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Someone emailed me with a question relating to domain names, and it motivated me to write down something that I’ve had rolling around in my head for a while.

This is just a “theory” I have.  However, it’s totally consistent with everything I’ve learned about SEO and how the SEs work.  I have no solid proof that things work this way, other than tons of empirical evidence that really doesn’t contradict it.

Ok, so here’s the general idea…

I got my Ham Radio License when I was 13.  For those who don’t know much about radio theory, radio antennas are, by their nature, tuned to a specific frequency.  The length of the “dipoles” or radiator wires needs to be calculated to be a specific ratio of the wavelength of the frequency you want it optimized for (eg., 1/4 wavelength, 1/2 wavelength, etc).  Radio waves at that exact frequency will be captured and transmitted most efficiently.  Radio waves at other frequencies will be less effective the further away from the tuned frequency you get.  Everything from the antenna into the equipment has to be tuned to the frequency you’re using.  If it’s not, things don’t work well.

There’s a measure called “impedance” that says how well matched the antenna is to the frequency you’re using.  An “impedance mismatch” occurs when they’re out of tune.  At some point, the mismatch becomes so bad that the antenna just behaves like an ordinary piece of wire hanging out the back of the equipment.  That is, it’s more or less random in terms of how well it works.  It’s capturing whatever signals are there and you’re not getting any benefit from its length.

In my mind, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is like a radio receiver that’s composed of an antenna and several related components that amplify the signals.  The process starts at the domain name, which is the antenna. Parts of your site that amplify the incoming signals include the ‘TITLE’ tag on the page, ‘META’ tags like ‘Description’ and ‘Keywords’, as well as the words used in the URL to access pages on the site.  Then the evaluation drops to the content on the page.  If these components are present, they each amplify the signal.  If they’re not, they don’t.  However, if they’re present and they DON’T match, they present an “impedance mismatch” and tend to garble the signal.

The more semantic consistency there is among these different components, the more “relevance” Google and the other SEs will assign to your site and the material on it. When that happens, you get a form of “amplification” as the SEs direct more traffic (ie., stronger radio waves) towards your site.  Google is happy to direct more traffic to it because it thinks the site is more relevant to their visitors than other sites.

A keyword-rich DN is like an antenna tuned to a specific frequency.  It’ll tend to favor searches that match those keywords — but only if the other components present a “LOW impedance mismatch”.  That is, if you use a DN with popular real estate search terms for a site that talks about XBOX 360 stuff, there’s a pretty HIGH impedance MISmatch, and you’re not getting any value from the keywords in the DN.  The SEs will detect the mismatch and proceed to ignore the otherwise keyword rich names you’re using.  If they get confused enough, they’ll simply de-index your site.

BTW, if you use a generic DN to host your blog (uh, like in this case), the DN is simply not contributing much value to the equation.  It may not hurt, but it’s certainly not helping.

I thought I’d mention this because what prompted this post was a question about the value of buying a keyword-rich DN that’s composed of several words that individually and collectively are searched for very frequently.  The DN is parked and pointing to a “parked domain billboard” page and isn’t getting a whole lot of traffic, all of which is apparently organic.  So it doesn’t have a very high price listed.

My theory here suggests that parking a keyword-rich domain on a site with a blog that has lots of content “tuned” to the keywords in the DN, along with basic SEO stuff done on the site, then it would get a ton more organic traffic.  Which for most people seems rather intuitive.  So why are so many DNs parked on these silly “parked domain billboard” pages?

So the traffic coming to a keyword-rich DN pointing to typical “parked domain billboard” pages is probably reflective of the “raw” value of that DN alone.  It’s an antenna hooked to a “meter” of sorts that’s simply measuring whatever signals are tuned to that frequency.  That’s it.  It’s not giving the SEs any way to “amplify” the signals it sends there because it’s just too passive.  It gets some traffic, but nowhere near what it could get if there was something behind it and everything was tuned to the same frequency.

If you were to point it to a blog with basic SEO and pages of content that are “tuned” to those same words, then set up a handful of articles on the same subject to get back links, your organic traffic would increase significantly.  You’ll be giving the SEs a reason to “amplify” the traffic they send you, and if the terms have high search frequencies, you’ll get more traffic than terms with lower search frequencies will produce.

That is, a keyword-rich DN that uses keywords with high search frequencies acts more like a high-gain antenna when connected to a site with semantically-related  SEO and content, as opposed to using a DN that is fairly generic or has unrelated words in it.

And there’s even a way to actually MEASURE all of this once it’s in place.  But that’s a story for another day!

TEST IT!

If you wanted to test this theory, find a keyword-rich domain name (DN) that contains several highly searched keywords and a couple others that use the exact same terms but in a different order, then set them up on unrelated sites with either a blog or a static web site.  The word ordering in the DNs should be mostly irrelevant if the content on the sites is the same.  Vary the content on each site in terms of quantity, not relevance, then see how much organic traffic they each get over time.  (The text can vary so the content looks different, but make sure the keyword densities are the same in all cases.)  My guess is that the traffic rates will correlate strongly to the QUANTITY of material on each site, everything else being equal.

That is, a site with just a keyword-rich DN and an empty site will get some traffic based on the DN, but nothing else.  As you add more relevant material, your traffic will increase.

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