I’m wondering if search engines like seeing major keywords in the domain name itself? For example, if someone is searching for rock singers would a domain name like www/rocksingers.org rank better than www.musicrus.com for the same website.
If so, would a .com rank better than a .us or .org for the same domain name. For example, Would www.rocksingers.com rank better than www.rocksingers.us or www.rocksingers.org?
Not just by having the those keywords in the domain.
If EVERYTHING else was equal (number of backlinks, quality of backlinks, same anchor text in backlinks etc etc etc) then maybe the keyworded domain will out-perform the non-keyworded URL.
Remember SEO is done at a page level - not a site level. So you can still capture those keywords in the whole URL e.g. www.musicrus.com/rock-singers
No - this has been stated to have no ranking impact.
Its an advantage only to have the keyword in the domain, but its not a must one factor.
Have you considered using hyphens in your domain? The hyphen will help search engines discern the keywords.
Here are a couple articles about choosing a domain you may find useful -
How to Choose a Domain I - http://www.small-business-software.net/how-to-choose-a-domain-part-1.htm
How to Choose a Domain II - http://www.small-business-software.net/how-to-choose-a-domain-part-2.htm
Imo, it’s not that the SE’s like keyword stuffed domain names, but rather, many
webmasters that link to a site do so with the domain name rather than a descriptive
phrase or “click here”, therefore, the site gets it’s keywords in the anchored text.
THAT is what the SEs like.
Bompa
it really depends… domain is just one factor… SEO really helps to attain that…
Is this just a way to link drop without needing a signature?
Yah - good spotting - the carefully constructed thread title is sometimes a giveaway…
Ok… I have done a lot of research on this. I would say that you have a 75% greater chance on being ranked high in google if your main keyword is in the URL. If your main keyword is listed in your Title & URL. You will surely be ranked high in small niche sites.
If your trying to rank high with a highly competitive keyword, then I would say that this wouldn’t matter that much. It’s still a good idea to do so in any case.
Although important, just utilizing keywords within your domain name won’t get you ranked high…that requires off-page factors like link quality, number of links, and one-way links.
Yes you are right search engine give more weightage to the site using keyword in the domain rank and it rank better, at the best of my knowledge priority are as .com> .org> .us
I think it does, just like it is important to have static urls. They aren’t as strong as they used to be
A prime example of where trying to help search engines will hinder your users.
Search engines may pay a minute amount of attention to the words that make up your URL, but they really aren’t all that bothered. They certainly won’t care about the difference between several-important-words.com and severalimportantwords.com. The main reason for using human readable URLs is so that people scanning the SERPs get a better feel about your website, and also can remember or construct URLs themselves.
It is well established that people don’t cope well with hyphens. While a lot of your traffic will come from search engines, a lot should also come from direct addressing, and if you want that, you need to make the domain, folder and page names easy to remember and easy to type. That means all lower-case, no hyphens, no punctuation, and - unless you are a global brand - no kool misspellingz.
It also means that you should try to get a unique domain name. If you go for several-important-words.com but someone has already registered severalimportantwords.com then they are likely to get a large chunk of your traffic, both from direct addressing and from people googling the domain name (which a lot of people do). Likewise if there is already a .com, .net, .biz etc version of the domain registered, it’s best to avoid using the same domain name as someone else with a different TLD, because you could end up losing a lot of traffic to them, and if you are in direct competition then you could find yourself in legal trouble.
The presence of keyword in the URL is good but the no of back links and keyword density in the content does plays an important role and hence this is not the only factor which constitutes for a high rank in SERP.
I like this, good post. Hope the OP read it.
Thanks fo all who have replied, and special thanks to Steve D