web site experts tend to downplay the value of the domain name in the URL. However, we believe it is a much more major factor than many search experts and guros realize or believe.

For example, in the Bing search results below for lemon juice you will find LemoinJuice.org ranked a very high #4 out of a significant 13,000,000 search results (even higher by ranking #3 with quotes used in the search). The LemonJuice.org web site is a nice little web site with some good relevant (but limited) content, nevertheless, the site itself is comparatively small, especially compared to many other much larger websites which rank below it.

Making its high-ranking even more impressive is the fact the three sites ranking above lemonjuice.org are extremely important and huge websites (Wikipedia and EzineArticles) with many 1000s of content pages and 1000s of links.

The fact LemonJuice.org ranks so impressively goes a long way in confirming the high value of the two keywords ‘Lemon Juice’ being in the websites URL address (view the live search results by clicking below):

Bing.com results – lemon juice without quotes: >http://www.bing.com/search?q=lemon+juice&go=&form=QBRE&qs=n target=”_blank”>

Bing.com results – “lemon juice” using quotes: >http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22lemon+juice%22&form=QBRE&qs=n target=”_blank”>

P.S. Even ranks #1 when searched without a space: > http://www.bing.com/search?q=lemonjuice&form=QBLH&qs=n” target=”_blank”>

Going to Websites via Web-Browser or Search Box

At one of the domain forum boards one of the well-known forum moderators Biggedon was talking about so called “direct navigation” which he said is “mostly used when you know or think you know the exact url of a website which has the product or service you want.” He went on to say “however, I see many of my co-workers who type their search into their “web browsers” search box, rather than using the browsers address bar window, then they click from a list of links the SE produces. The culture of “address bar searchers” is fading fast to those who use the browser window to search, especially with the search-engine companies urging you to search thru their service saying Google this, Yahoo that, Ask this, Bing…

Agree to what Don said above to a good degree. In addition, I don’t believe the likely scenario of web-surfers migrating somewhat from web-browser typeins to search box type-ins is really much of a negative since a search window type-in (assuming the relevant domain extension is added) is in my opinion still considered to be a typein and almost as valuable (though some experts may not completely agree).

My family members are good examples as they most always typein full url’s including the extension (usually either .com or .org) into the search box instead of the browser url window. In fact, I sometimes do that too and do it even more lately. With that said, not really the whole story because the most valuable and best part of the story is that if you typein the full url in the Google search box to a large degree and much of the time your site immediately resolves.

However, occasionally for some odd reason (perhaps if was recently indexed or maybe ranked very low) the url will be listed in the search results instead of instantly resolving (still OK because the web siite url will be on the clickable list, frequently shown in #1 position, or ranked high). I believe for these 2 scenarios to work the url needs to in fact be at least indexed in the SE.

That is why you should not always rely on the search-engines finding you but should also submit your URL direct to the search engines. Yahoo makes it difficult to submit URL’s since you need to first have a Yahoo! account. However, Bing and Google make is real easy to submit your URL’s (no account required). Here is the link for Google URL Submission, and a link so you may also submit URL to Bing.com

Type-in address in to web browser