Domain Importance

[reefs]

Can any one shead any light on whether your domain has to contain any part of the keyword you are targeting. Is it better to have all the domain words the same or part, or is it actually not crucial to have the same domain as keyword?

[edited by: Marcia at 5:32 pm (utc) on Mar. 4, 2004]
[edit reason] No urls or keywords, please. [/edit]

[ThomasB]

In the past it was a small plus to have keyword.tld as your URL. But in the recent days I think that's no more a big factor if you want to get to the top of the serps. But because of the keyword in the domain name it might be useful for linking as many people use "keyword.tld" as linktext, which is very important these days.

[reefs]

sorry, what is .tld?

[dauction]

I strongly believe that Keyword domain is a variable in most SE alogo's, granted it is only one variable of possibly 100's , just a matter of how much weight that varibale is given at any one time in the algo..IMO

But of more importance in Keyword domain is simply visibility.. searcher looking for keyword..goes to SE types in Keywords.. 20 results pop up ...you domain is an exact kewyord match .. higher percentage of click throughs.. IME (In My experiance)

[isugari]

Hi reefs,

tld = top level domain

From my experience, the domain name has some slight weight on ranking, but only very slight. So if you can get a domain name with your primary keyword phrase in it, it's fine, but if not, it's fine as well. Avoid getting one of those really long domain names with your keywords in it, just for the sake of having keywords in the domain name. Even if you don't have your keyword in the domain name, you can still good search engine listings, since there are still ways to squeeze in a keyword when you name your folders or filenames, and of course, ultimately, what will really decide things with search engines is how relevant your site is for an intended user.

Hope that helps,

Katherine

[paybacksa]

Of 100 links to my site, I'd say 80 were NOT negotiated by me, and all of those use only my domain name as the link text, alt text, and href value.

One side effect of having a domain name like mechanized-widgets-NY.com is that people linking to your site will always put keywords into the link text.

[internetheaven]

Never thought of that one paybacksa, cheers.

For about 6 months now my stats have shown that my domains with keywords in the domain on Google were slowly being overtaken by my domains with no keywords in the domain but in the file name. (optimization, linking and pagerank and practically identical)

On Yahoo (since the index switch) I've noticed the opposite.

[steveb]

It's defintely much better to have the keyword in your domain name. With Google there doesn't seem to be much difference between having keyword in domain name or in the url (like site.com/keyword/) but obviously for the root domain the domain name is the only thing possible. I agree also that Yahoo values keyword in domain name moreso than elsewhere in the URL string.

[conroy]

In terms of SE ranking value a domain name with keywords in it is better. Once you start talking about branding, user loyalty, return visitors etc. then it is not so clear as to which would be better.

Bottom line is that many extremely competitive areas have sites that rank high with keywords in their domain name and ones that don't.