yes domain name is more and more effect on site ranking and SERP. If you have domain like xyz and your keywords also xyz, buy xyz so purchse domain www.xyz.com or www.buyxyz.com so it more helpful and beneficial for you
Register "you-long-keyword.com" if you want a quick top rank in Yahoo. Google, although considers the url, doesn't pay too much attention, therefore a nicely optimized old "whatever.com" will always outrank a brand new "you-long-keyword.com" I agree. Register .co.tk, co.cc or .info if you want to be considered a spammer LOL
To a degree I echo tankard, correctly SEO'd sites can and will outrank an exact domain. BUT I do think Google pay a lot of attention to exact domains. I have been creating niche adsense/amazon sites for awhile now and it is very easy to rank in the top 10 for a keyword when you have the EXACT domain - whether it is .com/net/org etc hasn't mattered in my experience. It gets harder to auto rank without SEO efforts the more you add. For example adding hyphens between the keywords "key-word.com" makes it far harder to rank quickly than keyword.com It is not essential for exact domains as SEO will play a part, a solid backlinking strategy coupled with top quality on page SEO will get you outranking exact domains most of the time. But if both were to have exactly the same strategy then the exact domain would win 99% of the time.
I agree completely with the above reply. Exact domains are great for ranking but only coupled with SEO as you will get outranked by other domains with SEO.
Same opinion as @Nick here. Exact domain names rank way better than xxx-xxx.com. I dont think anyone uses .co.tk/.co.cc any more.
Domain names definitely effect SERPs but directories/sub-folder can also be used to place keywords In my opinion, it mostly depends on your SEO strategy to stay on top search engine ranking.
It's unfair as my competitor has the exact keyword in his name and has outranked me even though the site has a lower page rank, lower Alexa, less unique content. I have to work much harder on my SEO. I have noticed that keywords in sub folder do help though...
Domain names do have some relevance to SEO, but not in the way you think. It's all about the links pointing to your site and the fact that people who want to talk about a site will post the domain, which may just contain relevant keywords- that's all. Google, Yahoo, MSN don't take a domain name into account when ranking a site. As for .com, .net etc, they don't rank better than .co.uk etc. If you're searching google.com, they rank better. Do a non geographic search it ranks better, but chances are whoever's looking for a specific site will do a geographic search
and to be perfectly honest with you, once you've done all you can with the SEO on a site, you'll find the only competitors beating you are those with an older domain .
If that were the case how come exact domains end up ranking with next to no backlinking? As in one or 2 backlinks. Onpage SEO can only get you so far
I agree with most of what was said before. I think it's important to have a .com and fewer "-" for user credibility. As said before, when trying to rank for longtail keywords, the domain can help. Whether you have a domain that has the keyword you are targeting or not, nothing beats correct onpage SEO coupled with proper backlinking and offpage SEO. Like everyone has said though, the domain does affect things, but it is not the most important aspect of SEO.
RichardTJ touched on the main reason keywords in a domain name help, simply because a lot of time you will get a link back using the actual domain name. I am also starting to believe that Google might be giving some extra attention to domain names that have keywords directly related to the websites content. With the large influx of folks buying dropped domains in the past couple of years it would make sense that google gave more weight to a games site called GamePlayersWorld.com than to a games site on some dropped domain called DemocratsGo2007.com