Everybody wants ranking in the search engines. Here’s something to consider. Search engine experts often disagree on which factors are most important to Google, Yahoo and MSN.

One big question among them deals with whether the domain name of your website has any bearing on search engine rank and positioning. Are the keywords in your domain good? Yahoo, Google and MSN don’t talk about their search engine algorithms, but some research can help.

We may never find out the formulas that the big search engines use, but when you factor out other variables you can predict with fair certainty that domains containing keywords definitely rank higher in the search engines.

You can do some research on this yourself if you want. Just look at the SERPs, then compare the websites in some of the analysis utilities I have mentioned in the blog recently. Also run them through Yahoo and Google link analyzers. When you start to really compare you will see that keywords in the domain carry some weight. Of course these domain names are hard to get hold of and register.

There is also strong belief that some extensions get preference over others, but this is harder to prove and could be related to the website’s age - having the most common name with the most common extension - because we know that age of the website is another factor that carries weight with search engines. So “clothes.com” will have a higher ranking than “theclothingspecialist.tv”, all things being equal.

Domain name alone cannot push the webpage to #1, but it doesn’t hurt. In fact this parallels my complaint that the conciseness and the specificity of a website is often overlooked by search engines. But, in the most obvious case of Title - conciseness IS recognized. (Let’s hope it’s contagious to the rest of the pages, spiders, and human reviewers)

Bottom Line: Buy the most concise keyword domain name and extension available.

Takin’ It to the Streets,
Arthur Browning