How to Set up Google Alerts

In a nutshell, Google Alerts are updates sent to your Gmail account that let you know about the most recent Google results based on queries you want to stay informed on. Here is how to get started:

1. Sign into your Gmail account
2. Go into “Account settings.” Click on  “Alerts” directly beneath “My products”
3. Let Google know the search queries you want to be alerted about, (for most SEO campaigns this will be targeted keywords and  branded terms)
4. Set how often you want to receive these alerts
5. Set up a quality filter preference (how many), this can be handy in that alerts can quickly clutter up an inbox
6. Tell Google where to deliver your alerts. This is useful if you have an address you use exclusively for clients
7. Click on “Create Alert”

The other day as I was reviewing a client’s Gmail inbox, I came across the usual three to eight alerts I receive daily (this can also be set to as-it-happens and once a week) for the keywords and branded terms I want to stay current on. The first Google Alert I opened, led me to a blog post that had been flagged because it contained the query “cocktail dresses,” (Google loves to crawl and index content!). The first thing that came to mind was to see if this blog met my criteria for a guest blog post opportunity. In this case, the blog didn’t have the authority and social following that I like to see before reaching out, but it did allow me to place a well thought-out comment that was relevant to the topic of post. While the link was no-follow (doesn’t pass link juice), search engines still index the comment. These types of links still hold value if they come from a relevant, related site. It’s also a good opportunity to increase brand awareness because Google will associate the comment and content of the blog with the link pointing back to your client’s site.

Forum Commenting

The next Google Alert I opened led me to a website where it had found the keyword “vintage clothing” in a question posted on Yahoo Answers. As it turns out, a Yahoo community member was looking for a great place online to shop for vintage clothing. Bingo! It just so happens I know of one. I responded by letting the member know about my client’s collection of vintage clothing and dresses and included a URL in my response. Not only was this a great opportunity to increase my client’s brand awareness, but also to take a potential customer to the exact page on my client’s site where she can find the products she is looking for.

Product Reviews

The next alert I opened was flagged for the keyword “rockabilly dresses.” One of the results led me to a fashion blog that had a high PageRank, domain authority and a large social following.  As I  navigated through the site, I came across a guest post letting me know that the site owner might be open to the possibility of another one. I proceeded to contact the blog owner who responded the next day saying that while she isn’t accepting guest posts at this time, she would be interested in doing a product review. As luck would have it, my client is open to giving away products in exchange for reviews (keeping SEO optimization in mind of course) and hence a mutually beneficial relationship is born.

Sizing up Your Competition

The next alert I clicked on was flagged for the keyword “vintage dresses” and led me to the vintage dresses page on a competitor’s website. While I won’t be requesting a link or a guest blog post, it does gives me an opportunity to take a closer look at a their site, analyze their backlinks, and look for new link opportunities. In this case, I found some great blogs I will be contacting for potential guest blog posts. These alerts are also handy to get a feel for topics or keywords that are trending in your client’s industry as well as for ideas to create content around.

Public Relations and Reputation Management

Using Google News Alerts is a good way to keep an eye on the great (or not so great) things people are saying about your clients on the web and can be a valuable tool and resource for any reputation management campaign. It’s an easy way to stay updated on any recent news, industry events, conferences, summits, etc., that your client is involved in and forgot to mention. These can turn into an opportunity for a press release or a blog post. You want to keep people in the know about the all the great things your client is doing!

Business Directories and Listings

Using Google Alerts can also lead you to business directories and listings that are specific to your clients industry or niche. These types of relevant links can help to build the overall authority of your website.

While not all alerts are going to be link opportunities, if you’re willing to dig a little you might be surprised at what you’ll find. Let me know about anything I might have missed or share a success story of your own from using Google Alerts in the comments below.

A link farm is a website with a high number of links to different websites with no relevance or category logic, grouping, organization, or relevance to the domain name.

If you land on a site and there are hundreds of links all over with many unrelated topics, you’ve probably landed on a link farm. Link farms ARE spam and will be considered as such by Search Engines. The key purpose of link farms are to easily and illegitimately send signals to search engines to assist in ranking.

A few important things to keep in mind when it comes to link farms:

1. If you’re using link farms in any way for your SEO, STOP! It will not serve your clients end goal to rank well and long.
2. If you take a client on or have a website where you find your website has somehow been included in a link farm take corrective action to be removed.
3. And most of all, remember that SEO is ALL ABOUT RELEVANCE. Links farms are the exact opposite of obtaining the correct relevance signals to rank organically. The best and most legitimate way to build an quality SEO marketing campaign is through legitimate digital marketing initiatives like guest blogging, public relations, high level directory link building, internal blogging and user generated content, social media and keeping your business at the forefront of news and minds so that natural links are acquired.

