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 Your domain name, the URLs of your pages and your title tag are some of the influential factors for your search engine rankings.
For example, a domain name such as: http://www.buy-furniture-online.com will generally get ranked higher than http://www.companyname.com, assuming that they had identical keywords and page content. Thus, the conclusion is that you should try to use a domain name which contains your keywords. (those you've found during your preliminary research).
There are certain drawbacks and objections to this method: keywords in the domain name look too unprofessional, and you (or your client) have already registered a domain, so it's too late to change. The optimal workarounds would be as follows: Try to get an additional domain name which contains your keywords. Then, redirect it to your main website. (Later in this course we will deal with the corrent way to organize the redirects). Use keywords in the URLs of your pages, e.g. http://www.companyname.com/web-development-services.html. Remember, search engines rank pages, not sites. There's a widespread opinion that solely stuffing URLs with keywords will lead to really good rankings. This was once the case, but not so much anymore, except probably on Inktomi. That being said, having your keyword in URL in your domain name and page URLs will be a good bonus, though not a decisive factor. In order to properly populate URLs with keywords, you need to remember the following. First, the search engines can not separate the keywords from one another if they are written together in one word. (except in some cases like Yahoo). So a domain name like freeicecream.com is of little use. However, free-ice-cream.com is. Important: don't use the underscore sign (_) to separate the words, only the hyphen (-), as this is a real word separator considered by the search engines. Remember that Yahoo can only find a keyword if it runs on from the start of a word so with the example of freeicecream, it will actually only find the word "free" but won't find the word "ice-cream". So in case you're targeting "free ice cream", the domain name without the hyphens will not help. With all search engines, free-ice-cream.com will be found and used to rank your site. As has already been mentioned, using page name URL's with keywords is just as important as the domain name. So, when naming your pages use buy-office-furniture.html rather than buyofficefurniture.html. The worst case scenario is to use a page name that has no keywords at all. At this step, if you already have a fairly large website, you might start looking for a solution to rename all your pages and keep the link structure working. Macromedia Dreamweaver offers a solution with its "Change links sitewide" feature. SEO Software's built-in HTML Editor also has a Find-and-Replace function which you may apply for multiple pages of your site to rebuild the links. One more word in favor of keyword-aware domain names: when a site links to you using your domain name as the anchor text, this link gives you more weight on the search engines for the keyphrase used in the link anchor text. Directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo often won't let you specify the anchor text of your link - they'll use the site's name. Here's where a keyword-rich domain name comes in handy.
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