Google, being the largest and most used search engine and is extremely important to optimize your website for. As a matter of fact, if you optimize your website just for Google you’d find your rankings in Yahoo! and MSN will jump up higher than your ranking in Google. I’ve optimized many websites that show up in at least the top 20 listings in Google and found that in each case they ranked higher in Yahoo! and MSN usually in the top 3 positions with most in the number one spots.

Most everyone agrees that with Google content is king. So writing good copy with just the right amount of keyword phrases, for keyword density is important. And natural anchor text links is second to the throne, which takes lots of work and proper timing to do properly.

Third in line are keyword phrases (notice I said phrase because single keywords are almost impossible to optimize for), which need to be researched to find the right phrase for you and not used to often in the content/text to get the right density. Used to often and you’ll hurt your ranking.

Fourth in line are the Meta Description Tag which when used properly can actually bring visitors to your website who wouldn’t normally come there. Of course there are several other factors involved with getting that elusive number one spot.

But what most everyone often overlooks is what I call the fifth element which Google uses to determine their ranking of a website and that’s the domain name.

People, even SEO companies, don’t either know the importance of the domain name to Google or take the time to chose the proper name for the website. Most just use their company name or what they conceder a “Cool” name for their websites. Now, unless your company is well known or at least well known in its field, using a basically unknown company name is pointless. Even more pointless is the “Cool” name.

The entire reason you optimize your website is to get visitors from search engines, so why not use all the tools available to get the best ranking possible for your website.

Use your domain name as one of those tools. Instead of your company name or the “Cool” one, use a keyword phrase, one that describes your product or service. Take your time in choosing the proper name. Make sure that it will work best for your website. If you not sure ask your friends and relatives what keywords they would use to find your product or services on the Internet. You might be surprised at what they would use.

You have the keyword phrase that you know will work. But before you jump online and get that domain name there are a couple of things you may still need to do.

Let’s say you’re the owner of Mike’s Bikes and you specialize in Colorado Mountain Bikes so you figure to kill two birds with one stone and use the domain name mikescoloradomountainbikes.com to keep your name in it along with using the keyword phrase. Now this might make sense to you but you’re not Google. You’re not going to like it but you need to drop the mikes out of the name because it’s dead weight.

So now you’ve got coloradomountainbikes.com but wait before you burn up the keyboard use Colorado-mountain-bikes.com instead. Why? Because Google sees this as three different words and would see coloradomountainbikes.com as a single word. When people are doing a search they will not be using coloradomountainbikes, they are going to use Colorado mountain bikes. The bonus is that your domain name now becomes a keyword phrase used by Google when it performs a search.