It’s important to do everything you can to diversify your link portfolio and make your links appear as natural as possible. This means having different types of relevant links coming from various different domains and IP addresses.

Be Honest – Is Your Business Worth Talking About?

In the last six months, did your business create anything that caused people to turn their heads and take notice? I mean a product, a piece of content, a video series, a service, or anything else at all? If you can’t honestly answer yes, then why would anybody want to link to you? Duke Cannon is a perfect (but crass) example of a company that gets this, and boy are they getting links for it. Forgive me for getting so basic, but we have to get this out of the way. Natural links go to businesses that are making people talk. Do that.

Ok, that’s out of the way.

Go Find The People Talking About You

Assuming you create some kind of buzz with your products or content, you’ll come across people talking about you. If you’re big, invest in social media monitoring like Trackur to see what they’re saying and where they’re saying it. If you’re just getting going, set up a few Google Alerts around your brand name and keywords. Stay on top of what they’re saying because you might want to reach out to one of them (I’ll give you a good example of how to do this in a minute). And also, you should be where they are. If people talk about you on Twitter, you need to be there too.

Contact Those People

When you come across that glowing review of your new product, promptly contact the author. Tell them you’re grateful they wrote the review, and be generous with your praise. They may have even linked to you in their review, but if not, find a nice way to ask them to. They already love what you do, so they’ll probably support you if you tell them how much a link would help you.

Link building is a critical part of most SEO campaigns. If you have a solid strategy to obtain legitimate links from relevant websites, you’re adding value to the web and typically, raising your rankings within the search engines in the process. On the other hand, if you’re link building to sketchy websites for the sheer purpose of manipulating the search engines without providing any value, it’s easy for the search engines to see your shady tactics and adjust your rankings accordingly.

However, what happens when you’re a legitimate business that unknowingly hires a spammy SEO company? Or, what if your competitors decide to sabotage your rankings by throwing some money and/or resources at a smear campaign, filled with massive amounts of unnatural links? Does a business owner’s website deserve the“Google slap” when they had no intention of violating Google’s policies?

Personally, I have received an over-optimization penalty from the search engines because of my own stupidity. It was one of those “life lessons” that I deserved because I knew better, but applying the same consequences to all webmasters is borderline unfair.

For example, I currently have a client who has had prior SEO campaigns from illegitimate, overseas companies that did more harm than good. Those companies got him 340,000 external links over the span of 18 months in the footer and sidebar of 90 different domains using their main keywords. They also had keywords with Chinese and other Asian characters. Oh, I almost forgot, there were porn sites in there too. Did this trusting website owner deserve a penalty from Google because his SEO company is engaging in wrongful strategies?

If you had an established company and you saw a competitor quickly coming up in the SERPs, how far would you go to stop them? After all, you want to stay at the top and dominate your niche. If you were experienced enough to understand that building an unnatural link profile to a website could result in penalties, would you? I wouldn’t, but that’s because I’m an honest person. I’m willing to bet, however, that most people would try and destroy their competitor’s rankings given the chance.

Google: Help us, Help you

This isn’t the first time somebody has suggested Google allow us to disassociate our websites with another linking website. Dr. Pete from SEOmoz already gave his modest proposal in an excellent blog post on 6 ways to recover from bad links. I’m sure others have covered it as well.

There are a few ways Google could allow us to help them combat webspam. One excellent way is to create a robots-only file on your website similar to a robots.txt, where you can specify what websites you want to disallow.

If that method doesn’t work, it could always be built into Google Webmaster Tools. This concept isn’t complex and I can’t imagine it being difficult for the search engines to execute, but it definitely would protect business owners from shady SEO firms and prevent unethical competitors from sabotaging your website.

Dr. Pete already did an excellent job with his suggestion, but if this blog post has any purpose, it’s to raise awareness of this problem. Being able to disassociate incoming links at the very least, would raise the standards and practices of SEO companies and prevent oblivious business owners from getting screwed.

To me, it would make sense for Google to allow webmasters to do this. At the very minimum, it would allow inexperienced site owners to quickly recover their losses after being duped by an illegitimate SEO firm. It would also protect new websites from being sabotaged by big competitors. However, what reasons do you think Google has for not doing this?

