How Important are Keyworded Domains?

Many webmasters will tell you that it is very lucky if they can manage to get keyworded domain names. As all the keyword domains in general have been grabbed already by others wo are using them or parking them hoping for a decent profit on resale. What that means is that unless you have an extremely niche oriented industry or a new concept that you are marketing, finding a keyword domain names is really difficult. Netflix will attest to that with their “Qwikster” debacle.

There are quite a few companies that pay a lot of money to get these prized domain names. Is it worth paying huge prices for such domain names, and do you really need to have keyword domain names?  There is no total agreement on this at all since not all SEO professionals agree. There are still many SEO expertswho believe that keyword domain names are weighted when it comes to search engine placements. Many SEO experts also feel that one of the search engine ranking factors has to do with the domain name. Whether this is absolutely true or not is unknown, but it seems as if that may be the truth to a certain degree.

What can we say with any certainty? We know that Google gives importance to the age of the domain – there is no doubt there. We know Google grades on keywords in the text, tags, and captions. Based on this, it makes sense that Google may also give importance to domain names. The question is how much impact it may have which is a point of a speculation. Quite a few webmasters have tried to make use of keyword domain names to the tune of spending thousands of dollars getting keyword domain names.

You most likely will not to lose anything by selecting keyword domain names, as there are other advantages associated with such domain names. Possibly the single greatest advantages of getting keyword domain names comes when people link to your website. They will most likely be using keywords to link to your main pages. If the keywords and domain name match, it can bring additional credit to your website and highly contextual links to your website are always a good thing.

Additionally, there is a number of people who link to websites using just the URL of the website rather than using anchor text. Keyword domains will stand to gain in this regard, because in the link itself your keyword will be present. Looking from it at that angle, you come out ahead in quite a few instances. This is a tremendous advantage to your website to increase the value of every such link.

All of this does not mean that non-keyword domains do not rank well but that it appears keyword domains have better rate of success on the whole if you follow this logic. Spending thousands on a highly keyworded domain name should only be done if you are confident it will aid you enough to recoup the cost. If you have any doubt, then you are better off ranking via contextual SEO and saving that money.