How important is it to have your targeted keywords in your domain name? For example if you're making a parishilton site and you manage to get the domain, parishilton dot com. How much of an effect will it have on your SERP?
According to SEOMOZ : http://www.seomoz.org/articles/search-ranking-factors.php "Slight Importance These factors carry some impact on rankings and could be important when in a highly competitive area." I feel it has more than a slight importance.
It depends on the search engines. From my experience, MSN focus a lot on domain names. However, Google take it as a slight addon on top of its heavy page importance factor.
Same here - and I believe as the search engines advance, keywords in domains will only be more valuable.
Very important I would have it no other way. I alway llokk to have one or two keywords in the domain name.
If your site is going to be competing in a very competitive field, it helps a lot. I have sites that are nothing but keywords, such as product-a-reviews, etc. Works great and ranks high in the SERPs despite the high competition for "product a reviews" search phrases.
It is a very important factor to decide who will be ranked at the top if the competitors are at par with you in all the other on and offpage optimization factors. But it is not necessary that you will rank at the top by just putting the keyword in a domain name if the keyword is already competitive.
in google slight . However all the top ranking sites in msn have keyword rich url. When making a site think beyond google also.
All else being equal, keywords in the domain name will put you at the top of the SERPs. On the other hand, if everything is not equal, then it's not a strong enough factor to worry about.
From my experience it doesn’t help much. I have a blog that uses keywords in the domain and I don’t rank that well on searches using those words.
My experience is that it helps a lot. I know about one page sites with the keyword in their domain and they rank as nr 1 in google. But I wouldn't over do it if was you.
Do you think a separator is better or worse than just joining the terms together to make the domain name? All the THIS-TOPIC-WEBSITE.com sites seem to be advertising related so it would make sense if google were to punish them.