In my career as a journalist, I’ve had the opportunity to cover breaking news events from around the state of Utah. In the summer of 2010, a major oil pipeline developed a leak, forcing more than 20,000 gallons of oil into Salt Lake City’s Red Butte Creek. It was a major catastrophe from both an environmental and economic standpoint. People wanted to find out how the oil leak affected them, the extent of the damage, the clean-up efforts, and what government and company officials were doing to rectify the situation.

The news business is not unlike other businesses. Many have their favorite station to watch, or their favorite radio frequency locked on their preset when they want to avoid a traffic jam. Often consumers will buy their groceries from the same store, and even show preference to one brand over another. Think Apple products versus Android. During the oil leak, and the many months of clean-up afterwards, residents wanted the latest information, and consumed that information through a variety of channels. They also had very high expectations from the station, and wouldn’t have been satisfied with a 2 or 3 line story about the oil leak or a regurgitated press release.

So, how does a major news event correspond with effective linkbait content? Think about what you do when you hear breaking news through the grapevine. Let’s say you arrive at work early, sit down at your desk and turn on your computer. Suddenly, you notice your coworkers huddled around the office television, and you look at the screen and see images and video of a building fire. After watching the TV for a few minutes, you turn around and type in the URL to your favorite news station’s website to see if they’re covering that breaking news.

What if your website became that instant source for information about your industry? It can! In fact, that’s what SEO.com strives to be in the search engine optimization industry, and it’s highly rewarding to see people link to our blog posts. I don’t mind tooting my company’s horn a little, because we’ve worked hard to become one of the leaders in the industry. There’s no reason why your website can’t do the same!

How to earn links naturally

You may have heard the phrase “Content is King”. In April 2011, my colleague Kevin Phelps challenged that belief, and offered some alternatives to content marketing, including traditional SEO, PPC and social media efforts to garner more traffic. While the written word is still incredibly valuable, there are many other ways to earn links naturally. Remember my example about the oil leak? There were many ways to get the latest information about that leak, including video, newspaper, radio and website content. In the linked story, there were links to external websites so readers could get even more information about the spill. There were photos, in depth interviews with government officials, helicopter footage of the damaged areas and social media buttons to help you share that story with your friends and family. They offered a comments section, so you could share your views and stories about how the spill affected you. There were different angles of the story, like how the oil leak affected local wildlife, and even numbers and email addresses to local resources.

Now, I understand that this is a news station which has hundreds of employees on the ground and behind the scenes working on the story. Not everyone has the time or resources to invest in making content like this. The point of this example is to show you ways to earn links naturally. Let’s say you own and operate a website that sells air fresheners. Not terribly exciting, is it?

One of the elements of SEO that I recommend is having a blog on your website. Search engines want to show fresh content in their results pages, and blogging is the best way to make sure these search engines keep coming back to your site. Sometimes you can even rank for long tail keywords placed within the blog posts.

You may be struggling to think of ways to write about air fresheners specifically. In this case, you should start thinking laterally. Take a moment and think about ways people use air fresheners. How about in their cars? People enjoy taking long road trips with their families, and often use a search engine to help figure out what they need to pack. This is a great opportunity to write a 50-point packing checklist for your blog. You could even add real check boxes instead of bullet points, and make the page print-friendly. REI’s “Expert Advice” section is a great example of this. Chances are, if people find your content useful, engaging and easy to use, they’re more likely to link to it. One hour writing a blog post or article like this could easily earn many links down the road. Is the time investment worth it? Of course it is!

Follow the trending topics

I use this strategy daily on a website I own about local news. A few weeks ago, Northern Utah experienced a strong wind storm that uprooted trees, snapped power lines and caused extensive damage. People immediately flocked to the Internet to view pictures and read about what was happening in their communities. I continuously wrote new content and provided pictures that people sent to me, and Google indexed my articles almost immediately. I saw a lot of unique visits from long tail keywords, and gained a large amount of natural backlinks. Besides the established news stations, I was one of the first local websites to break the story, and became part of the conversation. Social media networks are a great way to find out which topics are trending.

Let’s go back to my air freshener example. You probably think of those tree-shaped air fresheners that you can hang from your rear view mirror in your car, but “Febreze” is a brand that seems to be set on changing peoples’ perception of what an air freshener can do. Check out their page called “Breathe Happy”, which is filled with interesting statistics like “17% think crayons are the most recognizable childhood scent”. I’m not one who would hang out on a website about air fresheners, but this page is actually pretty interesting, and there’s lots of great stuff to explore!

