Hello Everyone,

I see this code or what ever it is being used by my top competitior.

<!-- the keywords and such -->

Does anyone one know what this will do?

It goes in between the headers and doesn't show up on the webpage only in the html code.

check out the code I am talking about here: www.questrealestate .com

Thanks in advance for any answers.

Those are comment tags and once upon a time many years ago stuffing keywords in comment tags helped with ranking for those keywords. That was a loonnng time ago though and it no longer works.

A few months ago, a realtor stopped into my office and asked me if SEO was right for them. I surprised him with my answer. I said, “I’m not sure, let’s find out.”
In general, SEO works best for people that are selling really expensive items. This is because all things being equal, doing 100 SEO for something worth $1 generally only brings 2x as much traffic as doing SEO for a website selling things worth $10,000. The conversion rate for the website selling $1 trinkets is going to be lower then the one selling a $10,000 service, but not by as much as you might think. The conversion rate depends on the
• quality of the product
• quality of the website
• competitiveness of the pricing (or at least perceived competiteveness).
So, to give you actual numbers… If we did SEO for a website that sells $1 widgets, we might get them 10,000 extra visitors/ month at the end of the first year. This might sound like a lot, but you can only expect them to sell widgets to two to five percent of the visitors. So, they’ll make $200-$500.
Let’s consider the people selling the $10,000 product. They might only have a 0.5% conversion and get an additional 2,000 visitors/ month at the end of the first year. I’m being quite conservative here. 2,000 visitors x 0.5% = 10 sales/month, or $100,000/month in revenue. Pretty amazing, isn’t it. If you want to do SEO for your website, you need to find an expensive item to sell.
What’s the most expensive item that the average person sells during their lifetime? It’s their home. The realtor isn’t generating $200k in revenue every time he/she sells a home. The realtor might be generating $10k in commission revenue. But still, the numbers are impressive. As a realtor, you can expect a SEO campaign with e reasonably budget (around $5,000/month) to generate around $100,000/month in revenue. This works out to a return on Investment (ROI) of $20 in revenue for every $1 invested in SEO.
I finished this discussion and the realtor said three words. “Let’s do it.” He thought for a moment, and added another word “now”.
If you’d looking for a good how-to document that describes almost everything you need to know, then check out this PDF.: http://www.bergstrom-seo.com/resources/google-search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf ".It’s a pretty long document (22 pages) but it tells you everything that you need to know about SEO. Good luck!
You can find more about how SEO relates to the real estate industry here: http://www.bergstrom-seo.com/articles/2009/10/seo-and-real-estate/

I'm a little confused in regards to the comparison to big ticket items opposed to inexpensive items.

I think a lot of it boils down to the product and the demand. I would much rather be at the top of the results for a keyword that converts for an inexpensive product ...... "buy custom pens online" is a search that someone makes when they have their wallet open and are ready to buy. Much more money to be made with that term than let's say "Vancouver property".. Even though Vancouver property is much more expensive than custom pens... there's a lot more people/business googling "buy custom pens online" than "Vancouver property". Also, Vancouver Property is too broad of a search term and not a converting key phrase. Are they looking for Vancouver property to rent? buy? sell?

Realtors are lucky that they aren't competing world wide and usually only against their local niche market. I think $5,000/month is WAYYYY too much unless you are an office that is also supplying leads to your agents.... or your market is EXTREMELY competitive. I think an Internet savvy Realtor that has a basic grasp on SEO can keep their site ranking at the top for well under $1,000/month. There are companies that you only pay if you get results... usually $100-$300/month.......if you get the top 2 rankings for your keywords... you dont pay. Even getting the top 10 keyword phrases for your site will still keep you well under $5,000/ month

Just my 2 bits :)

Jeff