How to use multiple domains the most effectively

[Chants]

Hi . First of all my apologies for such a long post but I feel it might be of interest to other people as well and hope someone might have enough time to read it.

I am a newbie marketer and have been a little involved in domaining. I advised my brother who is a medical surgeon in training to get a lot of plastic surgery domains ( since this is his field of specialization ). He has paid for all his own studies and wont have much start up capital when he begins to practice so I wanted to help him get a head start with some effective internet marketing.

He made what was for him a significant investment in domains based on my advice and now I am wondering whether this is money well spent.

What urged me to advise him was the following advice i got from a domaining course I bought : " Another excellent marketing tactic you should consider is to have multiple URL addresses ( including your domain name ) point to the very same web site. This will allow you to keep your legacy domain name, while multiple new e-business names conduct commerce and are listed in the search engines, significantly increasing your web sites overall traffic." He goes on to say that many businesses these days own more than one domain for this reason.

However I have since discovered that the url doesnt appear in the search results if you simply type in the keywords ( which is what most searchers do ) but only if you type in the exact domain name ( my brother owns a few .coms , ,nets, .org , .biz and .tel ) Also I was told that if you url forward a domain Google views it as duplicate content and will not list it.

I am quite confused about what the truth is. Is it enough , for example simply to optimize the site for different keywords or is there some value for instance in developing different sites for the business , optimising different keyword with a link to the main site. Or for example developing a domain like abdominoplastytummytuck.com with a link to the main site and bidding on a high volume related keyword like abdominoplasy ?.

What I'm saying is that if there is no value to url forwarding , is there some value in developing the sites independently and optimising for different keywords and linking them all together - giving him bigger exposure or can one achieve the same result with one site.

What I though was that one site with a lot of keywords might be overwhelming and it is better to break down the information into different more focussed sites. Plastic surgery really lends itself to this because there are so many different procedures and a span of related long tail keywords.

Another question I have is if I have say a .biz with a keyword and then optimise the site with that keyword will the site get preference in the search engines because it is a key word domain ? Or is this only the case with .com domains.

I have been trying to get answers to these questions for a long time and it is especially important for me to have reliable information - so that I can advise my brother whether to keep his domains or not. However I would also like to know for myself since I have a small portfolio of domains which I bought with this strategy in mind and dont want to invest any further until I am clear about the mechanisms involved. Thanks a lot for reading to the end !

[INFORG]

You need to develop those domains to get the result you are looking for. I refer to them as "feeder blogs" and develop them for their own keywords, and then link them to the main site. Using multiple Hosting companies or IP's is recommended by many to achieve best search engine results.

You can develop any extension (including .biz), and rank well in the search engines.

[David G]

Hi . First of all my apologies for such a long post.....

The post size is not really a problem, the problem is the formatting and complete lack of paragraphs making it almost impossible to read.

[Chants]

Hi . Sorry about that. I'll try and edit it