Domain Name SEO

Adding stop words such as "the", "and", "of" etc. will not hurt your ranking in the search engines. ANY site can be made to rank well enough as long as you put in the proper effort towards SEO.

No, it won't. As long as you have the main keywords you want to rank for in the domain name, you should be able to do well as long as you employ proper on-page SEO, as well as utilize sufficient and relevant backlinking.

Like any type of content - articles, blog posts, etc best practices usually encourage keywords first. Titles beginning with keywords, first sentence of opening paragraph, etc.

Having said that though, keywords in a domain name is only 1 of many SEO items to consider. Look at all the sites that rank for keywords and their keywords are no where to be found in their domain name.

In some respects SEO has some near superstitious beliefs. I like a good keyword rich domain and if I have to use any ancillary words to get a dot com I put them last...keywordthe.com

Good rankings still come down to a butt load of backlinks. Either crummy or perfect on-page SEO can be dramatically affected by backlinks.

If you want to rank for KEYWORD, the domain name with KEYWORD. com, .net, .org will be easiest to rank for.

Adding any words to it makes it more difficult.

As long as the exact KEYWORD is in the domain name, you have a better chance to rank compared to a web site that does not carry KEYWORD in the name.

Whether the word "the" makes a difference or not, depends on the market. In some markets you do not even have the slightest chance as you would be competing against 10 year old KEYWORD.com, KEYWORD.net and KEYWORD.org, and also some sites that have no keyword in the name, but are online and active in the market since 1996 or so.

I have seen many many times top ranking sites which has the keyword in domain where wards were changed in places.

Example: Keyword: Ho To Cook A Cat
Domain name: acathowtocook.com

Do a search on Google for 'forex articles' and you should see my site at number 2, so no it doesn't seem to make a difference.

I am kinda agree with Doug. Domain name is only a small part of SEO. Keywords placement and backlinks are still the key to ranking high. I saw many top internet marketing Gurus use their name in the domain for branding purposes. When someone search for Internet Marketing, some of the websites with their name still rank top.

Benjamin

I wouldn't of thought it would of made a difference, the keyword is still in the domain so yeah, you can usually use words like "the" to make a nice site name out of a keyword, instead of having a website with a keyword as the name, which doesn't really work - If that makes sense.

I have not found that adding short stop words to my domains has made any noticeable difference. Not too long ago out of the 100+ ranking factors that google uses the domain name seemed to carry a hell of a lot of weight. They change their algorithm all the time so whatever anyone says now may not be accurate next month. Follow the others' advice of having good off-page seo and you'll do well.

Thanks for everyone's help!

If your worrying about your keywords in the domain name. Then apparently you are not building a great brand. Don't take this to offense, however focus on a building a good name. Creating a domain with your keywords in it is silly. The only time you do that is if this will be a throw away domain. Something that you will use for spam and etc.

NO. It will never hurt your SEO venture as long as the keywords remain intact.

I usually add a + word/letter after my desired keyphrase if its not available.
so lets say
keyword1keyword2addonword.com

Through my efforts, I believe it is all a matter of degrees. Providing you have got your basic on site optimization ok and a reasonable amount of content, links are very important and keyworded domain names can be a big factor too.

An exact match .com, .net or .org will provide a very large benefit in ranking, but with enough link building, you can rank domains that do not even have the kw in them.

TheKeyword.com will have a lot less SEO benefit than an EMD, but will still be good compared to many other domains. You will just need more/better link building and time than if you had an exact match domain (or less than if you did not have the KW in the domain at all).

For example, for a kw I am thinking about targeting at some point, I looked into the prices of the exact match .net or .org. It looked like getting one of these might have cost in excess of 2K. So I secured KeywordHQ.com for $10. Given the competition of the term, I believe I will be able to rank for less than 2K link building efforts anyway, so the exact match does not seem like a good idea here, If the term was much more competitive though, the 2K might start to look small compared to the extra link building efforts that would be required to rank.

All a matter of degrees.

It will not hurt. As long as keyword is coming in your domain name, Google will find out relevant keyword from domain.

thanks every for this discussion