What is an EMD? A PMD? And why do I care? How does this relate to SEO? The short answer is an EMD, an Exact Match Domain name, and a PMD is a Partial Match Domain name. Why this matter takes a bit more to explain.
Exact Match Domain
We’ll start with EMD or Exact Match Domain name. An EMD is where your URL or your domain name is the same as the brand or keyword you’re trying to target. For example, Fire Media Lab has an EMD of firemedialab.com. It is EXACT. Variants of this could have been fire-media-lab.com, but the search engines are pretty good about separating the words out in domain names, and I prefer domain names without hyphens in them when I can get them. From an SEO perspective, this is powerful. Google, Bing, Yahoo… when they see a domain name with certain words in it, this is a powerful signal that the website is about those certain words. As branding becomes more and more significant with SEO, having an EMD for your brand becomes more important.
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https://www.firemedialab.com/ |
Partial Match Domain
A PMD or Partial Match Domain is probably more correctly stated as a partial match URL. It’s a partial match in that part of the URL is a match for the domain. An example of some PMD’s with Fire Media Lab would be some of our social profiles.
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https://www.facebook.com/firemedialab/ |
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https://www.pinterest.com/firemedialab/ |
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https://www.instagram.com/firemedialab/ |
EMD and PMD Working Together
When you have sites with a PMD pointing to an EMD, this sends powerful signals to a search engine. The PMD’s will reinforce the EMD which will reinforce the brand. Together, these will work to communicate the relevance of the target or brand site.
