I have seen there are several career blogs which are having domain names matching the names of important examinations, recruitment agencies etc. Most of them are pretty successful by using this strategy. Besides this I have also seen several blogs using the names of famous movie stars as domain names. The most important thing about this type of strategy is that these blogs/ websites are pretty successful and rank high for some very popular key words despite of rare updates and thin content quality. I want to know if this strategy can help in long term. I also want to know if there is severe penalty by Google for using domain name for high rank in search engine.
Well, you can use blog domain names as a keywords but its not necessary because whenever Google index your site in its data bases then you can by default see your domain names at the top position;;; Let me know
Having a good, easy to remember domain name can certainly help. But I think keywords in content are what you want to focus on from this point forward.
You can rank better if you have the keywords in your domain name, and also make sure that you have them in the title an description and use a .com domain.
it used to be one of the must do in terms of onsite optimization but things changed since last penguin update. google went after lot of EMDs (exact match domains) and dropped their rankings. even viagra.com didn't rank #1 for viagra anymore so having your exact keyword on the domain is something to avoid now a days. google considers it as over optimization. you can have partial keyword or if you have long tail keywords, use one word to put together a brandable domain name.
At the end of the day value return is very important. If some process give you the high return you should go with that.