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Shak
Check your stickymail
>How is your title in relation to his and the keyword. (i.e. location kw appears in title, etc.) Link text to the same title is oft hard to beat
My site is VERY well optimized for this term. I've done everything by the book to do well for this term. In fact, it is THE most critical search term I target.
>Assuming widgetywidgets.com has a great wonderful widgetywidget pic on front, and nothing else, and is the super respected site on widgetywidgets, than it's a great thing it can appear on top.
This is exactly the case here. The company name is "Widgetywidget Productions".
NO, it isn't. The big factor is the anchor text. It's been mentioned before thousands of times. The domain name could be FruitBalls and if the anchors pointing to the site all contain the words "cement bricks" the site can rank well for Cement Bricks.
The only reason the domain name is a factor at all is because people are putting the keywords in the anchor text that happens to reflect the keywords in the domain name.
teeceo.
Nothing new here, though. It's been observed many times.
I thought so too. Try a search for welcome and look at the cached pages.
Now try a search for allinanchor:welcome
Pretty much the same. Off page factors are more important than on page.
Like Netguy, IMHO I think with the same PR that title is the issue in this case.
DMX appears early (first) their title - it appears later in yours. From my experiece the earlier a keyword is in the title, the more importance it is given.
Your title appears to be too long. Choose two of your top keyword phrases at the most per page title.
You can always use a keyword rich URL- www.yourdomain.com/dmx etc.
I think these changes alone will help you position relative to your competition in question.
I would say Google knows how many anchor texts on average equal a site/url or title name and how many are descriptive. They could neutralise any beneficiary effects over sites having simple brand-names if they really wanted to.
That is the extent of the importance of keywords in the domain name though. Look at the title of the thread. The importance of inbound anchor text
Note that it is about the importance of anchor text, not the domain name. What is so confusing about that? It's about the ANCHOR TEXT, not the domain name. If the people linking to it used different ANCHOR TEXT it wouldn't rank nearly as well and the DOMAIN NAME isn't going to help. Period.
You ever have another company just place your link on a site? Many times for me, and you don't get to choose the anchor so a keyword rich URL is very very helpful.
This is a non-commercial site. It just so happens the current domain is keyword2.ws, where keyword2 is the other single keyword that I am shooting for. And, I'm #1 on the SERPs at Google for keyword2 at the moment. Had I known back then what I know now, I'd probably have chosen the domain name keyword1-keyword2.org. However, at this point too late to change anything. So long as I can do reasonably well on page 1 for this keyword is adequate. At this point probably the only thing I can do more SEO-wise is try to get more, and preferably higher PR, inbound links, but this isn't easy to do. At least honestly. I am going to tweak my title to hopefully do better though.
it is always easy to find fault in another...very hard to put yourself on the line and be vulnerable... i wish there were more of you out there, so instead of learning at your expense, we all learn together.
I agree and have we been there before? [webmasterworld.com]
There are very few absolutes. Google Bombing however is a perfect example of why domain names aren't nearly as important as people think they are. Add to that that you can find sites ranked well on Google in which the keywords don't appear on the page at all and the keywords aren't in the domain name. Google uses the inbound anchor text to determine the importance of the page for those keywords used in anchors.
I've optimized many sites that don't have keywords in the domain and I have never run into any problems getting them to rank well. I much prefer brandable domain names to hyphenated keyword domains.
The only benefit I see is that it is easier to get people to use your keywords in anchor text if the keywords are in the domain name. That's it. Then people fail to separate where the benefit in ranking is coming from and assume it is because they have keywords in their domain name.
From there we can move onto the density argument. People fret and worry about getting the perfect keyword density and I know for a fact that density doesn't mean squat. I took some pages that ranked well and stripped the body text from them and replaced it with greeking. Guess what? The ranking didn't slip. Entire pages devoted to lorum ipsem where the keywords were only in the title, header and in anchors pointing to the page. Body density dropped from 7% to 0. No changes in position. Proximity however, from title, to header to anchor remained constant.
If there is any weight given to the domain name it is minimal. The impact comes from people linking to the page using the keywords in the domain.
I'm finished now, after having broken my promise to myself never to debate this issue again as all previous attempt by me and many others have had no impact at all on those people wishing to believe that a keyword domain is the holy grail.
The problem here is that if you own keyword.com then invariably a number of sites WILL LINK TO YOU WITH THAT KEYWORD IN THE ANCHOR TEXT. Your logic about keyword in the domain name not being important is relevant ONLY if by some miracle you can get other sites that link to you use whatever anchor text that you want them to. That doesn't describe the real world for most webmasters.
Well then miracles are occurring every day and all over the web. It's a big world out there and I see links all over the place that are actually descriptive of the page content and ya know what? Those links are MORE effective in terms of conversions that some keyword anchor.
You know what else? A brandable domain name practically forces webmasters to add keywords to the link to ensure that people know what they are linking to.
Please don't make it sound as if it is impossible to get people to link to sites using good anchor text. It happens all the time and certainly isn't a miracle and you are doing people a disservice by making it sound as if they MUST have some horrid keyword-keyword domain name in order to rank well.
In one of my keywords, the top 50 sites all have the keyword in the domain, despite some being poor sites with
little content and few links.
This is for a very competitive term, and some well SEO
sites without keyword in the domain, are unable to break
into the top 50.
TM
I don't know what you guys think, but any one size fits all prescription for the Web is a losing proposition.
Brand v. Keyword-Keyword URL is not about right or wrong. It is about what makes sense for the unique business or site.
If you have a pre-existing brand, or you wish to develop and cultivate customer retention, in the long-run, brand is more important. If your business is driven by new users and new customer aqusition via the search engines- a keyword rich URL is part of a comprehensive mix of tactics you can use effectively in an attempt to be the best via a specific keyword phrase that dominates the search term universe for your product/service.
Right. In particular, I consider for Internet marketing keyword-keyword domain names far superior than brand name in the domain. For example, if I am selling blue widgets, I want blue-widgets.com rather than brandname.com because someone looking to buy blue widgets will see immediately from the domain name I am a seller of what they want. If they don't know what my brand name for blue widgets is already, seeing brandname.com won't appeal to them. Obviously if someone has a well known, pre-existing brand than brandname.com might make more sense.
>In one of my keywords, the top 50 sites all have the keyword in the domain, despite some being poor sites with
little content and few links.
This is for a very competitive term, and some well SEO
sites without keyword in the domain, are unable to break
into the top 50.
I see this repeatedly also. Real world observation seems to be that Google gives a big boost for keyword in domain name. It also makes good sense for Google to give a big algo boost for keywords in domain name. From a webmastering perspective, it would make no sense to choose the name blue-widgets.com unless blue widgets was what the site was about. Remember, Google mainly is interested in *relevant* results. Sites with keywords in domain name tend to be relevant for them.
I'm thinking about changing my title tags to 'Widgeting History in America' just to place 'widgeting' first in the title as that is the single key word I want to optimize the most.
