First of all my credentials; I have none. Occasionally I'm lucky enough to get a temporary gig here and there doing clerical work. Sometimes these places have do-it-yourself interfaces to some of the company web pages that I get to update.

Using empirical observations it seems to me that having a domain name with "keywords" helps. It's not the end all and be all but it seems to be at least a piece of the puzzle. Especially if you're fortunate to have a couple back links; it would seem a back link to "GreaterRochesterMortgage.com" would be worth more than a back link to "GRM.com" because of the keywords contained (I'm assuming that most back links don't take the extra effort of using meaningful anchor text.)

Overture suggested that "rochester mortgage" is a fairly popular keyword for our area and while our website is relatively weak we get relatively good positioning for the keywords "rochester mortgage" and "mortgage rochester". And we got *no* positioning for "rochester mortgageS" nor "mortgageS rochester" ... the plural of. (I've also noticed that we get better positioning if I google from within the Rochester area as opposed to someplace out of state.)

I also noticed another company kept popping up with top positioning for those keywords. It's company name / domain name was similar to ours but it was for a Rochester in another state and their website was even weaker than ours. It kinda reinforced the idea that domain name played a role.

With that in mind I bought the domain name GreaterRochesterMortgageS.com and had it pointed to our website. Within a month we started getting good positioning for "Rochester MortgageS" and MortgageS Rochester.

I also had our web host change the owner of our domain name from his company name to our company name. I can't swear that this helped but if I were writing the code I would consider using owner name as another vote of authenticity.

I've other corroborating anecdotes from other places I've worked but I fear I've bored you all long enough.