Keywords in your domain name are very important! You will hear SEO people and Domainers always express that keywords in your domain name are important, because they ARE! So what keywords should you have in your domain name? I always say the best keywords are the ones that people already naturally search for!

You can use Google Adword Tool to help you with this, but be sure to select EXACT (mid top right side) after the keyword search appears. The reason you want to see the Exact term is to get a better idea of what people are exactly searching for. If your search term keywords are included in a phrase, the user really could be searching for something totally different!

Why are matching keywords in your domain important? Google loves exact match domains and if you ask me, they are loving them even more by the day! With a decent site (SEO), some relevant text or products on this site and a little traffic, Google will show you the love and rank you all that better in it’s search engine. Yes, even on the first page of Google for the exact matching term of your domain name! This can make a huge difference in the traffic your site gets and more importantly, Targeted Traffic!

Owning the exact matching term for what people naturally search for can help reduce advertising costs! Why? People are already searching for the term and about 1 in 6 people that search for an exact term, use direct navigation and visit a site directly and skip the search part!

Another way to get into the top of a specific page is to focus on SEO for the specific term with the main site being busy (lot’s of traffic), but if you do not own the exact matching term domain, you will still get beat out most of the time if the exact match term domain is used (by somebody else) and the site is done correctly! Doing a site "correctly" is not all that hard! Really, it isn’t and it will really help if you own the exact match domain you wish to rank for in search engines.

Here is a pretty good example of what I mean by this! This is a real life example!

The Snuggie For Kids blanket was launched but used the brand name Snugglette®. Since I promote this product as an affiliate, it popped into my head that people would have a hard time with that name (spelling and remembering) and would likely "naturally" end up searching for this by the first products brand name, Snuggie! But I also thought people would include "for kids" to it because that was what the product was for. So the exact match search term would be Snuggie For Kids. I did not purchase that domain, because Snuggie® is a registered trademark.

I was sure to include the keyword in my title, meta description and part of my URL link (not in domain). I was clearly sure to use the keyword in my article, provide pictures etc. This helped me because of the SEO and my site get’s a fair amount of traffic as well already.

The same day I wrote about it, I ranked #1 on Google for the matching search term with the article snuggie for kids. This was because I focused on the specific keyword phrase Snuggie For Kids because I felt that would be the natural search term. I ranked # 1 for months and months and I even ranked # 1 and # 2 (with a follow up article) and I sold some Snuggies For Kids blankets!

Snugglette happened to notice this trend of people searching for Snuggie For Kids and they ended up rebranding the product to be called, you guessed it… Snuggie For Kids!

They also registered the exact match domain name SnuggieForKids.com and started using it. Other marketers didn’t follow the rules (profiting from a registered trademark in a domain name), and went out and registered other variations of the keyword in the domain. They applied some SEO and Boom! They all started to out rank me on Google! In fact, currently, SnuggieForKids.com ranks # 1. Amazon.com (super busy traffic site) ranks # 2 & # 3. TheSnuggieForKids.com ranks # 4, ToysRus.com (another very busy traffic site) ranks # 5 & # 6 WalletPop.com a blog ranks # 7, SnuggieForKids.org ranks # 8, Squidoo.com ranks # 9 and I rank #10 (I had fallen to #12 just after the holidays).

So even though I was the first to rank #1 and # 2 for some time, my rankings kept on falling on Google as sites were being built on the exact match domains matching the keyword! Not only were my search engine rankings falling, so were my sales that I was making! As soon as I fell off of page # 1 for the exact match search term, my sales STOPPED COMPLETELY and traffic drastically dropped to the article. Clearly a double edge sword. The exact match .com ranks the highest. The domain including The with the exact match term results in a #4 spot and an exact match .org ranks #8.

I felt like my hands were tied! They were, because I didn’t and in this case could not own the matching searched term domain! I hold the chance of ranking a little higher like Amazon and ToysRUs do, but those are huge companies with huge amounts of traffic and I am a one man show with only a fair amount of traffic!

If you convert this story away from a trademarked term and think of naturally searched for terms like GEO domains, products like Camera, Computer, Video Games etc and add .com to those terms, you can see why domain names hold a lot of value! Generic domain name + High search volume for that exact term + a little development with proper SEO = TRAFFIC! Not advertised traffic, Natural Traffic and Search Engine Traffic!

Since Snuggie For Kids is the trademark, clearly they have every right to own the domain name and really should rank # 1 since they do a pretty decent job with SEO on the site! I can understand the ranking of Amazon and ToyRUs because both sites get a great deal of traffic and put some SEO focus on the keywords! The other two domains (TheSnuggieForKids.com and SnuggieForKids.org) are not owned by the TM owners and upset me a little but there is really nothing I can do about it and the remaining are basically sites like mine that put a specific focus on the product and it’s keywords!

Clearly having the exact match term(s) in your domain name, will help you out on ranking higher in search engines! Only one can own the exact match term!

Another big plus to owning the exact match term domain name, it makes sense to the searcher. Since it makes sense to the searcher, it is also likely to be more trusting! Add all these up and it helps owning the exact match domain name for a lot of reasons and many more that I didn’t cover in this article! I know it is more trusting for me to hear a real life example, and this is one of those.