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The words in your your domain name, web page titles, and web page (html) file
names definitely affect a web page's search engine ranking.
For example, let's say someone goes to Google and begins
a search for "metal spatula." If your website's
domain name is "www.metalspatula.com" and on that
site you have a page titled "metal spatula" that's
been saved with a file name "metalspatula.htm,"
then you have a very good chance of one day appearing at the
top of a search for "metal spatula."
Every search engine orders its results a little differently,
and some search engines seem to weight the words in your domain
name, web page titles, and web page file names more heavily.
For instance, if you run a search for "guitar tuner,"
the site that comes up at the top of Google's search results
is an online guitar tuner on one of the pages of www.gieson.com.
The actual address of the page that has the online guitar
tuner on it is http://www.gieson.com/Library/projects/utilities/tuner/index.html
.
Now, if you run the same search (for "guitar tuner")
on Yahoo, the top (unpaid) result is www.howtotuneaguitar.org.
My guess here (remember how mysterious the workings of search
engines are?) is that Yahoo gives more weight to how well
the words in a domain name match the search terms. In other
words, the search was for "guitar tuner," and since
both "guitar" and "tune" are in the domain
name of www.howtotuneaguitar.org, Yahoo gives it the nod over
the guitar tuner at www.gieson.com/Library/projects/utilities/tuner/index.html
.
However, if you do the same search at Google, the top two
results are flip-flopped--the tuner at gieson.com is now first
and the tuner at howtotuneaguitat.org is second. You might
conclude, therefore, that Yahoo weighs how well a search phrase
matchs a domain name more heavily than Google does.
And a quick comparison between these two sites on Alexa.com
also reveals that the guitar tuner at gieson.com has 488 pages
linking in to it while he tuner at howtotuneaguitar.org has
just 97 sites linking in to it.
Could it be that Google weighs "link-ins" heavier
than domain names--or at least that it weighs links-ins more
heavily than Yahoo does?
Either way, on any search that you conduct, take notice of
the search terms that are highlighted within the search results.
Search engines definitely pay attention to the words in a
domain name, page titles, and html file names.
If you can't change your domain name to match your topic,
that's not a big deal--your page titles and html file names
are totally in your control, and two out of three ain't bad!
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