Domain Names: Are They Are Important To SEO?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, July 17, 2008

How important is your domain name when it comes to search engine optimization? I read a variety of views on this topic; some proclaiming that you must have a keyword in your domain name whilst others claim it’s all irrelevant.

On a scale of 1 to 10, domain names probably rank around 2 or 3 for importance in SEO, maybe even less. There are always two aspects to any activity involving your web pages and search engine optimization. Will help your site and will it harm your site. We always seem to concentrate on the former and not the later.

Having a keyword in your domain name wont harm your ranking efforts. The question then remains whether or not it will harm your traffic, branding or reputation.

The longer the domain name, the harder it is to brand and get instant recognition. However, given the age of link clinking, most people are never aware of the domain name unless they look for it. Whether it is in search results, social media, or advertising, your site is only a click away. Search engine marketing strategies are aimed at getting pages to rank highly, not sites.

In the bigger picture, domain names are not that relevant to SEO. They may help in situations where your page is closely ranked with another on - the small fraction of leverage that domain name gives to your rankings may help push your page ahead of theirs.

Domain names should be selected for reasons other than SEO. Can you brand that name? Can the name be associated to your niche? If you look around the web, most well known big name sites are not keyword domain names - yet they succeed and rank well - in fact some domain names have become keywords for everyone else, Google, StumbleUpon, Digg, I could go on.

Are domain names important to search engine optimization strategies? Yes, depending on your business model.

Category: SEO

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4 Comments

Comment by Tim Watson

Made Saturday, 19 of July , 2008 at 1:21 pm

Great information Nick! I found this searching yahoo, and your site was #1 out of 191 million results for search engine optimization, I’ll pay attention!

Tim

Comment by Colin

Made Monday, 11 of August , 2008 at 2:35 am

The SEO benefit of a keyword in your domain name comes more from links than from the domain itself. Having a keyword in the domain name (and name of your site) encourages automatic placement of that keyword in links to your site when people link to your site by the domain name.

Great for some situations, but as you say, having a keyword-filled domain probably hurts more than it helps if the domain name is too long, awkward or difficult to remember.

Comment by namecritic

Made Tuesday, 12 of August , 2008 at 12:04 am

I think I’d bump the importance of the right domain name to around a 5 out of 10 if you are talking about ranking for the exact phrase in your domain name.

I recommend clients buy two domain names. One that has keywords and that is where the website is physically located. The other domain can be shorter, more memorable, and used for marketing, branding, etc. That one points to the website and when users type it in, that domain appears in the address bar.

This gives you the keyword rich link for your domain name and your shorter name for branding.

I can show several websites with very little link popularity that rank #1 for the exact phrase in the domain name. They have decent content, but few backlinks, so the domain name must be making a difference.

Comment by BlogMarketingGuru

Made Wednesday, 14 of January , 2009 at 1:45 pm

Namecritic is correct. I’ve closely studied the effect of a domain name in the SEO process. It is a 10 out of 10 when it comes to speed to market, and another 10 out of 10 when it comes to the “with all other things being equal”. The domain name with a .com extension trumps everythign else.