They way you are thinking is something that has bothered the community for more than a decade. Yes, you are actually right that keyword based domain names are ranking higher than non-keyword based. Most likely over time this will change. Something that I always seen with Google is that they are trying to implement changes slowly (meaning that over time these keyword based domain would most likely fade away).

But if you look at the issue at a marketing prospective does this client only want to rank for one keyword? Y/N?

• Yes: then go for it! if this eCommerce will not be targeting now or in the future other keywords then stick to a keyword based domain
• No: if you have a lot of different products and you are looking to rank for different keywords, its better to build a brand name for your company by having a brand name oriented domain name!

I tend to focus to the brandability of the domain name (short,catchy, .com, etc) rather than the keyword focus, UNLESS we you are going to target an extremely competitive keyword which by it self could bring tons of traffic!

Some articles worth reading are:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-your-domain-name-will-impact-seo-social-media-marketing/

http://www.motocms.com/blog/marketing/10-tips-choosing-domain-name/

You could basically ensure that those who are submitting these articles are optimizing the work for you. Am referring to basic on-page optimization on at-least having an appropriate:

• meta title, which that would be the article name, or the first 40 characters of the article name + your forum name.
• Heading 1, which it will be the name of the article
• Heading 2 will be the sub headings, etc
• If the user is adding an image he can add some text to describe the image (thats you alt tag)

I believe the above are the very basic things you could ensure that your submission template does for you by default. Now as for the link coming to this page 'article page' make sure its keywords based link, article name for example.

Sometimes plain HTML based website are easier to optimize. Make sure you add the necessary meta tags, google analytics, headings, etc. you could manually create friendly urls with htaccess! also manually create a robots.txt file and even an xml sitemap which you should find many online portals that could create one for you. Because you will be working on just the code, don't forget to check if there is any broken links!

yes you can still work just fine the html websites!

Am guessing the easier way out of things is just to say build a blog, which in a sense means more content, fresh content, involvement from the company and maybe new links. It also allows you to attract new keywords.. so blog is not such a bad idea. I just hope that you could find more people that would devote their time on their content and website rather than just say "ohh I have an seo to do that, he does everything and we don't wanna get involved"

but yes there is tens of other things other than a blog that are more important..

In cases like this I always say: if it cost's nothing to remove it, then remove it!

you want see a boost, but atleast you have a better base for the future, since we just dont know how things will end up