Keywords in Your Domain Name

I'll start off by saying that whenever you purchase a new domain name, it will help you to have some or all of your desired keywords in the domain name, that should be pretty obvious. Preferably with no hyphens, but if you need one or two hyphens that's no biggie. More than two dashes and your domain name looks spammy to me. Okay so lets say that your targeting "keyword real estate".

Well then the obvious domain name choice should be keywordrealestate.com or keywordrealestate.net. However, most likely those two domain names are taken and you'll have to start looking for keyword-realestate.com, keyword-realestate.net, or keywordreal-estate.com etc.

Now lets say that your competition has already locked in all of the reasonable domain names with your keywords in them. Damn I hate when that happens too. Or lets say whoever was in charge of the company's website before you bought companyname.com and that's the company domain name.

Can you still beat out your competition? If their webmaster is completely incompetent, then no problem. But most likely they paid some "experts" big dollars and they rank number one for your key search terms. Now can you still beat them? Well, it will be tough, but you can do it. Living in Emerald Isle, NC I keep pretty close tabs on the google ranks of local real estate companies. So do a Google search for "Emerald Isle Real Estate" and see what you get. Whoa, look at that, a domain name with ZERO keywords in it outranks another site with two of the four keywords in its domain name.

How can this be? Well I know Bluewater's webmaster and he kicks butt at SEO and programming. He also spent a lot of time and hard work to accomplish this. So I would have to say that you can beat any domain name for your key terms if you really work at it, and provide something useful for your visitors. But it is definitely easier having keywords in your domain name.

I think some search engines like Yahoo still put a lot of weight on domain names with keywords in them so you may be able to generate a lot of traffic just from a good domain name.