During the holiday season, many people like to host parties at their homes. Often, it’s a chance for hosts to spray some type of holiday-scented air freshener before the guests arrive, or after the guests leave. Why not write a blog post about tips for hosting a holiday party, and include a tip for air fresheners?

The point here is to think outside of the box, and put yourself in the place of your customers. What are they talking about? What are the trending topics within your industry?

Please share your experiences with effective linkbait, and offer any suggestions in the comment section below!

As I discussed in a post over at PRMarketing.com, the sole purpose of infographic marketing is to attract natural backlinks. Infographics, when created with a purpose and an end goal, do just that; get loads of natural backlinks that are very hard to replicate by competitors.

The trick to getting even more backlinks is by increasing the number of people seeing your graphic, liking it, and sharing/embedding it on their own website. I like to generate this additional visibility by submitting my graphics to infographic directories.

Web Directories

Many SEOs cringe when they hear the word directories. Most think that link acquisition via directories is a dead tactic. As Cyrus Shepard over at SEOmoz blogged about last month, directory link building is alive and well, but the way we should approach this link building tactic has changed considerably when compared to ten years ago.

One of the most basic rules that SEOs live by these days is to only submit to relevant web directories. This can include directories of a specific type (infographic, document sharing, etc), industry/keyword specific directories, or region specific directories. Submitting to these types of directories will ensure you get maximum value out of these types of links.

Infographic Directories

Now that we’ve established that some directories can still provide value, lets talk about infographic directories. Truth be told, there are quite a few awesome infographic directories out there that not only give you great backlinks to your website, but generate visibility, and often times drives traffic to your website. As infographics continue to grow in popularity, the number of directories will also grow, giving us additional distribution points for our graphics. For now, here is a list of the infographic directories that we use at SEO.com when promoting a graphic:

http://visual.ly/

http://www.coolinfographics.com/

http://submitinfographics.com/

http://www.infographichub.com/

http://www.infographicsshowcase.com/

http://www.wallstats.com/

http://www.best-infographics.com/

http://www.omginfographics.com/

http://dailyinfographic.com/

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

http://flowingdata.com/

http://infographicsite.com/

As always, submitting to each of these sites doesn’t guarantee that your graphic will get published. Keep in mind that your graphic needs to be quality. If it is, you will get a lot of links, passing a lot of link juice, and a ton of additional visibility.

Although this was a short post, I hope it was valuable and ask that if you know of other great infographic directories out there that you will share with us in the comment section below.

Idea Generation

The first and most common way to start guest blogging is by finding blogs that write about topics directly related to yours. For example, if I run a website that sells a weight loss supplement, I should look for blogs that write about weight loss or the actual supplement that I am selling on my website. To the engines, most of these links are highly credible because of how relevant the websites are to my site. I want to get as many of these as I possibly can.

The second way, which takes a little more creativity, is by finding blogs that write about topics that relate to your products or services indirectly. Using the same example above, I might look for a blog that discusses everything you need to know about being a new mom and offer to write them a post about how to lose the baby weight. I might also look for a celebrity blog that discusses the latest celebrity fads and offer to write them a post about the latest weight loss fads that celebrities are into.

If you really put some time and effort into it, posting your content on sites that relate indirectly can help you reach viewers that you might not have reached otherwise.

Research

There’s probably a dozen ways to get started researching blogs to publish your content on, but in this post, I am going to stick to the two ways that I use most often.

Typically when I begin a guest blogging campaign, I start by searching the keyword or topic in Google and selecting blogs. As you can see in my example below, www.weightlosswithsandra.com/blog/ might be a legit site to get a guest blog post published on. When I visit the site, it looks like she accepts content from many different individuals or websites, so I would add this to my list.

When I exhaust my Google Blog search, I turn to more advanced search queries. These queries will drum up more results than a typical Google Blog search and can bring additional opportunities to get your content published. Some of the more popular search queries that I use are as follows:

[keyword] blog

“[keyword] blog”

intitle:[keyword] blog

inurl:[keyword] blog

“add comment” [keyword]

“post comment” [keyword]

intitle:tag [keyword]

intitle:post [keyword]

[keyword] guest writer

[keyword] guest blog post writer

[keyword] submit content

[keyword] submit post

[keyword] submit blog post

[keyword] guest blogger wanted

Blogger Outreach

Reaching out to blogs, asking them to post your content, and actually getting it published can sometimes be tricky. That’s why building a relationship with the site owner or blogger before asking them to guest blog is often the best route to go.

