Originally Posted by joewattie

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.)
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