Lets say I found a decently searched term with low competition like "great cakes" and the #1 site result on google was greatcakes.com. If I registered buygreatcakes.com would that domain help me rank on the first page of google easily?
It will help site but not make it rank number one. You still need to make site seo for google and get alot of links to the site.
I think it helps if you have the keyword in your domain but your SEO effectiveness is way more important...Also the domain is your brand so sometimes it's better to brand yourself rather than to worry about something that really won't help a whole lot...
It definitely helps in this way: Often times people will link to a site using the domain name. Because the domain name is in the URL this will help the link reputation for those keywords. I don't think it makes any difference in Google otherwise. Although MSN & Yahoo may put some weight on domain names.
It will make no difference... Domain name can be A LITTLE helpful in the exact match ONLY... i found this cool post that supports me about domain names.
It will really help you rank well for the term buy great cakes very easily but still you need to do onsite and offsite optimization for it.
Yes, it will help a lot. But if your keyword is 'great cakes' I would go for greatcakes.net as it is very important that 'great cakes' are right in the beginning of your domain name. Still you need to do optimatization.
Or if you want you just buy great-cakes.com as I believe I heard somewhere that google prefers a dash inbetween words.
I doubt, if there is any influence, it will be not much. And when you will start to build backlinks it will be neutralized completely.