SEO rank with no keywords in domain?

[PenguinManiac]

A website's name is the very first thing that is to be taken into consideration to determine a website's success. However, and this is especially true when creating a brand, it's not always possible to include related keywords in your domain (price is one of the many causes, but it can also simply be due to personal preference).
Can a website still be successful in a specific niche if no related keywords are contained in the domain, despite them being promoted through the website's metatags, articles and whatnot?

 

[SEOPub]

Most of the time, I cannot tell if your questions are serious or if you are just trying to increase your post count for some reason.

This question is pretty dumb...

Can a website still be successful in a specific niche if no related keywords are contained in the domain, despite them being promoted through the website's metatags, articles and whatnot?

Amazon
Zillow
Mashable
CNet
IGN
ESPN
CNN
Tumblr
Angie's List
Yelp

None of those domain names have a thing to do with what the sites are about.

We could list hundreds of these.

 

[PenguinManiac]

PenguinManiac

You can't build a solid building with shaky foundations. As I've stated multiple times around here, I'm still a noob in this department, but what I do know is that the gap between techniques employed by beginners and aged, full-grown websites or companies are different. What worked many years ago (when most of the companies you mentioned were founded) may not work nowadays. How can you give off a good impression and make potential viewers understand your niche of interest if the very first thing they see, you name, doesn't contain any hints? Given how much competition in every possible niche you can think of has grown, it's now harder to stand out among them than before.
I'm sorry if my questions strike you as dumb. I'm really just trying to question everything I know to get rid of prejudices. Can you blame me, seeing how much websites promoted around the idea of using "smart keywords" in your domain name to ensure more views?

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

You do not need keywords in a domain name. When people do a search in Google, most of the time they are not even really paying attention to URLs before clicking on something.

Zillow was not started all that long ago. What the heck does the word 'Zillow' have to do with real estate? Nothing.

There are tons of other examples. All you have to do is look in the search results.

 

[manmad]

Yeah, there's not really much point to putting the keywords in the domain, you won't really find any websites that are like that and it kinda ruins the aesthetic for the website.

 

[LinkHeros]

As already pointed out, you do not need keywords in the domain name for a successful website.

Back in the good old days of SEO (10 years ago), exact match or partial match domains had an advantage over domains with no keywords. But the search engines are a lot smarter now, and those days are over. It is much better to build a brand and avoid any over-optimization penalties.

 

[Rob Whisonant]

Forget about SEO for a minute. Think about what makes people buy. Trust is a big reason. Would you buy from...

high-definition-televisions.com

or

bestbuy.com

In these days and times it is much better to brand your websites. People just don't trust buying from exact match domains anymore UNLESS the exact match domain makes sense to be one.

Now something like bobs-hdtv-reviews.com could work as far as trust goes as long as you tell them who bob is and why he should be trusted.

 

[Gazoo]

Having keywords in a domain name is not required to have success and in my honest opinion I like brand names or something that is unique or catchy for a domain name.

Keywords can work in a domain name sometime but many times the way some people register domain names with keywords just makes it scream "SPAM" or "JUNK" to me. I have seen some that just look so bad that just seeing the screwed up domain name makes me want to not have anything to do with a site built on it.

I think that what is on the actual website including it's content and what the site is about will have a bigger impact on it's success then having a domain with a keyword/s in it.

If you do proper SEO both on-page and off-page and build a good quality site that people will want to visit then that is going to be more important.

 

[Aryan]

I also have same opinion as others, be honest, there are many low quality websites with keywords in domain name in past have been penalized by EMD update (Exact Match Domain). It's better to provide quality services and products and so that people remember your brand name rather than searching it by any keyword.

 

[Tommy91]

The problem is in this place:

Domain name can be the name of a brand or can be used as a primary keyword.

Case 1: If using domain name as brand, use subpages for SEO.

Case 2: If keyword insertion into the domain name is the home page to do SEO. In this case the web is very few pages.