Well, a few months ago I grabbed the domain name "cellulaires.org". It's french for "cellulars". Of course I made a website out of it targetting french canadians cell phones owners since I live in Canada. I put a few articles on the site (powered by Wordpress) and it soon begun to receive search engine traffic, not a lot, but around 15 uniques a day from search engines. I am now on the first page on Google for the keyword search "cellulaires". On top of it I received a pagerank of 2 a few days ago but I really don't have many backlinks yet (did'nt have time to promote the site that much). On the other side I made a few websites that don't rank as good as this one with search engines although they have quality content, also powered by Wordpress, with the same plugins installed. So is the answer in the domain name?
This question comes up a lot and the answer will vary depending on the search engine. I'll assume you're asking in regard to Google. Only a Google represenative could answer this for sure, but my response would be yes. The domain name matters in regard to Google. My reasoning is that when you type a search term in at Google, the results page has the search term you entered in bold. However, I should also point out, that sub-directory and html file name information, if also matching your search term, is also in bold. It looks like Google pays attention to the full url and whether or not the search term is contained within it.