The .com
 

Can one of you keyword and SEO gurus explain to me why putting "the" in front of a popular keyword seems to rank so well. When looking at various keywords on google and seeing which sites rank for them, I noticed an ever increasing thekeyword.com presence.

Is it simply because of the keyword in the domain name or does having "the" in front matter more than let's say "it" or some other word in front of the keyword.

Thanks :thumbsup

"the" has no positive effect, it's the other terms being in the domain name that do it. Putting "the" in front of the rest of the words in the domain is simply a way of getting a domain name where the EMD is already taken for pretty much all extensions. Say facebook.com is taken but you still wanna rank for 'facebook'. No .org, .net or other extensions are available. You simply register thefacebook.whatever as long as you can find that available.

Of course the above is overly simplified and there are tons of other factors.

I doubt "the" in the domain has anything at all to do with it. It's probably because thekeyword.com has spent time refining their content and optimizing their site more for the keyword than keyword.com has. Or, that thekeyword.com is simply the more popular website than keyword.com.

Thank you for the explanations :) It just seemed odd to keep coming across thekeyword.com, enough so to make me ask.