Does Domain Name Matter?

I'm thinking of getting a domain name with my top keywords in it. My question is does this help with search engines and how much? Also I'm thinking of having it just as a pointer domain and not the main/default domain. Do I would use this keyword optimized domain to submit but when the user comes to my site it changes to my regular/main domain. Does this affect the effectiveness of the keyword rich domain? What do you advise?

 

Google is highlighting (bold) keywords in domain names and I have seen that the domains with keywords in them are ranking higher recently. According to me domain names with keywords do matter but cannot say it this trend will last long enough becuase people tend to misuse this and Google might stop giving priority to this feature.

I do not think that it will be good idea to use your keyword rich domain as a pointer name and make it redirect to your "main" domain. You can consider 301 redirect for the time being if you really want to. It too might get blocked in the future.

 

The main advantage in having your keywords in your domain name is that you rarely have to ask for the correct anchor text when you get IBLs from other sites.

 

yes makes a huuuggggeee difference in many cases

 

I have 3 sites all use the keywords in the url and could not agree more.

If you have a brand name it's usually fairly easy to rank 1st on the brand name with an internal page.

In your marketing mix - (price, product, position, promotion)

With the promotion of your site -

If 90% of it is to be through online advertising you need every SEO edge.

If 90% of your advertising is offline you need strong recall.

In both cases you need to establish brand recognition and product differentiation.

Good business/brand/domain names are 'brand/industry' like
'Apple Computers'

so the url would be:
applecomputers.com

Which associates the brand with the industry.

If you limit yourself to brand/product there isn't much room for diversification without rebranding.

 

Thank you all for your great posts! I've learned a lot My business is web design and development. I have no offline marketing and can't afford to start right now. So a good domain name with "design" and "development" is available. I'm thinking of using this new domain name as my "primary" domain and the domain that I submit to the SE's. My current domain www.virtual-voyage.com is also the name of my company which I would keep as my secondary domain. Does this sound like a smart move? And if I should get this keyword domain should I have the "-" between the words? Does this effect rankings in any way? Thanks guys

 

My own experience tells me that having your main keywords in your domain name helps very much.

Not only because it gives an extra impulse in achieving high SERPs, but also because if you buy PPC ads, potential customers are more avid to click on ads published by domain names that contain the keywords they're looking for.

But beware... because my experience also tells me that usually big search terms are NOT big sale terms. So if you're just interested in high traffic, use big terms in your domain names, but if you're interested in sales, make some extra research before deciding which keywords you're going to use in your domain name.

Following there's a small extract from this month's newsletter of one of the most renewed SEO publications, where they published the results of a statistical analysis of the current question: Does having your keyword in your root domain affect ranking? And they found very interesting relations:

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But also they asked themselves if having your major keywords not in the domain name itsef, but in the folder structure would help as much as having in on the main domain name, and they also found very interesting relations:

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So, be careful in trying to use your keywords anywhere else but in the main domain name, as Google seems to be penalizing the excessive use of keywords in the directory names... something that doesn't surprise me, as many spammers use this technique... the problem is that there are also MANY legitimate reasons to use your keywords in the folder structure of your site.

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Tapanti

 

Researching good keywords is very important. If you can find a domain with keywords that you want, that's great. (Generally, the non-hyphened version is preferable. But if you can, get both.)

The next step is of course optimizing your site for those keywords. Finding a keyword that gets searched a thousand times a day is good but not necessarily one that you would want to target.

Why? Because chances are there would be tremendous competition for it in the search engines. You don't want to show up on page 70 of Google. You want to find a keyword that is not only highly searched but has low competition.

For example:

'design' is searched for 41,000 times a day but you'd have to compete with over 220 million sites on the search engines. Not a good idea.

On the other hand, 'web design' is searched over 60,000 times a day and you have about 7 million sites to compete with.

'Web design' would be a better keyword. Well, you get what I mean.
You can brainstorm other better keywords to gain good rankings.

Good luck.
Edwin

 

As far as SEO is concerned I think, I repeat I think that only the title is more important and little else might in page might be.

 

One KWT I am competing for can NOT beat the site that has the KWT in its domain name - even though the competing site has just 2 IBLs, still has a PR of 4 and 0 pages it ranks #1 and in every other sense I totally beat it but am only #4/5... so whether that holds true for a new site I don't know...

 

include your keyword if possible but no keyword in the domain doesn't mean you can't rank well for that keyword.

 

It is best that Keyword should come in domain name, but it should not look spamming.

 

Yes domain matters, a good domain will help you both ways, technically and non technically, for example most of the people through out the world know about .com and they generally use .com after websites. And another thing, domain name provide you safety also.

 

If I don't make mistake, it's very very old thread ... now live again
LOL

 

Having your main targeted keyword in the domain name matters a lot. Your rankings increase because of that and most importantly it lets Google know what your site/ blog is all about and places it in that category.

 

choose a domain name that will allow you to include targeted keyword of your website or search term in your URL.It is best that Keyword should come in domain name, but it should not look spamming.

 

It definitely does not hurt! But it is not everything. Plenty of websites rank number for their keywords without actually having the keyword in their domain name.

its all about the SEO you put into your domain, not the domain name.

 

it definately helps which is a shame. It means that google places more credit on a site just because it has keywords in the domain. This reduces the quality of results in my opninion

 

I think is a great deal find a domain name for your website that includes keywords related to your content/business.
Often google reward that kind of domains, but you need always good content for ranking the Serp in search engine.

 

I'm not sure it matters. I have "Aneurysm" in my domain name and my site does not appear in the search results at all for the keyword Aneurysm. I place fair to good for just about any other related term or phrase. It's very frustrating and nothing I do seems to help.