Does having a word in your domain matter or help?

[purplefrog]

There are lots of myths out there when in comes to SEO...I'm not telling you anything you don't know.

One thing I see is people putting certain words in their domain names, particularly region or city names.

For instance, if you live in Super City, I see people getting things like supercityrealtor.com or supercitywidgetmaker.com

Does this really help in search engine results if someone were searching for, say, a realtor in Super City? Is a site with that word in the domain necessarily going to come up higher in the search engines just because it contains the word as part of the domain?

I'd love some clarification on this!

Thanks

[Billyray]

I have a domain: word1word2word3.com that ranks 5 in my local Google for: word1 word2 word3.

• It has no inbound links and never has
• all other top 10 serp results are PR 3 - 7 as opposed to mine which is PR0
• it has "word1 word2 word3" in the title and once in text on the page
• its a one page site with only 36 words and 3 outbound links to topic related sites
• its also not hosted on my continent
• It only ranks for word1 word2 word3

I believe it ranks because of the search phrase in the domain.

IMHO i would definitely grab supercityrealtor etc. Plus you will get type ins to some degree.

[Dan Schulz]

Yes, it can. Especially when you're using modifiers such as local search terms (like chicagowidgets.com for example), since it helps the search engines "identify" (or "flag") the domain as being relevant to the content that (should) be on the site.

That's just the short (and I do mean short) version, though. I'm sure Chris (or someone else) will go into more detail.

[mobilebadboy]

It can always help, but I've seen it to be less necessary.

I have domains that have nothing to do with the subject of the website, but the content for the website is built enough around the subject that it ranks just fine for what I'm wanting to rank for.

You could own woopdedoo.com and build strong content site around cocker spaniels and do good. Would owning cockerspaniels.com be a plus? I'm sure it would, but if you have enough quality cocker spaniel content, then I can't see why you can't do just as good.

As was said, type-ins would be the down fall. Quite a few people might type in cockerspaniels.com instead of searching for 'cocker spaniels'.

I used to believe I HAD to have the keywords in the domain, til I proved myself wrong.

[purplefrog]

Very helpful. Thank you.

mobilebadboy, I hear what you're saying and I know that it's the case. Content first, then maybe perhaps if a keyword is in the domain name, an extra plus.

I'm busy reading here. My goal is to be really good at SEO. It's a challenge weeding through fact and fiction, but the more I learn, the more it seems that there are perhaps 10 main things that you can do that will cover 99% of SEO.

[Chris]

On this site is whole article about keyword rich domains, and I go into it in depth, but to sum up here.

the #2 way to link to a page is with the url (#1 is with the page's title).

http://www.websitepublisher.net

See, that is a URL link. What keywords do I have? "http www website publisher net"

So I've gotten keyword rich links. If my domain was "purplepanda.com" I'd not be getting the keywords of "Website" and "publisher"

Fun test: http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...280US280&q=www

Why is Yahoo first?

[Chris]

I'm busy reading here. My goal is to be really good at SEO. It's a challenge weeding through fact and fiction, but the more I learn, the more it seems that there are perhaps 10 main things that you can do that will cover 99% of SEO.

This is true, by the way, most of it is pretty basic, just doing a few simple things well.

And welcome to the forum, its nice to have a non-spammer join (don't prove me wrong).

[purplefrog]

Thanks Chris!

I'm definitely not a spammer. I'm a sponge for information though.

I've done my share of reading over many years about SEO, tried another forum (left because of the rude "SEO guru" running it) and am now just trying to finally break it down to all the basics and get good at it.

Thanks for a great site and forum.

Off to read now....

[MissMandy]

On this site is whole article about keyword rich domains, and I go into it in depth, but to sum up here.

the #2 way to link to a page is with the url (#1 is with the page's title).

http://www.websitepublisher.net

See, that is a URL link. What keywords do I have? "http www website publisher net"

So I've gotten keyword rich links. If my domain was "purplepanda.com" I'd not be getting the keywords of "Website" and "publisher"

Fun test: http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...280US280&q=www

Why is Yahoo first?

Good question Chris, why is yahoo showing top position for www? Was it some sort of google bomb type thing?

[Chris]

They have a ton of links pointing to them like

http://www.yahoo.com

Giving them a lot of anchor text with WWW in it.