Does the domain name make a difference in search engine placement?

[leverage]

Hi all,
This is my first post. I was wondering if the name of your domain name can make a difference to the search results in say google. For example,

Say my site domain name is www.bikerepairs.com. Also lets presume there are another 1000 or so sites out there that also offer site repairs as the central focus of their site.

If a person is searching through google using the key words "bike" and "repairs" would the site with the domain name www.bikerepairs.com have more chance of rating higher?

Cheers,

Leverage

[megri]

The keyword in URL has go the importance you can well rank for bike repairs try to get some in bound link with anchor text bike repairs (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=bike+repairs&spell=1) from good theme based sites having good Page rank. You domain can benefit you there is no doubt but you need link popularity for this keyword also. Even this thread will provide you vote in google

[weblaunch]

Yes, having your keyword in your URL definitely helps in terms of search ranking. If you look at the search results in Yahoo, for example, you'd see that URLs containing your search query are in bold letters.

But I don't suggest going out of your way to obtain a domain name containing your keywords. It's just one of the factors being looked at.

[jagan]

yes, it helps. Every part of your website has values for google.

Title, keytwords, description, url etc....

Google gives importance to having the keywords in the URL, these may be in the main url or the sub-url or in a subdomain, But main url has high importance...