keywords in url- how much does it help?

[knoxy]

hi guys

Can anyone help me out here? How important are domain names which incorporate keywords? Do they help at all and if so which engines support this.

Any help appreciated

[2_much]

Hi Knoxy,

Recently, I read somewhere that keywords in the URL give your pages a slight boost, but not very significant. I belive someone posted this recently, but I can't seem to find the exact post.
My experience with this has been that there is a slight boost, especially with keywords that are not very popular or competitive. However, if you are dealing with competitive keywords, the boost is not significant.
If you are going to use keywords in the URL's, try using the same title...that should give you additional relevancy points.
The engines where I've seen this most are Google, Altavista and Inktomi.

[knoxy]

2_much

Thanks a lot for the advice. I had the same gut feeling but it is nice to get the view of a respected player.

[rencke]

I beg to differ politely. If url=title the boost can take you straight to the top, or the first page at least. Here is something for you to analyze:

[altavista.com...]
and
[alltheweb.com...]
and
[search.msn.de...]

Notice, that the search was only for the first of the keywords in the url and in the title.

[2_much]

I agree with you Rencke, this can be quite a significant boost, and it CAN take you to the top...especially if the keywords are not competitive...that's what I was trying to say at the end of my post...
however, this is not always the case with competitive keywords...especially if your keyword is a word and not a phrase...if you are dealing with phrases, you get more of a boost...
random example:
[google.com...]

I've been testing this and have gotten some good results...the most consistent trend I've seen is keyword in URL and title in less competitive phrases WILL result in top 10 rankings, especially if your pages are optimized and SE friendly.

[rencke]

How would you define competitive keywords? On a global scale involving all langauges I would say anything in the top 30.000 or more, but in one single language i.e. English? Top 1000? 2000? 3000?

I used my quickie acid test, because I know by heart what sites should be on the first page. The English version "Sweden" normally ranks between 2000 and 3000 depending on the time of year (vacation planning).

I don't know how frequent the German version that I used would be, but at a guess perhaps around 2000 for searches in German.

I agree 2_much, that if you can pinpoint the best phrase, rather than just the word, you'll make it straight to #1. No question about it.

But the point I was trying to make was, that you can make it with a two kwd phrase if they search for kwd1. And that opens infinite possibillities as far as hyphenated domain names are concerned. Almost everything is still available for a mere 15 dollars.

[Brett_Tabke]

The more obscure the keyword, the more the boost. Common keywords, it won't help too much since there are so many domains with the keyword in it. It is also fairly SE specific (works on alta/google, don't do much on Ink etc).