How important is domain names?

Hello,
Im thinking of starting to work hard to get ranked high for a certain keyword for one of my sites. Now my question is, should I buy that certain keywords url and then redirect the visitors to the site I want the visitors to see?

For example, lets say I have a site about "BMW cars", and now I want to rank high for the keyword "German cars", should I buy an url like germancars.com if its availible? What benefits will it give me? (if any) Will "Germancars.com" rank high for that keyword just becuase of the url?

Thanks!

 

The benefits would be for your users more than for search engines. Keywords in domain names have little, if any, effect in SEO.

 

How do you mean? How can the visitor that just want to read about "german cars" have any more benefit from my url being germancars.com rather than my other bmwcars.com url? Thanks

 

I respect fully disagree . . .

Statistics show that people tends to type "ebay" into google when looking for ebay.com (samething for yahoo, and any site name really . . . ). Its a stupid behavior, but it is what it is . . . (I used to work for a SE)

As a result, SE's are "forced" to rank domain names that match the keyword pretty high in order to ensure that people looking for "ebay" will get ebay.com on the first page . . . its a fact that Google dont want you to know too much bout cause its easy to spam . .. just my 2 cents . . .

 

Domain names are veeeerrrrrrrrry (very very) important. If you do not have more money to throw for advertising, then you must concentrate on choosing domain names. www.seoforum.org.uk has an excellant article on choosing a domain name and it says that forum itself is an example of why names are important.

 

Google show ebay top for a search for ebay because of the amount of backlinks ebay has with "ebay" as the anchor text and the amount of times "ebay" appears on the site.

Google dropped the importance of keywords in domain names about 3 minutes after people started getting domains like;
web-hosting-lawyer-compensation-free-viagra.com

 

Oh no, I must say domain names are very important. A domain name related to your site will help you being index by search engine faster. However, the issue of whether your site will rank high anot is another matter.

Let's say your domain name is parked with keywords with low competitive and your site has high PR. Of course, you will get higher ranking for that particular keyword. So choosing domain names will definitely help in indexing but ranking, it does depend.

 

No search engine can drop importance of keywords in domains. Atleast for another couple of years ( I prefer not to disclose those reasons).

There are some solid examples of how keyword domains ranked much better when used appropriately ( ie. the contents of the domain must bear relevance to the domain names).

Take for instance www.seoforum.org.uk. This is a new forum with no page rank at all. Yet it is ranked perfectly in the top for the keyword and the contents are related to its domain.

Another example is www.suggest-url.com. A new suggest url directory with no page rank. Yet ranked first for the keyword.

Why do you think they are on top?.

 

are TLD ext as much important as keywords in domain name?

 

Thanks guys for all the tips! One more question, which would be best, germancars.com or german-cars.com?

Thanks

 

right... germancars.com might also give you good type in traffic. So skip the hyphen.

 

Google will see both, but Sarah is correct, the dash is not the favorite.

Also, the idea of getting a domain name like germancars.com will work. Do a one page article (about German cars) on the site, then point it towards the page about German cars on your main site. This works most of the time and you don't need a lot of pages, just the higher valued ones should do fine.

 

here is another example . . . (Google is much smarter) so lets try Yahoo . . .

type in "domain forums" as a keyword in Yahoo . . . notice that domainforums.com shows up first . . . anyone in the industry would know that namepros.com and dnforum.com has the most backlinks and are the most popular . . . somthing must be going on by yahoo to match it to the domain name

 

hi all,

i´m quite a newbie in SEO but from my point of view i always (i mean always!!) go to domain names with the top keyword i want to use.

i belive if i haven´t got the keyword "xxxxxxx" in one of my blogs (url and title) it would be dificult for this 3 week old blog to get #2 and #3 at Google by the search "xxxx"!...
And let me tell you it´s a major keyword - webdesign related... so, you be the judge my friend.

 

Really?
When i done a search for "seo forum" i found the following domains above it.
www.webworkshop.net
www.highrankings.com
www.seochat.com
forums.seochat.com
forums.digitalpoint.com
forums.searchenginewatch.com
www.sitepoint.com
www.searchguild.com
www.seobook.com
www.ihelpyou.com
www.webmasterworld.com
www.aosep.com

So considering none of the domains above it have the term "seo forum" in it's domain name only a fool would entertain the idea that the words in the domain have any importance. (and im not even going to mention your ludicrous idea that page rank would have any effect)

You are drawing false conclusions.

 

I have to disagree...

Search engines use a combination of keywords and popularity. If the search results are garbage, a page with good keywords, backlinks, (or a domain) will stand out above the rest. Whichever site has the best combination wins the top spot.

 

Of course they use keywords, I'm not saying they don't. I'm saying the keywords in the domain name are not given any more weight than the keywords found on the page.

 

I have to disagree. Only a fool would come to a decision that words in domains have no importance. The right way to decide is by

1. Try searching for "seo forum" and see the position of "seoforum.org.uk".
2. Now look at the registration date, page rank, back links of the domains that shows up before seoforum.org.uk.
3. Now check the same for seoforum.org.uk

Now decide.

 

Exact match domain names do give a benefit in Google because the search engines thinks that you might be searching for a brand.

Keywords in domain names can help, although it is www.keyword1-keyword2-keyword3-keyword4.com, it might not help.

It isn't critical to have keywords in your domain name.