To start building the relationship, I start off by commenting on and sharing some of their content through social channels. After doing this a for a few weeks, I will reach out to them via email or a contact form. I let them know how much I appreciate the information I read on their blog and that I have been sharing it on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. I find that if I tie in the sharing of their content in the initial email, I get a much higher response rate. When I get a response, I begin the discussion about writing a unique piece of content that can be published on their website. The rest is pretty much history.

I would like to wrap up the post by mentioning that guest blogging shouldn’t be a one and done strategy. You should work to keep the relationship with these bloggers alive for as long as you can. Just because you post a piece of content on their site once, doesn’t mean you can’t get another piece published in the future. Reach out to them often, ask them to share your content through social channels and continue to share theirs. You can also ask them to post your other types of content like infographics and videos. With just a little effort on your part, you can have a “link building partner” for life.

I just finished reading an interesting article: The blogosphere as an excitable social medium: Richter’s and Omori’s Law in media coverage, It takes us through the effect blog content instigates online. In it the authors ran studies focusing on keyword usage to discover how people react to new information by their blogging behavior. The result was a discovery of two types of events:

Exogenous: These are events where the use of a keyword is recognized in one sudden explosion. They used the event of Sarah Palin’s nomination as an illustration by following the use of “palin.” The event drew a massive, out-of-nowhere interest in the subject. Shown in graph figure (a).

Endogenous: These events begin gradually with the use of a certain keyword increasing to an eventual climax. The scenario exampled in the article was when President Obama’s inauguration was approaching. They tracked the use of the word “inauguration” and found it to follow the format of the graph in figure (b).

In both scenarios it was discovered these occurrences—particularly the fore and aftershocks— are similar to the experience of earthquakes.

So what does this mean for SEO? We know people are reacting to and involved with blogs. We also know online interaction is increasing. The question we should be asking is, “what marketing opportunities are being missed in these scenarios?”

The above occurrences likely would have been spotted and discussed  without all the research spent discovering it. The endogenous event is one I feel SEOs are already doing well fielding for optimization and link building opportunities. However, when approaching an exogenous (or sudden) event I find these are missed opportunities.

A Call For Collaboration

More than any other issue in digital marketing, I consider collaboration among inbound marketing initiatives (PR, social, email, paid advertising, SEO, etc.) to be the biggest downfall. With more collaboration of marketing efforts these explosive events could be pushed more effectively and achieve larger gains.

Here is one instance I see this happening:

A company is featured on a large website, television show or otherwise. Likely the PR department was responsible for facilitating the appearance, but this wasn’t well communicated to the other marketing departments. Soon after follows a mass spread of information and news online about the subject. To the naked eye this seems great. The company got exposure, increased in sales and is doing well. But what was missed here:

• A well-crafted press release (for both SEO and PR purposes) could have been coordinated.
• Social media could have been building anticipation and preparing for how to push it best after—creating a well-rounded trend.
• Paid search could better prepare with additional keywords to bring into the campaign.
• Already established online relationships could have been contacted, guest blog posts and other specific link opportunities could have been brought in.
• An email campaign could have been designed for correct timing in correlation.
• Quality, fresh and optimized content could be prepared to go live on the site.
• And likely many other approaches…

From a data perspective, would you rather see one large spike in traffic and revenue that month or a consistent above-average trend all month long? Nearly every time a steady trend achieving long-term gains will be better than a single spike. By unifying marketing avenues an exogenous event will become an endogenous occurrence with long-lasting results.

I see this issue occurring in-house and from an agency platform as well. In the most recent SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday, Tom Critchlow did a great job explaining the importance of communication and processes to be sure SEO gets done:

…When you’re trying to get things done, processes are at the heart of everything a business does. If you want to make something happen that isn’t already happening, you need a new process, or if there is an existing process, you might need to modify that process to make it SEO friendly or make it happen in a particular way.

The integration of marketing departments needs to begin at an upper level. This is one of those new processes to set in place. SEO specialists, social media gurus and PR experts all know how to roll out an effective campaign. But what seems to be missing is the perspective that all of these campaigns can be viewed as one. What is really lacking is effective project management between the different avenues.

Let me know your thoughts. Have you had this same experience or do you have an effective process established?

One of my favorite ways to generate natural links coming into a website is by creating and publishing link bait. One form of link bait that I really enjoy and have a lot of success with is being one of the first to blog about current events happening in your industry.

