I have had my site up for about a year and still do not get ranked in my market. I have herd that Google & Yahoo put sites in a "sandbox" for a year before they start to give them decent rankings. I wanted to ask if anyone else had herd of this? I use the same provider as some other agents I know and I have more/better quality inbound links, unique content and get more traffic. But, I still don't even show up on searches(unless I buy adwords etc.).

Reply google does have a sandbox but you should be able to get some results from yahoo within a few months if you are doing the right things.

Took a quick peak and say this
(h1)
(a href=" http://jimhoulihanrealestate.com/ SiteMap">http://jimhoulihanrealestate.com/SiteMap(/a)
(/h1)
(h1)Jim Houlihan - Silicon Valley Real Estate Services.(/h1)

So you are telling the engines the most imprtatn words on your site are http://jimhoulihanrealestate.com/SiteMap - do a search in yahoo for this and bet you find your page.

Yahoo is huge for on page seo. Learn your title tags and use them wisely. Think of it as writting a paper in college. You have your heading (h1)

Tthen the sart of each paragaraph is an important sentence (h2) - this may require some css work but worth the learn.

Do these minor changes to your home page and get some free quick links and yahoo will be all over it. G - thats a tougher cat to catch.

FYI (=< and ) = >

Trying to engage in SEO strategies while you have content that's duplicated on many sites will be a waste of time in most cases.

The link shows a site I found quickly with a search on one of your For Buyers links text. How many more are out there with the exact same page of text? I am not knocking template sites, as I use one, but the first step should be DELETING their content and writing your own original content. Free articles to help you here.

Norcal Jim,

Google does not have specific "timelines" for when they start to rank a site well. It can hapen very quickly, if you are optimized for terms that nobody elses is competing for.

It has a lot more to do with your competitive environment. Google rewards "establishment", and sites that are more established, with older domaind, more links, links in place for a longer time, etc. tend to do better.

You should work hard on your optimization, contnet, and link popularity.

Here's a multi-page document that was specifically written for real estate professionals, using real estate examples:


Search Engine Optimization Basics For Real Estate-Related Websites

I hope it helps.

You say that you are not being ranked well in your market ... I would suggest that you try Google sitemaps

www.google.com/sitemaps

there is a "Query Stats" page that will tell you if you are ranking and for what search terms

useful as you can track your SEO changes and the impact they have