domain seo question

I know that serps have a lot to do with meta, title, description, anchor backlinks etc. but I thought that if you had for example the website "searchengineoptimization.com", with a bit of work it would be easy to come in 1st place for the phrase "search engine optimization". The site searchengineoptimization.com doesnt show up in the first 1,000 results and it has a pr of 3. Is this normal or is the owner doing something wrong?

I kind of think you answered yourself there already.

Backlinks, content, age, more backlinks..Google loves content. Even if you have the exactly correct name domain, if your competition is HUGE - aged and thousands of pages and tens of thousands of backlinks..you're pretty much doomed in your attempt And especially phrase like search engine optimization is very very competitive.

blackhatnoob said:

I know that serps have a lot to do with meta, title, description, anchor backlinks etc. but I thought that if you had for example the website "searchengineoptimization.com", with a bit of work it would be easy to come in 1st place for the phrase "search engine optimization". The site searchengineoptimization.com doesnt show up in the first 1,000 results and it has a pr of 3. Is this normal or is the owner doing something wrong?

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There are on page SEO tips, like the Meta tag, description, etc, and there are off page SEO, such as backlinks, etc.

If your trying to rank in Google for highly competitive terms, you better have all your ducks in a row. I mean your on page and off page better be perfect. The only one you really have full control over is on page. Off page is whomever links to you. With that in mind, Google looks at exactly that. Who IS IT that is linking to you? Are they a authority site?

I have done SEO stuff for years, but I am tired of it now. I stopped doing it awhile ago and got into PPC advertising because it was so fast (I can be impatient, know what I mean?). Funny thing is, all my years of SEO is paying off now with PPC. Go figure.

Bottom line though, Google wont just rank you #1 because your domain name IS your keyword term. The look at all factors. Do you have a site map? Is your site structure correct? Do you talk about all things related to your keyword, or are you just keyword stuffing for the term you want to rank for? Who is it that is linking to you? Are they one way links or reciprocal? There are lots of factors.

Now MSN is a whole other beast. You can rank in days on the first page for competitive terms because they haven't updated their algo must since the 90's (Thanks MSN! You have made me A LOT of money!)

Thanks, that makes sense. I thought that if you had the exact keyword in the domain it would be worth much more than meta, etc.

Sound advice on this thread. Of course it helps to have the keyword domain but its not enough on its own.

Where it really come into play is if you are battling it out neck and neck in a competitive niche...it then becomes harder to get above the person with the domain, against you with the keyword in your page title.

Bottom line...if you can get it then grab it...if not then work harder than the domain owner and you'll win

Glad I could help guys. Like I've said before in previous posts. Lots of people here have shared ideas and knowledge with me, so I try to the same whenever I can.

theres a very interesting article about this here

jonathanleger.com/how-to-get-a-5-ranking-in-google-in-14-days-starting-from-scratch

where the guy does an experiment for one of his blogs. Clearly its flawed because the search term he ranked for has very little competition.

But he does bring up one possible point which does seem very possible:

How much merit do you think google puts on a domain name that includes the exact keywords, but adds an additional word, or is somehow a little different, (e.g. going for keywords "cheap laptops" but having to settle for a domain name like getcheaplaptops.com)?

Google has an exact match bonus, so the domain name has to exactly match the keyword phrase I'm afraid.

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The big question is what if you put ignored words in the domain. Is that executed before or after the exact match algorithm

seo20 said:

The big question is what if you put ignored words in the domain. Is that executed before or after the exact match algorithm

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Yeah, that is a pretty good question, but what are ignored words (you mean "the" , "a", etc?)

I think it would be like if someone typed in "the diet blog" the person with dietblog.com would come up first.