Domain names are more important for SEO By: Robert McCulloch On 2006-10-08
 
Domain names are more important for SEO than ever today (October 05, 2006). The reason is that search engines have had to discount more and more on-page factors due to webmasters and their SEO efforts to get top ranking.

With less factors to rank webpages with, search engines are looking for other things to base a website rank in their search results. In-bound links were what made Google what it is today, but even they are discounted now due to webmasters linking to everything they can find to increase their PageRank. But that is another story.

Domain names are the one on-page factor that is hard to cheat on. After all, how many top level domains can a site have?

MSN understands this and ranks a website with a keyword phrase within the domain name well ahead of other sites. For example, I registered a domain name (american-pitbulls.us) for a pitbull site and setup a blog about six months ago. Three months later I did a search on MSN for ‘american pitbulls’ and my blog came up #1! (Page 1 of 70,571 results)

Keep these factors in mind… The site had:

No PageRank
A new domain name, 3 months old then
No links
No SEO - a WordPress Blog

The blog is still at #1 on MSN today ahead of all 70k sites. Feel free to check yourself, AdSense…

http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=american+pitbulls&FORM=MSNH

The full url is http://american-pitbulls.us/wp

I’m getting traffic from Google as well now. Anyway, you can see how important the domain name is in ranking well in MSN. Even at third in the search engine wars, MSN can push out a lot of traffic.

Robert McCulloch
http://attorneycollect.com/