My webiste is www.chriswlee.com

On goolge if you search Tuscaloosa Real Estate or Tuscaloosa realtors mine isn't even on the first page. What can i do to get it up near the top.

I get a lot of my business off of my webpage and i would like it to be easer to find.

Thanks in advance for your help

Read this: http://www.seo-guy.com/tutorial.html

It should give you some good tips...

Chris:

Looked at your site and it look good and the search is great. However, Google places value on links into your site from other sites. When I checked Google for the links to you, there are none.

You have good meta tags and keywords, so the thing you can do yourself that will begin to help with time is to get links to your site. Not easy and takes a while, but I didn't hit the first page on Google until I had more than 40 links in. And that's with more than 150 that I know were linking to my site. Thus Google is only recognizing some of them.

How do i get the links to my site?

Having RSS feeds or a blog will help you get "noticed" by search engines, since search engines like content that is frequently updated.

For an easy way to integrate RSS feeds into your website, try http://www.myrealtyfeed.com

Links are the biggest factor in where you rank as far as Google and the other major search engines are concerned. Jim Kimmons was partially right, Google counts most of the links you get but will only show you some of the links to your site. Yahoo or MSN usually show a much more accurate picture when you do a search for link:www.yourdomain.com. Anyway to get more links, submit your site to directories, write press releases and submit them to other sites, and put links in you posts on furms such as this one.

Getting to the top of the search engine results is the holy grail of all the webmasters.

As the others pointed out, getting backlins is one of the significant actions you can take. There are many ways of doing this but exchanging links with other websites, getting your site included in the internet directories are 2 of the most common ways of doing this.

Good luck...

Chris your site looks good onething you make want to think about is dropping some of the Java you got going on that helps and links

Some stats first:

Last month on the Overture network there were 999 search for the search phrase "Tuscaloosa Real Estate", and there are 5,090 pages on the net with that exact phrase... so you page has to be "better" then over 5,080 pages to be on the first page.

For "Tuscaloosa realtor" there were 231 searches but ONLY 134 pages with that phrase on the Internet.

Now for the bad news... I doubt you'll ever score on the first page of any search engine for either of those terms. The first thing I notice when I go to your website is your title is "RealtySouth - My Homepage". Your title should include the most important search phrase... I would think you website title should be "Tuscaloosa Real Estate - Tuscaloosa realtor Chris Lee". Then I notice those 2 phrases are no where to be found on your page? So how is the search engine supposed to know what your website is about? Your website is in desperate need of some search engine optimization. This can be a DIY project of you have time... the question is, can your website hosting company or template support it?

Some personal advice... go after the search term "Tuscaloosa realtor". I'm betting you can be #1 for that search term, which means hundreds of visitors looking for a "Tuscaloosa realtor" since there are only 500 or so pages out there competing for that term. Do some search phrase research, take the time to understand it, or spend the money for someone to do it for you. The return on investment is HUGE!

In addition to that search there were several other significant key words sets:
"999 tuscaloosa real estate
276 tuscaloosa alabama real estate
150 tuscaloosa al real estate
120 tuscaloosa county real estate
84 real estate in tuscaloosa al
78 real estate in tuscaloosa alabama
48 real estate in tuscaloosa
40 real estate agent tuscaloosa
37 hamner real estate tuscaloosa
35 lake tuscaloosa real estate
34 real estate title company tuscaloosa"

My experience has been that most real estate searches on all the major search engines take some form of "city, state, real estate".

Incorporate those key words into your site's meta tags and the tile and it will improve your search engine ranking.

If you're serious about improving your site's rankings (and attracting lots more business) you might consider hiring a search engine optomizing specialist.

I've used this guy for over 6 years now and he does a great job for my website. Today (6/28/05) we're number 4 on Google organic search for the most often searched for keywords in my area: "Knoxville real estate"

http://www.erpositioning.com/

Ed does a great job AND when he gets you a bunch of top spots and your competitors try to hire him he won't work for them; he only does one type of industry per area, i.e. Tuscaloosa real estate.

Pay Per Click is another way to get instant high rankings; you just bid to determine what you're willing to pay for a top spot on Yahoo, Google, etc.

I logged into my Yahoo/Overture account and found that www.dreamhometour.com is paying 75 cents per click for the top spot in a search for "Tuscaloosa Real Estate" right now and number 2 is HomeGain with a 39 cent bid. So for 40 cents a click you could be in the number 2 spot for those keywords.

As I recall Tuscaloosa is a fairly small town relative to Birmingham, Mobile, and other larger southern cities so with a combination of good search engine optimization/positioning and some pay per click you could probably dominate the search engine results in your area for around 500 bucks or so a month.

How do you find that information about what was searched and how many times it was searched?

http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/

"Keyword Selector Tool" in the "Tools" column.

Google looks at the AGE of sites as well as the AGE of inbound links. They give much higher priority to older sites that link back to you, as well as quality sites. In addition, the older YOUR site is, the higher you will rank.

There are many articles on the 'net in regards to this... here's one> http://www.powerhomebiz.com/052005/sandbox.htm

Therefore, going out and getting a huge quantity of links from new sites won't hurt, but it won't help as much as getting a few good links from some more established, more credible sites.

And... new sites are sort of penalized and are not even ranked at all for at least 8 months...

This is a fairly new thing with Google, and probably done to combat the rampant link exchanges that are going on now. I could spend my entire day trading links it seems. I am very picky now when it comes to link exchanges..... I don't exchange links with every Tom, Dick and Harry. Too time consuming, not enough benefit. I really research people wanting to trade links to be sure the page MY link will be on is cached in Google, that it is accessible from the home page, that there aren't a gazillion links on the page that my link is on, etc. I also tend to not link with any templated sites such as iHouse2000, