Keyword Rich Domains – Good for Google!

This site has very little content which mentions ‘Website Design’, if you look through the content you will see that most of the references, and certainly all the main headings, directories and page titles refer to ‘Web Design’. For example the page title for the home page is ‘Web Design in Cork by Frank Prendergast’. The reason for this is that ‘Web Design’ is far more often searched for than ‘Website Design’.

However, at the time of writing, if you search for ‘Website Design Cork’ and ‘Web Design Cork’ it is ‘Website Design Cork’ that returns on the first page in Google.ie.

I originallly launched this site with ‘Website Design Cork’ as a H1 header on every page. I then redesigned with an image (with an alt tag) instead of a H1 heading. I wondered how this would effect the rankings for ‘Website Design Cork’, as headings are generally more useful to search engine optimisation than image alt tags.

After the change in design there was no drop in the search engine positioning for ‘Website Design Cork’. I Intentionally left the site exactly as it was, except for the design change – no new content, no links into the site, nothing but the change in design.

There was no drop in in the position, it remained at result no.19. I waited for the best part of a month, and watched as Google reported accessing the site no less than four times, and still non drop in position for the term ‘Website Design Cork’.

Despite the content focus on ‘Web Design’, a search for ‘Web Design Cork’ performed considerably less well, coming in at position 50… at least until I began to experiment with that too (more on that soon, keep your eye on this blog!).

So why, with so little content focussed on ‘Website Design’ is the site performing so well for searches for ‘Website Design Cork’? Well, may I draw your attention to the domain name of this site, in case you hadn’t spotted it – WebsiteDesignCork.com.

It would certainly seem to me that keyword rich domains can have a very positive effect on search engine rankings. Obviously, you have to consider that the content of the site generally confirms the nature of the site being relevant to the domain, but I would hope that would always be the case with a legitimate business website!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 9:40 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.