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The Last Issue:
03.12.04
Does a URL matter?
Often, we are asked which domain names would work better for search engines. If they buy a domain name with keywords in it, will the web site have a better search engine ranking? The answer is Yes and No.
Yes, it seems like if a domain includes keywords, then it will be easier to find in search engines. Many SEO experts deny it, but according to my observations, it is true. Let's experiment:
Go to Google.com and search for "IT" (IT stands for Information Technologies). Skip the first page, because the top 10 results have "IT" either in title or description (notice that keywords in the Title and Description weigh more than in a domain name!!!). Second page is more significant for us in this experiment. Web sites 11-18 don’t have anything to do with Information Technologies, but they have the extension "it" in their URLs: www.corriere.it, www.repubblica.it, it.yahoo.com, www.google.it, www.alitalia.it, etc. These are Italian web sites!
Want more? Now search for "Go" and look at the result. Look at the first 10 pages (you can look further, but 10 pages are enough to prove my point). You will find a lot of Japanese web sites. Since they are written completely in Japanese characters, there is no English word "go" anywhere on them. But they all have "go" in their URLs – because Japanese extension is ".go.jp".
We see that a keyword in your URL helps. But it is also important how you use it. If you sell credit card processors, such domain names as buyvisamastercardterminals.com or visaandmastercardsignup.com won't help you. For people, they are too long and difficult to remember. For search engine spiders – they are NOT keyword-rich, because a spider can’t divide the long URL into several words like humans can. For a search engine spider, "buyvisamastercardterminals" is just one senseless word.
But if we turn "buyvisamastercardterminals.com" into "buy-visa-mastercard-terminals.com" – a search engine spider starts seeing 5 separate words in this URL: buy, visa, mastercard, terminals and com.
Now let's search for "fast merchant account". www.fast-merchant-account.com comes up #1 and #2 in the search result. Or, search for "find web designer". Who is #1? www.1234-find-web-designers.org
But by picking a keyword-rich domain, it seems some people don’t know when to stop. By trying to have an "easy-to-find" web site, people start buying domains with two or more hyphens between words (just because domains with one hyphen are already taken):
www.colorado-springs--real-estate.com
www.web--design.com
www.web---design.com
www.web----design.com
Don't these domains look like monsters to you?
Choosing a domain, please remember that there are no shortcuts to high ranking. If ranking depended just on a keyword rich URL, it would be too easy. Search engine algorithms are much more complicated. How many pages your web site has, how many words on a page, density of keywords within a page, headlines, how many other web sites link to yours, how important are those web sites which link to yours – these and much more are taken into account.
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