Will Keywords in Your Domain Help Your SEO?
Posted by brendensimmons | Posted in Uncategorized | Posted on 25-11-2009-05-2008
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By: Cade Lee
There is much talk about "keyword-rich domains" in the SEO world, especially over the last several months and I though it important to discussa couple of things to be wary of when going out and spending a fortune on domains that seem like they might make sense for your business. I should begin with what a “Keyword-Rich” domain is for those that are new to this and have never heard the term before. A “Keyword-Rich” Domain is simply a domain name containing the major keywords relevant to the site and SEO campaign that you are targeting. So as an example, in our industry, many of the SEO Professionals in Denver target the keyword “Denver SEO“. If you will go to Google and actually search for the keyword "Denver SEO" you will notice that www.denverseo.net is the 5th result. By doing a little more research on this site, you will see that this site has a PR of 3 compared to many of it’s competitors who have earned a page rank of 4 or higher. This domain does have some age as it was created on May 03, 2006 so it is around 3 ½ years old. The site is well established and has many backlinks, but not compared to competing sites. When we compare this to some of the other competing websites that are ranked just below this website like www.hyperdogmedia.com, which has a PR 4, 2 backward links according to Google and according to our research this domain has well over 2085 backlinks. So how is it that a site like Hyperdog’s is ranked below DenverSeo.net? According to some SEO professionals it would be due to the “exact match bonus”. There are many other factors that go into the rankings, but this is definitely a factor as it has been discussed by many internet marketing professionals.
According to some very savvy at least in my opinion internet marketing pros, an exact match bonus is awarded for just that, an exact match. Having a domain that contains most the keywords plus some stop words would mean less of a bonus or none at all. So utilizing dashes in between keywords, stop words or other characters tends to penalize any kind of exact match bonus you might have received. If we go back to our original search, you will notice that many domains rank higher for the keyword “Denver SEO” than www.denverseo.net, so with hard work and useful content it is definitely possible to outrank keyword rich domains. Another example of this is the keyword “SEO” which is a very competitive keyword with well over 190,000,000 results. You will notice that www.seobook.com outranks www.seo.com by two positions. Once again this comes down to content, and site popularity. While keyword rich domains are absolutely beneficial, it does not seem to be the most important factor in obtaining a solid position on page one of Google in the SERPs for the keywords that you are targeting. As a matter of fact, we have seen clients that have a portfolio of keyword rich domains only to have those domains not even rank. It is a fact that keyword rich domains can be a benefit if used properly.
