What’s in a name? Opinions vary wildly in the SEO community, but from what I can see, the answer is “Everything”. I have seen websites rocket to the top of search results on a keyword-rich domain name alone and recently I saw something else that really confirmed the importance of a domain name for SEO rankings.

I was asked by a client to do an assessment on the website of a prominent business that is probably the leader in it’s field. Clients include the Duchess of York and Deepak Chopra among others. There were 16,000 websites linking to this site and if you searched in the name of the business, it was certainly number one. But in the keywords they would like to appear – those that will bring them new business, they were nowhere to be found.

The problem is that most people do not use HTML keyword links when linking to your site – they just use the URL. So if your URL is www.warburton-smith.com and your business is dog grooming, unless you hire a whole lot of clever guys to generate backlinks like Dog Grooming then don’t expect to rank too highly in those keywords. If however you happened to register “www.dog-grooming.com” it would be a different story.

You see, the search engines don’t really know what keywords to count the link against if it does not contain any keywords and peer endorsement – which is really what back linking is supposed to be about – and genuine peer endorsement is really always going to be a description and your URL. And what about back-linking in HTML with keywords? I think that is being cheated to the point that it is about to lose relevance very quickly.