I am a complete noob when it comes to webiste design. I've read a great deal about what it takes to get to the top of google but I'm not sure how to go about doing it.

I originally had a site through advanced access. I basically put the templates all together, and had all our office listings on it.

Our searh engine rank was abismal other than yahoo for some odd reason. We actually were on the first page of yahoo somehow for Hattiesburg Realtor.

The Templates just sucked and the old site was slow, and rather hard to navigate so I got with a local web designer who has done several local agency sites.


My request were.
I wanted a very simple and easy to navigate site database site that would allow clients to easily search all of our office listings.

I wanted to be ranked on the first page of google for my local area keywords. Hattiesburg Realtor, Hattiesburg Homes for sale, etc.

Well the site was completed about 6 months ago. The website guy seems to have vanished from the face of the earth since then.

My site is ranking horribly on goolge. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I need the help of a professional.

Site is vinesrealty.net

I know several things that can be done to help the rank.
1. The Txt needs to be more specific and rewritten.

2. The domain name is the name of the company. It has no key words. I was thinking www.hattiesburghomesforsale.com and just forward my currenty vinesrealty.net to it? Would that work?

3. I don't have any inbound links. My original intentions were for the site to just be easy to navigate and easily allow clients to easily search our listings.

Is there a dollar amount I can expect to pay to get the site revamped and to the top of google.

I wish I had the know how to design my own sites. Any suggestions for online web design courses I could take? I know nothing about programming... Other than a brief sitnt of pascal.... I'm sure a dead language isn't going to help much...

Start writing blogs about Hattiesburgh homes for sale and link the blog to your website.

I looked over your site. It's not a bad looking site but needs optimizing for the Search Engines (No new news there). For example, there are no meta tags except for a title tag. While keyword tags aren't very important to Google, Yahoo and Bing (Microsoft) rely on them. The description meta tag is very important as it is often used in the search results as kind of a sales blurb. You can move everything to a "keyword" focused URL but I wouldn't bother. Better off sticking with a domain that has been around a while rather than start new (you would loose any Google trust that comes with a site's age). Also, you only have 72 incoming links and it looks like none of the links are from a Page Ranked (Google rating) site so you need more links and some links from high ranking sites if possible. I get a lot of links from real estate articles my wife and I write. I also used some software to analyze your site for the following keywords "hattiesburg homes for sale", "hattiesburg ms homes for sale", "hattiesburg real estate", and "hattiesburg ms realtors". It evaluates your "on page" optimization for those keywords and rated your site a D+ on all keywords. You need to get your site to an "A" or "A+". Bottom line is your site could be modified for better "on page" optimization for not a huge amount of money and depending on how much work you want to do, could have better "off page" optimization for not a huge amount more money. I didn't however analyze your competition. By the way, I am not seeking business. I have my hands pretty full with my note buying business. Sorry to be so long winded but the subject isn't all that simple. Just trying to help. Hope I did.

buy the www.hattiesburghomesforsale.com domain. having keywords in your URL is the most important part of SEO. Next either build a wordpress site or have someone build it for you. Finally hire an SEO to optimize the site once it is built.

"Finally hire an SEO to optimize the site once it is built."

I would get the SEO expert involved before you build the site.

I would recommend first doing your own SEO research before spending money on a so called SEO expert. There's plenty here right on agentsonline. It's also more then SEO it's content that will get leads to contact you. Follow Perky's lead. Also I tried the design my own site a few years ago. Don't bother with that. You need to be focused on selling real estate. You should already spend time blogging not designing a website and taking a class to do it. There are so many choices out there that are fairly affordable like Point 2 agent, busyagentpro and many others. I even had good SEO results with rapidlistings.com. But you do have to know some SEO with all of them. Also for example I just joined a RE/MAX franchise and they give each agent a website that you can get your own domain for, but not to many other in depth SEO controls. I'm already in top 10 of a few search keywords just from linking to it from my blogs in addition to my main websites.

Another good thing is to focus on niche markets. Like foreclosures, farm and ranch, short sales, condos. It's hard to beat the homegains, realtor.com and others with basic search keywords like "your city" real estate. I know I could easily dominate my market keywords when it comes to short sales, but I'm not entirely ready to actually do the short sales. My foreclosure site and farm and ranch site are usually found on the top search engines.

Good advice - find a niche with good search volumes but low competition. Get a domain name with the niche keywords - .com, .biz, .org or .net

Rono and SEORealEstate are pretty much spot on. Every day I am becoming a greater fan of WordPress. It is completely free and you can do everything yourself in a day. For the most part it comes optimized out of the box too and where it is not there is a free plugin which will get you there. Only thing it cannot do is give you good content, linkbacks, articles, etc...

I cannot attach a document here but you can use this report I pulled as a starting point on getting to where you want to be.

http://my411pages.com/corporate/pdf/report-53489-vinesrealty.pdf

1) get a domain with relevant keywords in it (better yet, buy an aged domain with established, relevant backlinks)
2) set up hosting for $5 a month
3) add lots of fresh, original content to the site (add something daily)
4) add meta tags to each page
5) each page needs to target ONE idea
6) sprinkle keywords throughout each page but don't overdo it (no more than 10 keywords on a page) and make sure each page makes sense to your readers
7) generate backlinks - tons of backlinks from well-ranked sites, not junk sites (pr of at least 3)
8) avoid reciprocal linking - google is onto that

Takes work but is worth it.

When on a listing appointment; show your vendor what a tech savvy agent can do to put eyes on their listing.

The more people who see the listing the better off they are
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vuPCF3-ebo

1)Create content
2)Blog about your content
3)Invite local merchants to advertise
4)Talk about the schools town sports events in your blogs offering guest spots to author stories
5)Create a following.
6)Find something for "them" to sign in for.
7)Give it to them.