let's say there is a website for bankruptcy attorney Joe Schmo of Orlando at joeschmo.com. And he has a lot of good content on his site about his practices and the areas around orlando he services. If he purchase a new domain name that is more keyword friendly like orlandobankruptcyattorney.com and just redirects it to the existing joeschmo.com site, will that help boost the rank of joeschmo.com or will it make no difference since there's no content actually at orlandobankruptcyattorney.com? I'm guessing it does not help because otherwise people would just buy a million domains with relevant keywords and point them toward their site without adding content to them, but I just want to confirm. Please advise. Thanks in advance.
i would not suggest you to do a domain redirect just for having a keyword rich domain. EMDs (exact match domains) used to be one of the main ranking criteria google was using in the past but that has been over used and google knows that. now with penguin update, google considers EMDs as over optimization and actually that has negative impact on your ranking. for example, after the last penguin update, viagra.com didn't rank #1 for viagra anymore and it was a big news. joeschmo.com is a brandable name as you are using the attorney name on the domain. keep it that way but run a good SEO campaign to rank the site high.
That would be useless for SEO but can be helpful for traffic purposes if the domain is getting type-in traffic.