How important is it to have the relevant vertical in your domain name?

[MortimerJazz]

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I'm not sure I've given this post a very good title, so let me explain.

If I'm starting up a site to help sell loans how much difference is there (when it comes to SEO) between a site called for example helpmeout.com and helpmeoutloans.com

Or for a poker site, how important is it to have the word poker in the URL? (eg pocketrockets.com and pocketrocketspoker.com).

Thanks alot for your help,

[HarveyC]

It's arguable. For MSN, it'll probably help you out a lot.

For Google or any decent search engine, the impact will probably be minimal, but people do generally reckon it has some impact.

I think the more important thing about this is that people will link to your site with the text "pocket rockets poker", thus increasing your relevancy for "poker" with each organic backlink you get.

[DutchRomano]

To keep with your example: 'Helpmeloans' provides me, as a customer, more of a description about a site than just 'helpme' (help me with what??)

[JamesEvansSEO]

...ok, in my experience, domains and subdomains that include your main keywords always perform better than not descriptive domains, but if your competitor with a not descriptve domain have a lot of backlinks and is using anchor text with your main keywords that will make things harder...a little bit only, my advice go for domain names that include your main keywords

[DavidCartlidge]

Don't make that choice because of search engines - any benefit is tiny.

Think Google, Yahoo, Wiki, eBay etc - not even real words.

What matters is how you are going to market your domain and whether you are trying to build brand awareness. If you want offilne or word of mouth traffic go for something that is easy to spell and has no hyphens. If you only ever plan to gain click traffic, this doesn't matter - but then who does not at least want existing customers to return??

The only tangeable benefit to having a 'keyword' in your URL is for backlinks, but then getting people to use varied anchor text, such as Yahoogle - Home of Poker or Play Poker with Yahoogle is always going to be much better than relying on your domain name, my-long-poker-domain-poker-spammy-name.com

[Jack Russell]

I'm not sure I've given this post a very good title, so let me explain.

If I'm starting up a site to help sell loans how much difference is there (when it comes to SEO) between a site called for example helpmeout.com and helpmeoutloans.com

Or for a poker site, how important is it to have the word poker in the URL? (eg pocketrockets.com and pocketrocketspoker.com).

Thanks alot for your help,

Domain name is not given much importance by Google as it was followed few years back. Rather than domain name content is given more importance these days. Good unique content keeping your business in mind will definitely help for better rankings.