How important is domain name for SEO

[Slater]

How much impact do the keywords in a domain name help with SEO ?

My employer has asked me to see if there is any way we can drive more traffic to the company website, we've recently had the website redone and it looks good and is showing a Google PR of 4 although using the google link: search it's showing no other sites linking to it

I've just registered some keyword rich domain names which are relevant to our business:

it-support .org.uk
it-security .org.uk

Would I be best just forwarding these to the relevant pages on the exisitng site or creating a couple of mini sites that have a link to our main web site ?

Any help appreciated.

Mark.

 

[BFTUK]

For a more accurate assessment of inbound links use the linkdomain: command in Yahoo.

As for keywords in domain names, they are very powerful, creating a 5-10 page mini site around each subject is the way to go and then 'feed' traffic through to the main site using banners or text links etc.

 

[stender]

Agree with Ash. Google link check is crap imho.

use http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

 

[paul]

Mark

Keyword domains are great for exact matches but not much help for anything else.

If you had domainnames.co.uk or domainnames.org.uk it would be fairly easy to get on the first page of Google for the term 'domain names', however, it would not help you much if you wanted to score for 'website names' or 'internet domains' etc..

Don't expect them to get there automatically tho, you will still have to do some link building work just not as much.

Another thing to think about is, if a site has excessive amounts of links all with the same link text it will get punished by the search engines, however, if that link text is the exact match for the domain name it would be hard for search engines to penalise a site for this. I believe search engines allow for this in their algos.

 

[Slater]

Thanks for the advice guys, see if i can earn some brownie points at work

Mark.

 

[stevebrowne]

Domain names with keywords are good for Google at the moment. It seems to treat them very well indeed. Yahoo and Live are either very slow at updating their index, or they don't hold as much weight with them.

 

[paul]

Domain names with keywords are good for Google at the moment......Live are either very slow at updating their index, or they don't hold as much weight with them.

You are joking right

domains
names
websites
insurance
poker
broadband
internet
affiliate
software
cars
vans
bingo
games

etc, etc....

As you can see it doesn't have to be .co.uk or .com, number 1 for software is a .plc.uk and for affiliate it is a .me.uk

 

[i4v.net]

You are joking right

domains
names
websites
insurance
poker
broadband
internet
affiliate
software
cars
vans
bingo
games

etc, etc....

As you can see it doesn't have to be .co.uk or .com, number 1 for software is a .plc.uk and for affiliate it is a .me.uk

paul - you have just made me realise what an utter domaining spastic i am..

thx for the wakeup call.

 

[stevebrowne]

You are joking right

etc, etc....

As you can see it doesn't have to be .co.uk or .com, number 1 for software is a .plc.uk and for affiliate it is a .me.uk

No, as I said, "Live are either very slow at updating their index or". Google have pushed a number of new KW domains to the first page within days for me recently (not for really competed stuff of course), whereas Live hasn't noticed yet.

eg:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=active&q=generate+power&btnG=Search&meta=

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=active&q=travel+wimbledon&meta=

I guess Google is just more keen on them.

 

[paul]

...or they don't hold as much weight with them.

I thought you meant they did not work so well in Live, just pointing out they work best there

 

[Maccke]

Instead of focusing on many micro sites, I'd recommend to make 1-3 sites really good and make them rank.

Short descriptive domains can be really good for SEO, due to many factors..

 

[stevebrowne]

live and yahoo have both updated now, leaving some of my domains in very nice positions ;-)