I have been noticing this for a while now, while tracking few key phrases in a particular niche, where sites having keyword/phrases in their domain and/or in url, are ranking ahead of my site. Even though in quite a few cases, my site is older and has more back links and content. Heck one of the forum ranking ahead of me only has a few hundred posts and even half of them are spam messages which do not belong to the niche!
I noticed that too with two of my sites with similar content. Site1 with many thousands of backlinks and PR5 but without keywords on sitename, Site2 with a few hundred backlinks and PR3 and keyword on sitename. Site2 is ranked #1 at Google for keyword in sitename and Site1 is ranked #23
One would think with Google trying to improve their search engine results, they wouldn’t be using such a algorithm, which can be easily gamed.
Yes they are very important, its only one aspect of a complete SEO strategy though and even though you have a great domain you still have to worry about title tags, on page content, backlinks and much more. Take plenty of time when picking your domain name!
Hello, As I saw is better use keyword in the domain, example cool-websites will rank better than coolwebsites.com..
Yes, this happens often. Keywords in the URL is one of the reasons lower-PR pages can outrank higher PR pages that don't have those keywords in the URL. Those who continually proclaim that "PR is useless" often point to SERPs where a lower-PR page outranks a higher-PR one. But they often fail to note that, in many of those cases, the higher-ranking page has its keywords in the URL, whereas the lower-ranking page (even with higher PR) does not have those keywords in the URL.
as far as I know is one of the most important. i have studied some competitors who have good keyword based domains and even if their site is not optimized they sill get very good results in google search
I wouldn't consider it "gaming" the search engines at all. To use the keyword(s) in your URL is being specifically descriptive. It is telling the search engines that this keyword is what this page is primarily about. If I write a page about Miami Vacations, then I am being helpfully descriptive to call that page www[dot]mysite.com/Miami-vacations.html. That is quite the opposite of gaming the SEs.
Correct, the whole concept of a proper URL and internal linking structure is to give relevancy to the web page's content. Gaming would be considered if you mis-used linking structure and\or file\directory names to point to a web page that is NOT relevant.
Yes, and also don't try to put too many keywords on sitename, IMO the best is a 2 or 3 word sitename as short as possible, and .com if is available.
This used to be a much bigger factor that it is now. I remember I used to rank highly on Yahoo when starting my page title with ! and my domain names with a 1 or an A. If only that was still the case!
it happens. I wud not say it helps to gain high serps but i have noticed that once u get ranking at Ist page of google. And u have keywords in domain name then you do not have to give more efforts to maintain your ranking. So some where keywords in domain helps without doubt..................