I am sure you all have heard this piece of advice about how having keywords in your domain will help you get ranked better on Google. That is partially true, but it really all comes down to branding and what you do with your domain. It is true that if you run a credit card site, creditcards.com fits your business better than a flyingbird. But there is a chance that Flyingbird could get ranked higher than creditcards.com if they get the SEO right. Now, I am not suggesting that registering strange domains can actually help your SEO. What I am suggesting is that the domain name is one of many factors that search engines take into account when ranking your site [Besides, you can always add a keyword to your directories names (e.g. Flyingbird.com/creditcards) which will help a bit with the overall ranking of the site. ].

Search engine optimization really about the audience first and search engines second. You can’t optimize for search engines and expect to keep your readers happy as well. I know a bunch of people keyword stuffed the heck out of their sites, but not only they got banned, the practice was not an audience friendly one. I understand why James Martel believes that an affiliate site is better off if it has keywords in its domain name, but if you have a paragraph as your domain name, your users won’t remember it. So you’ll lose a bunch of traffic that you would’ve gotten with a shorter, sweeter domain name. Search engine optimization firms are focused on getting you the best rankings possible, but the better ones take your audience into account. You can’t and shouldn’t sacrifice everything for the sake of reaching No. 1 position on Google. Ranking won’t matter if you don’t convert.