How important is a domain name for your web site?
Hat impact will the presence of the important search phrases within your domain name have on your web traffic?
Is it important to have a search phrases in the domain name?

All interesting questions. The SEO gurus disagree completely on this, so here are the findings of the real life test of the site: http://www.irishjobsinireland.com/.

Here is a site that has a very descriptive domain name: Irish Jobs in Ireland. It contains the phrases Irish Jobs, and Jobs in Ireland. A site is published about a year ago. The site has some content as well. The number of sites are linking to it, so both Google and Yahoo visit it from time to time.

After a year the Google PR is still 0.

For the phrase: Irish Jobs in Ireland it is only on the 8th spot in Google.ie. For the Irish Jobs or Jobs in Ireland… it is not on the first page.

The concussion is that the search phrase in the domain name helps, but alone cannot do anything meaningful to your web site traffic from the search engines.