Does a Good Domain Name Improve Search Engine Ranking?

I’ve heard it said that a good domain name will improve your search engine rankings and so should be considered as part of your search engine optimization (SEO) along with the usual keywords in the Meta tags and content.

Is this true? Does a good domain name improve search engine rankings?

In generally, you want a domain name to be something easily remembered, easy to type, meaningful, related to your website content and preferably, keyword-rich. In my opinion a keyword rich domain name is not too important, but every little helps.

It is often recommend to have your primary targeted keywords included in your domain name as it lets your first time visitors know what your site is about. This supposedly allows search engines to group your website in the right category and so increase the opportunity to rank in related search result pages. But is this true?

Try a test!

I did a Google search for "dogs". How many domains names had the word "dogs" in it? In the top 30 listed (out of 139 million) there were only two web sites with the word "dogs" in their domain name. Not very convincing in my opinion. If keywords in your domain name mattered that much, every hit in the top twenty should have had the word "dogs" in it.

Much better to pick a simple meaningful name, i.e. pets4us.com.

You can research your domain name choices at any of the registrars listed in my article, ‘Where to Register Domain Names". Most of these registrars provide domain name registration, domain name hosting, free domain name search facilities and some even give you a FREE domain name if you accept their domain name hosting package.