Does anyone know if the search engines, like google, look to domain names for ranking? If yes, do you know how the domain names have to be constructed. What I mean is: if we sell pilates equipment in beverly hills, michigan, would the domain name: beverlyhillspilatesequipment.com work for search engine placement. Would this domain name be associated with the search terms: beverly hills pilates.
Or would the domain name have to be: beverly_hills_pilates_equipment.com
Thanks to anyone that can help!

I would say that they both work. If you do a search on free image on google, you will se that Google has marked both freeimage and free_image in the url of the results. This means that they have found a match in the url.

underscore in a domain name? that's not common at all, as a matter of fact, i've still to see a domain name with underscore rank in the top 10 - if anyone has seen one - please let me know.

this is something that was just discussed over at SERoundTable.com also. see if this helps...

http://forums.seroundtable.com/showthread.php?t=1051

underscore in a domain name? that's not common at all, as a matter of fact, i've still to see a domain name with underscore rank in the top 10 - if anyone has seen one - please let me know.
There's no way to see a domain name with underscore rank in the Top 10 because only letters, numbers or hyphens are allowed. ;)

i don't think domain name take as a factor to rank your site in google. domain using to map your IP. so i think domain is not a very very important factor for SEO.

It becomes a highly debatable topic when considering the importance of domain name in search engine rankings. I believe it is just like the meta tags, titles, anchor text and other factors, domain name is one of the numerous factors search engines evaluate when ranking pages.