How important are keywords in domain names for rankings?
Groan I hear you mutter – “it’s been covered countless times”.
Well, look, this is just a little test on keywords in sub domains of WordPress. I’m just across the border in Surrey. I have recently observed sites ranking on page 1 for [main keyword + county] – pronounced ess-eeh-ohh + surr-eeh.
The site ranking no. 1 until recently (out of approx 350,000 results) had just a handful of links from other sites, including its mother company and a small amount of highly optimised on page content.
Somewhat more surprising perhaps was that the site ranking no. 10 has not yet launched a site. It has the all keyword domain name.com, with a page place holder on it with a page title tag, an H1 header, an H2 header and 2 short sentences of text.
This content has not been optimised for the equivalent keywords, in this case [ess-eeh-ohh + hamp-sheer] so we’ll see where this page ranks based on similar criteria – just keywords in domain, keywords in title tag, H1 tag etc.
If it ranks on page 1, then it may be worth moving to stage 2 of the experiment which will be to replace the content on this page with carefully optimised content including the all important keywords, for real.
Stage 3 could be building some links in to the site.
All stages could be influenced by comments received.
Now, let’s go off and get this page indexed pdq to get the ball rolling.
Talk soon!
