What’s in a name. Does the url of a web page really make a big difference when designing your website to get indexed by google.
Personally I think it's best to have a domain name that can become a brand and use directory or sub-domain names for adding that extra keyword in the URL. Branding first, SEO second.
Google does highlight the URL if the keyword is present and blogs seem to rank well considering the URL is usually named after the topic so I'd say yes it does help. Not as much as it used to back in the day but alittle.
Keyword or brand name in the url will help you attract visitors, because people see the url and they know it belongs to you. For example, if you are searching Furama Hotel, you will go first to websites like www.furamam.com or www.furamahotel.com. But it will not help your seo, an example is, just search in google for any keyword, can you find any bold texts in the url?
I don't know how much of a difference it makes ... if you type in 'Say No to Crack' in Google, my site comes up 1-3 along with a bunch of other humor sites, and was in this position from the 2nd day after it launched 8 weeks ago. But there are tons of other keywords where it comes up in the 1-3 spot that obviously aren't in the URL. Obviously this isn't a scientific response