Some web site owners believe that registering a domain name with their main keywords will shoot them to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). While having keywords in your domain name will advantage you, this advantage should not be overstated.

It may give your site a little lift in the SERPs, but this will be just one lift out of many you could give your site by thinking carefully about your content, your keywords and page structures (SEO stuff in other words).

The point has to be made too that there are many domains that come up prominently amongst the SERPs that do NOT have keywords in their domain names. Does youtube.com have the keyword “video” or “broadcast” in it? Nope.

These sites have probably achieved their good position by compelling content – content that is updated, enlarged, linked well to other resources considered valuable by search engines.

Historial Analysis
Search engines are more likely to favor older domain names than new domain names. New domains have no track record. They could be just spam resources set up the trick search engines. Older sites can be analysed for frequency of change and how many outlying sites link to them.

Resources
More discussion on keywords in domain names

[ad]