With the roll out of Google Instant, the almighty search engine has gotten pretty close to indexing new content published in as little as a few minutes. Add some Diggs, Stumbles, and Tweets within the first 30-60 minutes and you’ve got instant visibility!

You’re probably thinking… But Greg, my industry is so boring, there is no way for me to find things to blog about, let alone current events. I beg to differ… Your industry is not boring, you’re boring! And you’re not thinking outside the box.

For example, I have a client who manufacturers wood flooring used on college basketball courts. What could my client possibly blog about that would be interesting? Let me give you a hint… there was some sort of a basketball tournament that was wrapped up in the last week. Imagine if you were one of the first who published a blog post announcing the winner of the NCAA Final Four tournament? You would not only drive loads of traffic, but people will consider you as a resource and link to you. It’s really a beautiful thing.

Let’s consider another example. I also have a client who manufacturers and sells wedding dresses. Again, what could my client say about wedding dresses that hasn’t already been said thousands of times before? What if my client started to blog about celebrity weddings, providing details and photos, and was one of the first to publish these posts? Same scenario as above… You will drive loads of traffic and people will link to you.

As I shared in my webinar a few weeks back, I leverage this exact strategy on a website I own that sells tungsten wedding rings. I blog about recent celebrity engagements and provide pictures of their engagement/wedding ring and I see huge success. I know it’s kind of embarrassing to share, but I watch E! News & read US Weekly on a regular basis to get the scoop on engagements so I can post the content as soon as possible. It’s truly all about being smarter than the next guy!

So, to get started, I would first identify the types of people, businesses, organizations, etc who would use your product or service. Then, figure out how they use your product or service. Once you know this, you should be able to come up with some clever ways to produce content that would be interesting for people, especially if you can tie it back into a current event.

Good luck! Any questions/comments that add to the discussion are always encouraged and appreciated!

Theoretically speaking, my competition could match my site in each of these categories. For example, if I build a high-quality link, my competition can do the same. If I optimize my title tags, H1 tags, content, and other on-page elements, then my competition can essentially do the same.

In essence, they can match me link-for-link, quality content for quality content, title tag for title tag and everything else I am doing to ensure they rank just as good, if not better than I do.

However, one thing they cannot do is match the domain name of my site. Having a great domain name is an exception, and Google and other search engines place a lot of emphasis on keyword rich domains.

This is where Google and others have shown some biases toward websites. How is it that search engines are biased? Unfortunately, search engines use highly complex algorithms to find and display the results you and I see, and with any computer-run system, you can find a way to manipulate it.

For example, look at the search results for “online universities,” a keyword in a known ultra-competitive industry.

The first three results are for www.onlineuniversities.com followed by a mix of .com and .edu websites. This might look good on the surface, but looking deeper into why these sites are ranking revealed some interesting results. I only looked at .edu sites to get an idea of why they are not ranking in the top spots since it would be natural to think an .edu should show up before a .com.

Onlineuniversities.com has a small amount of Open Site Explorer and Google links compared to the rest of the competition for this term. In addition to having a lot fewer back-links, there is a huge discrepancy between their number of .edu and .gov links compared with the competition.

So how is it that Onlineuniversities.com is out ranking four .edu sites, which are highly relevant to the search term “online universities”?

I attribute a lot of this to the domain name. There are other reasons keyword domains and SEO go hand in hand such as:

• Credibility – A keyword specific domain looks more trustworthy to search engines and to individuals linking to the site.  If someone has a business selling widgets and their website domain is widgets.com, search engines and individuals have a good idea what the purpose of the site is.
• Anchor text links – External links to a keyword domain include that specific keyword in the link because that is the company name. This is a great way to get keyword anchor text links from directories like Yahoo, Business.com, and Best of the Web. These directories don’t allow keywords to be used in the title when submitting a listing. They only want the business name however; if the name of your business online is keyword rich there is a good chance you will get listed in these types of directories.
• User-friendly – Keyword domain names are easier to remember then other domains. From a user perspective, they are more likely to remember widgets.com then reverbnation.com which is actually a site that shows up for the term widgets.

Individuals in the SEO industry would argue that Google is placing less emphasis on keyword rich domains, but I feel like they still place a fair amount of weight on these types of domains. This is a great strategy to incorporate with your SEO efforts and one that creates a core competency for a business. In every niche, you will find keyword rich domains and that is why businesses are looking to use a keyword domain to their advantage.