NetHosted Blog

Recently I was asked for my opinion on how effective it is to place keywords in your domain URL to improve search engine rankings. This means for instance purchasing www.uk-paintballing-trips.co.uk for a company targetting the “uk paintball trips” search term. First of all I had seen a recent video created by Matt Cutts of Google fame on this subject, you can view it below:

Now personally I’ve always been of the opinion that Matt undersells the importance of SEO to a degree, this would be the typical view of a Google employee; The reason they are where they are today is due to the quality of their search results, and unscrupulous individuals may attempt to influence search results in a way that is detrimental to the users search experience, e.g. spammy irrelevant results entering the users SERP’s (search engine results page).

In my opinion it is valuable to have targetted keywords in your domain name, but it is definitely not going to make or break a website. High quality unique content has always been the key to long term search engine rankings, and as long as search engines keep doing their job this is the way it should stay. Of course certain design features make a site easier for a search engine to understand, using relevant titles and keywords in a blog url gives them an idea of the post content, and a well structured site with navigation links allows a robot to spider your content more effectively!