No doubt about it, using a top level domain (TLD) creates tremendous SEO for that site.... not just .gov or .edu. But putting the keywords you want in the order that the searcher is using also is key.
For example we just launched http://homes-for-sale-real-estate.com with each of our clients sitting under it by city and state and it is pulling a entirely new level of SEO for us. Each client (Real Estate) is then optimized at the Office, Agent and listing level...
Example site
Here is the video on all the features of this as marketed by our partner - Techmediamarketing.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YLKTWqftFY
Of course our entire process is to re-post directed links back to the YouTube videos for each listing to increase engagement (time) watching that video by more people. Our clients take our customized java-scripted-slide-shows of their YouTube videos as embedable links and post them on their web blogs, web sites and face book accounts generating huge SEO back links again. We are working with a newsletter company where we will take their embedded links and push that out to their newsletter readers... creating tons of page views, hey video takes longer to watch, email is opened on a mobile device 39% of the time, and creates longer "engagement" ranking for that search term... we win!
So this is an automated process... we are now creating new landing pages for each video, optimized for that city and state, then building clustered landing pages by category (houses for sale city state)... on and on. Cross links, back links, landing pages on our client sites with their videos embedded there, news sites that will take feeds like stumpleupon, tumblr, storify.... each listing is now linked from 10 or more places thus - with the TLD approaching the goal of starting the Google engine to follow all of this makes it simple and automated for tens of thousands of listings and is all kosher for Google (eg white hat).
It is nice to see other stories coming out that verify some of our techniques:
Author Tim Callan | September 28, 2011 on ClickZ
