rencke - 2:57 pm on Sep 21, 2000 (gmt 0)

This summer, I have been analyzing eight international sites kept by a client, both .com and .nation

Those that had the url formed like:
FrequentKeyword1-FrequentKeyword2.com or .nation had absolutely fantastic rankings in major search engines.

The best one had one of those ridiculous "Welcome! Click here to enter"-pages where the code broke every single SEO rule. Poor title, no description, no keywords, no header, no keywords in text or link text, no img alt:s, no nothing.

That page had 7 #1 placements and another 22 page one placements for FrequentKeyword1 involving engines like AltaVista, Fast, AOL, Direct Hit, Excite, GoTo, HotBot, iWon, LookSmart, Lycos, MSN, Netscape (ODP), Northern Light and Yahoo.

The client had other sites, whose url:s were formed in the same way, and they too had faboulous rankings, in spite of clear deficiensies in the code.

From this experience, and some systematic research to verify the finding, I have concluded that keywords in url play a major role these days.