Should a Domain Name Contain Your Keywords

I’m playing devils advocate today. I haven’t had a lot of time to dedicate to my blog lately having had numerous other projects taking up my time. So I was concerned that all of the work I did with it would have seen slippage on Google for some of the posts. Not so! On checking out a few… I saw that the whole site is indexed and some of the articles rank as well as they ever did. I was surprised because nothing new has been posted for four months of so.

As I was analyzing things something struck me. We are told by SEO experts that you must have your keywords in your domain name. If that is crucial why is it that for the term ‘internet marketing’ when searched for on Google, sees only one domain in the top 10 that has those words in the actual domain?

The image below is taken from the utterly brilliant Market Samuri

This image shows the top ten competing sites for a phrase in this case ‘internet marketing’. The fouth site has it in the URL as you can see from the area I highlighted, but none of the others do. In fact out of the top 50 sites for this phrase only a handful have the phrase in the top level domain.

A a side note I was actually shocked to see just how few of the top sites actually apply SEO techniques that are recognized to help positioning. You can see that in the other columns. A ‘Y’ means they have that element of SEO covered an ‘N’ means they don’t! I was expecting to see a sea of red!

Anyway my point is this my site is my name www.lynneivatt.com it means nothing from an SEO point of view to anything, yet I can get a 4th position on google for broad match microsoft oci tool and 130,000 competing pages ! My article on the Vista & AVG conflict is number 7 of 162,000 competing results.

I haven’t promoted these articles the only thing is they are in the url as a file name and the description. They are not in the domain but they are part of the make-up of the URL. Mhhh!

So is it really as vital as we think that the keywords should be in the domain? Apparently not in these circumstances.

On the flip side I have a site that I sell physical products from that I have optimized the heck out of and got my keywords in the domain. Yet it isn’t ranking as well as i would have hoped on Google considering the SEO that has been done to it. On Yahoo and MSN I am number 1 and have been for months!

My conclusion is that the less I try the better my rankings are on Google! I don’t really do keyword research for the articles I write on here yet some of them are right up there on Google with a domain name that isn’t optimized! Food for thought, but it shows you can rank well if your domain isn’t optimized for your keywords!

I think I know what the answer is but I need to look into it more. Check back for my next post when I will look at exactly how I’m getting these rankings.

Related posts:

1. Domain Name Extensions The Only 3 For Me!
2. Domain Names Do They Say What You Think They Do!