About a month ago, I came across a blog post about the benefits of having exact match domain written by Gyutae Park. I agree that exact match domain can get higher ranking easily and does reduce some our SEO effort. In this post, I’m going to show you the real example of how exact match domain can help us to achieve high ranking in search engines.
What Is Exact Match Domain?
Exact match domain is the domain exactly matches with your targeting keyword or the keyword searched by public user. Search engines put more weight into domain name during ranking evaluation. It means a site with exact match domain doesn’t need as many links or on-page optimization to rank on first page for a particular keyword.
What Is the Domain Name?
The domain name I used in this case study is www.beyluen.com. And the keyword is “beyluen” without quotes.
Search Engine Ranking Analysis
By searching “beyluen” in Google, you can see that www.beyluen.com is at position #6. In this particular case study, I’m interested to look at how the domain www.beyluen.com outrank domain names at position #7 to #10. How the domain get #1 ranking is not the purpose of this case study.
Below is the analysis I’ve done for all the domains shown in the search result.
DA: Domain age
PR: PageRank
BLP: The total number of links pointing to the URL
BLD: The total number of links pointing to the domain
BLEG: The total number of links pointing to the web page from government website (.gov) or educational website (.edu)
DMZ: Whether the site is listed in Open Directory Project’s directory
YAH: Whether the site is listed in Yahoo! Directory
Title: Whether the keyword appears in title tag
URL: Whether the keyword appears in URL
Desc: Whether the keyword appears in meta description tag
Head: Whether the keyword appears in header tag such as h1, h2 and etc
CA: The number of days since Google last indexed the page
Let’s look at on-page optimization factors. There is only 1 major optimization for domain www.beyluen.com which is exact match URL. There is no other on-page optimization applied to important elements such as title tag, header tag and meta description. However domains from position #7 to #10 have applied at least 2 optimization to these elements.
Another worth to mention is there is no content in the domain www.beyluen.com. To be exact, it only contains a list of folder (only 1 folder) under this domain which is generated by Apache web server. In fact, it can be considered as error page for visitors as they don’t have any idea what is this page about. Perhaps another on-page optimization you can say is the keyword “beyluen” appear once in the page content.
Next let’s look at off-page optimization, the total number of links pointing to the domain. The number is 0 for www.beyluen.com but the links pointing to other domains are quite huge. The huge amount of links don’t mean that all of them are effective because it is not filtered by those nofollow links and etc. But we can guess that the effective links are still greater than 0.
From our on-page and off-page optimization analysis, we found that domains from position #7 to #10 are doing optimization far better than domain from position #6. The reason is simple, www.beyluen.com is exact match domain and search engines give much more weight to these type of domains.
Conclusion
Exact match domain is an important SEO element as it can easily get high search engine rankings. Exact match domain is a limited resource. In case if you can’t get yourself a exact match domain, you are still able to high rankings provided you have done proper on-page and off-page optimization. One of my previous post was discussing about the benefits of not having exact match domain.
What is your thoughts? Please share with us below.
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Hey Bey,
Nice post. The fact that your exact match domain name is still ranking, even with a directory listing page shows that it’s receiving a boost in the search engines.
I see Twitter ranking very high these days. It’s a shame that the profile pages no longer pass link juice.
@Gyutae,
Thanks for your comment. Although Twitter profile page does not give us link juice, but it will still bring you traffic and make people more likely to connect you by reading some description about you.
Hi – thanks for that excellent piece of information. well done.
Can i ask you – what software did you use to find teh page rank and other results for those 10 webistes? Many thanks
@Adrian,
I use SEO Tool to lookup page rank for those website.
http://tools.seobook.com
Very good article that once you make it very useful for me. Nice to meet you.
Austin is building a 30 MW solar plant, but most of the solar plant news seems to becoming out of Calif. ,
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