Do you absolutely have to have your keyword in the domain name?

[ProfitwithAdam]

OK, I freely admit that I am a complete newbie when it comes to starting websites. My background is MLM. I still have an MLM company I am associated with, but I built up a decent organization and it is on autopilot. I don't make as much as I want to per month, in reality it is a pain sometimes dealing with new members and all the training, but I can't turn down a few grand a month. My passion is Internet Marketing the way this Forum promotes. Its all new to me, but has been of interest forever.

Enough about my background, I am researching keywords to go after a Niche that I am interested in diving into. I understand the point of having your keyword in the domain, but is it absolutely critical? All this research into my Niche got me thinking about the MLM company. The reason I ask is because for as long as I have done MLM, the companies won't let you have their name in a domain. So, all the research got me thinking how can I take this new knowledge of backlinking, article writing, SEO optimization and RSS submitting and add to my website for the MLM company if I can't use their name?

My question is for all those who are much smarter than me, which is most of you on this forum, how would you try to get on page 1 for a company or niche if you couldn't use the name of the company or niche?

For example, lets say its "Monavie", but you can't have "Monavie in your domain name. You know that anyone who gets a presentation or got information about Monavie would go online and type in "Monavie". You want to be on that first page showing everyone what you have to offer them as far as leadership and mentoring goes that differ from everyone else. How would you get to page 1 for "Monavie" without using that term in the domain name?

[aceriker]

It depends how much effort you can put in to SEO. If you can devote a lot of resources to SEO then keyword in the domain won't matter too much (the evergreen example is if you google click here and Adobe's page comes up, even though the words 'click here' are nowhere to be found on the site).

If you are considering branding this site, then it might be worthwhile to go with a generic or made up word, but if it's just another niche site and you want to get search engine traffic, consider a 'keyworded' domain.

Keywords in the domain are much easier to rank and do very well in niches with little competition, so why not take the ranking boost that you get with it?

[RGallowitz]

Simply go through all the optimization but with a domain that does not have the keyword in it. Having the full keyword in the domain does give you an "advantage", but you can still rank with a domain that does not have the keyword in it!

[jazbo]

Matt Cutts said back in 2008 that it helps " a little", which I would take as it may help you by about 1-2%.

So in short, it does not really matter at all as long as your site has well researched and relevant text in the title, h1 and body text areas.

[ProfitwithAdam]

Thank you for your advice so far!

Adam

[learningstuff]

Don't worry about getting the keyword in your domain. If you want to rank for that keyword without it being in your domain, you can write posts/pages that have this keyword in the title and scattered through the content. Then you need to build your backlinks to the pages/posts, using that keyword in your anchor text.