Because the search engines, including Google, put a lot of emphasis on the actual words in the domain itself, many people are now trying to make their web presence search engine optimized by buying domain names that contain their target keywords.
It’s not a bad strategy because it won’t hurt you, but how much does it really help you?
Let’s say you now have 30 domains that contain all of your target keywords but not your main website. What can you do with them?
1. Keep them registered and do nothing. This prevents competitors from registering them and using them to their advantage. Bottom line: No SEO score for obvious reasons.
2. Within your registrar’s account, you can set up 301 permanent redirects for everyone and redirect them to your main website. Bottom Line: No SEO value, but if someone types in the exact domain name of a domain you’ve registered and redirected, they’ll be redirected to your main website, so you might get some traffic, but probably not and not much.
3. Use them to build a mini-site. This strategy consists of using each domain on its own by creating a mini website to use around it. Bottom line: Potentially a TON of SEO value.
Let’s take a look at this “mini site buildout” strategy; the ones with the greatest SEO value.
One by one, you take each domain and host a site for it. If you have a hosting account for your main website, you can probably just add new websites to the same hosting account. This is very common and you can easily find out if you can do this and how to do it by calling your hosting company and asking.
Once you’ve set up your hosting and each domain points to its own mini-site, you’ll want to create each site.
The easiest way to build any website is to do two things: first, plan all of your content around your main keyword (the keyword that’s in the domain name) to include both articles and videos; and second, you develop the website using some kind of ready-made website template with an integrated CMS (Content Management System). Probably the best CMS for this case would be WordPress as it is very user friendly, search engine friendly, easy to set up and there are loads of free (and well designed) templates available.
OK, so now you have your domains pointing to their own respective mini-sites, you’ve created all of the content for them, developed the sites, and finally published all of that content that you’ve created on the sites, hopefully using a CMS like WordPress at that.
Now keep an eye on your main website and you should make sure that you drive traffic from your mini websites to your main website. To do this, simply add content about your main website to these mini-sites and add links that lead back to your main website. Also, if you have a business phone number and operate over the phone, make sure you include your primary business phone number on all of these mini-sites.
There are more advanced SEO techniques you should employ; however, that is well beyond the scope of this information.
In summary, if you have already invested or plan to invest in buying multiple domains for SEO purposes, you can put them to good use. “Locking” them up unused or simply redirecting them to your main website are not effective strategies. You want to use them to build an “internet empire” with lots of “internet properties” all focused on your target keywords and eventually driving people to your main website and business.
