how much importance is weighed on having your keywords in your website address?

[simpleonline1234]

My web page titles have the high searched for keywords as the actual title so I was wondering if the homepage address really needed to also have the keywords within the address? Why is that so?

[Damien Roche]

>> I removed misinformation.

EDIT:

to clarify, the URL holds weight, and yes, the domain name is obviously part of that. BUT, if you search for any competitive term, you'll likely see quite a few sites in the top 10 which don't have the keyword or any of the keywords in the actual domain name.

Yes, they are likely in the url, but not necessarily the domain name.

[SeanSupplee]

Domain with your keyword in it is one of the highest weighted things towards getting your site ranked for it.

With all honestly all on page factors outweigh your off page factors. You could easly rank for a keyword if you have all the on page factors such as "dog training" dogtraining.com , within your site having this keyword spread around and then LSI keywords to back up your main key word. If you get all that done right you don't even need off page factors such as back linking.

[imageworx]

I agree... I believe it carries a lot of weight. I took a niche site and backlinked 4 different associated key words with it including the keyword the site is named after. After one week the keyword that the sites named after is ranked at 15 the other 3 keywords which are similar in competition strength, number of competing sites etc aren't in the top 100.

[thenewevilisgood]

I strongly believe and advocate constantly building backlinks to a site for reputation, deep spidering and indexing, and increasing the frequency of spider visits, which gets pages indexed faster and ranked faster.

But Sean is right in what he says about the weight of keywords in the URL, but I'll stand by that links trump onpage page factors anytime.

But when it comes down to it, most people don't have a site with authority or any pagerank which really helps in getting pages ranked by themselves.

So any website promotion done without backlink support is like a table without legs.

[LilBlackDress]

I agree having your keywords in your domain name makes it much easier and I learned that the hard way.
One of my domains ranks above millions of other sites right now including the Mayo Clinic with little backlinking and I know it is because of my keywords.

That is not to say you cant get ranked without em..but it sure makes it easier.

[Mike Anthony]

I've seen extremely good evidence that having the keywords in the URl is helpful but I don't think it has to be in the domain name itself. That helps no doubt but plenty of sites rank well without it in the domain name.

[jimbo999]

Here is the real deal. It is only one factor out of many that is considered, and it is not weighted, but just assigned a value. What i mean is this:
If you are in a non competitive keyword, having the kw in your domain alone can get you to rank in google.
If you are trying to rank for a keyword that requires 10,000 links to get on the top page, then at that point the kw in the domain is not at all important because the other factors take over.

[Intrepreneur]

Originally Posted by jimbo999

Here is the real deal. It is only one factor out of many that is considered, and it is not weighted, but just assigned a value. What i mean is this:
If you are in a non competitive keyword, having the kw in your domain alone can get you to rank in google.
If you are trying to rank for a keyword that requires 10,000 links to get on the top page, then at that point the kw in the domain is not at all important because the other factors take over.

Super explanation. Good work.

[Bob Monie]

Here is my theory on keywords in domain names i posted the other day in the thred Inverted domain names . How do Google see it ?

Google puts a HUGE amount of ranking weight on exact match domain names. This is simply due to Google thinking that an exact match domain is either a brand or main authority in the subject.

Example of Brand name "cocacola.com" & "colacoca.com", if a search was done for "Coca Cola", Google will rank the exact match cocacola.com domain with little to no SEO while colacoca.com will need a lot more optimization to even come close.

When you think about it, most offline companies and small local businesses have very poor SEOed websites. A high percentage dont even have their business brand name in their site title and zero backlinks. But then they still manage to rank above the fold when people search their business name in Google due to their branded domain name.

If Google didn't put this much weight on exact match domain names, the search results would be a lot dirtier and chaotic. For example, local search results will be dominated by authority business listings rather than the business websites them selfs.

A great example of exact match domain name power is in generic geo terms. E.g. "melbournedentist.com" ranks no.1 with zero backlinks for Melbourne Dentist while "dentistmelbourne.com" ranks no.34 with 8 backlinks for the same search term.

its interesting to note that local geo search terms like "Dentist Melbourne" gets around 5 times the search volume as "Melbourne Dentist". Obviously this is due to people forgetting to localize their search at the beginning then adding the geo after.
Obviously GeoService.com domains sound better and are good for branding but ranking fast using ServiceGeo.com for the higher search volume keywords are they way to go.
But then again it all depends on what you plan to do with the domain and what service you are targeting. Get both if you can.

Domains still carry plenty of weight when ranking for inverted keywords. From my experience and testing and IMO its only around 60% of the exact match weight. Domains that contain the targeted keywords + 2 or more characters only carry around 30% of the exact match weight, while domains that contain none of the targeted keyword carry 0% of the exact match weight.

So in conclusion, I think "toybuy.com" only has around %60 of the ranking power compared to "buytoy.com" for the search term "Buy Toy". Vis verse for the inverted search term.