Leasing Keyword-Rich Domains

NEW YORK, NY - Pursuant to my post yesterday about buying or leasing keyword-rich domains -- Marios Alexandrou of All Things SEM writes:

"Have you had luck dominating the rankings for keywords that exactly match the domains you purchased other than the three you listed?  Or put another way, out of a hundred domains, what percentage would you expect to grab a top 5 ranking for the target keyword with minimal effort?  Inquiring SEO minds want to know!"

My answer to Mario is a qualified "yes, sort of."  One of the biggest advantages I have is that 99% of my fellow recruiters know very little about SEO.  They seem to know even less about blogging.

That said, I think that if I personally maintained 100 blogs, my user experience would suffer -- and Google would penalize me for that.  As it should.  Keyword-rich domains only differentiate when the content is good to begin with.  And good content is objectively gaged by how much readers link to it, Digg it, Delicious it, comment on it, etc.  But I'm sure Mario knew that already.

From an offline marketing standpoint, shorter URLs are easier to promote in postcards and in classified ads -- and they also pull better online than longer URLs.  See for yourself.

Back to the SEM question: "How are my other blogs doing?"

Well, LogisticsRecruiter.com has done reasonably well (#4) -- and that's a fairly competitive phrase, at least for the jobs and employment category.  But it's too early to put a hard percentage on the matter.  My intention is to hire a good logistics recruiter and have him blog at ...

• LogisticsRecruiter.com
• SupplychainRecruiter.com, and
• LogisticsHeadhunter.com

Consulting is about relationships, trust, and notoriety.  Every staffing consultant of mine will be given a keyword-rich online platform to establish his/her credibility.  As long as the user experience is excellent, I have no reason to believe Google will penalize me for rolling out this model in multiple recruiting categories.

I will likely have to open another Typepad account so that the IP addresses will be different for the logistics / supplychain blogs.  I understand that the major search engines get a little leery of dozens of blogs coming from the same account (although DuctTape Marketing seems to be an exception -- and my own formula will emulate Duct Tape's Marketing Channel).

Bottom line: All of my blogs that have good, original content get linked to.  And when people link to them, their text link references the keywords in the domain.  So it becomes a self-reinforcing loop: What the searcher seeks (such as "finance recruiter") matches the text link; which matches the title tags; which matches the keyword density of my posts, etc.  My position in the organic ranking rises because ...

Everything is in complete alignment.

My blog MarketingHeadhunter.com has been linked to thousands of times - with most of the text links being "marketing headhunter."  In that sense, MarketingHeadhunter.com has become the nexus of all things "marketing headhunter" on the web.  At least for now.

Such a domain name is especially handy since nowadays, most blog spammers simply scrape my content and include a cursory link back to my blog -- which is already "text-link optimized."  Even these second-rate links (like this one) reinforce my position in search engines.  It's nothing I am doing intentionally.  It's just that spam bloggers are too lazy to write decent content, so they scrape mine -- giving me some Google-juice in the process.

Anyway, I have found this page to be a very useful guide to SEO.  The points system they offer seems to be fairly accurate.  I believe that as the SEM arena gets more competitive, domains will become a primary differentiator.  Certainly, a good domain cannot be copied, and its quality cannot be gamed in the same way as text links.

Also, I use BLOGS on Typepad -- as opposed to static HTML pages or blogs on another platform like WordPress.  Maybe that has something to do with my success -- which, of course, might turn out to be fleeting.  If I were really going to test this out, I'd have a control blog on another platform and then run the experiments on another platform.

Let me know what you think.
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