Advanced SEO: Non-Bolded Keywords Don't Count for Exact Match?

[ViperChill]

So I've just posted on my blog about the site I'm building, which is part of a 12-month case study to build a $1M website.

You can find the link here: viperchill.com/exact-match-keyphrase/

What I wanted to discuss though was this section of the post:

Originally Posted by ViperChill

If you can get an exact-match .com domain name for your keyphrase, then it’s usually much easier to rank in search engines like Google. Thanks to my own .com, I was number one in Yahoo within a few weeks, and ranking highly in Bing. I’ve made some sales from this traffic, but nothing to brag about.


My lack of exact match love is because my keyphrase has the words ‘how to‘ in it. I assumed that they would be counted as part of an exact-match phrase, but I don’t think they are. I mainly think this because the word ‘how to‘ is never bolded in a URL in Google search results. Since it isn’t in bold, I don’t think it’s being counted in the domain.
On top of that, I don’t think I’m getting the rankings I would have if the exact-match domain was giving me some kind of bonus.

Speaking to friends, it may be the case that the words aren't being counted, or it may just not be bolding them for usability reasons, but still counting it.


What do you think?

[Chris The Traffic Blogger]

There are certain words which google ingores when providing search results, and this list changes from quarter to quarter. I was under the impression that 'how to' was not in this list, and after a few searches in google it looks like it's still an ok keyword phrase.

[ViperChill]

Originally Posted by Chris The Traffic Blogger

There are certain words which google ingores when providing search results, and this list changes from quarter to quarter. I was under the impression that 'how to' was not in this list, and after a few searches in google it looks like it's still an ok keyword phrase.

Can you give an example?