It’s interesting when people run tests online. Who would choose the phrase purple banana hats for a ranking test? Who would ever search for such a silly phrase like that? Worse yet, who would even bother trying to rank for it? Me, that’s who. I’m running a test on keywords in domain names and I needed to choose a query space that had next to no competition and very little activity in the index. I also happen to already rank for this silly phrase by having it on other web pages of mine. It is not a phrase I intended to rank for at first, but it turned out to be a wonderful testing ground for tests such as this one I am conducting today.
I always tell people to learn from their own results. When in doubt, try it and see what happens. This test is my walking my talk and also a hope that my results that people can see and follow along with will help them decide whether having their keywords in their domain name makes that much of a difference in their ranking. I’m almost positive that in very low to no-competition markets such as this query space, having the keywords in your domain could very well make a difference. We’ll see what this test shows to me.
Also being tested is whether or not the extension of your domain name matters if everything else is equal. Will the search engines show more love to a .com and rank a domain with hyphens in it lower? To me, its worth testing to see for myself, that’s why we are doing this purple banana hats test… so we can see for ourselves. Results will be reported soon.