Best use of a domain name

[WillG]

When I started down the SEO road I had no idea what I was doing. Like everyone else I picked a domain name without knowing the huge benefit of having my keywords in it. I have pored many hours and resources in building the site I have now and doing branding for name. I have realized after looking at my competition getting ranking for the keywords necessary for my niche will never get me to the top 3 spots for more than 1 or 2 keywords. So I bought a domain name with my top 2 keywords in it. Now I am left with what to do with that domain name. According to google I have 16,000 links to my current site. I really dont want to change domain names from the one I have now to the new keyword rich one.

What other options do I have? Is there same way I can use that domain name for ranking to my site. Such as set up some kind of blog and redirect to my established site.

Or should I keep my branded site and change to the keyword rich domain name and redirect my branded site.

If I do change to the keyword rich domain name what kind of hit should I expect. I will have to redirect 400 + pages to make this change.

Thanks for the time and suggestions

[wheel]

You don't just have two domain names, you've got two websites. So you can rank twice on a page. And that's what you should do :).

If you've got all your eggs in domain basket 1 and your rankings drop or you get heavily penalized, you're toast. If you've got two domains, you only lose 1/2 your traffic and have another website all ready for a big push to the top in place of the one you just lost.

However, I would suggest that you are over emphasizing the importance of keyword rich domain names. They are da' bomb on secondary search terms and I love them a whole bunch, but on a competitive term where you're talking sites that have 16K backlinks? The importance of a new keyword rich domain may be a bit overstated.

Look at it this way. When Google sorts sites by a score that determines the rankings, onpage can have a value of 1-10, keywords in the domain can have a value of 0-10, and links can have a value ranging from 0 to infinity. On searches with low competition and few backlinks, where the total scores are in the range of 10-15, getting another 3 or 4 points can change your ranking by pushing your total score from 12 to 15. But where backlinks become huge and you're talking scores of 10000, adding in 10 more points for keyword rich domain takes it to 10010 - doesn't do much of anything.

I know there's a counter balance to that thinking (there are benefits you can leverage with keyword rich) but IMO they're not what you think they are on competitive terms. The proof is, do a search on a competitive term - not many if any exact match domains. Do a search on longtail terms that aren't competitive, you're much more likely to find exact match domains.

But as I said, you should have two domains minimum. If you've got a keyword rich domain, that's a good place to start IMO.

[WillG]

Thanks for the reply the problem I have is this is an Ecommerce site. My niche competitors have been around for years so they have that on me but looking at their backlinks most of them are anchor texted for their domain names and not for specific keywords. Most of my backlinks are pointed towards the keywords I wish to rank for. My site is only 6 months old I may be just not giving the search engines the time to figure out my site so it can rank accordingly. Having a keyword rich domain would seem to be a benefit with backlinks due to no matter how the link anchor text comes your keywords will be there due to them being in the domain name

[Swanny007]

Google has said they're going to stop giving a boost to domain names with keywords in them.

Check out this article [seobook.com...]

My advice, don't switch your domain name, it's not going to be worth it in the long run. Just like Google now ignores hidden text on pages, meta keywords, etc., this will be something that will be *almost* ignored in a few years' time.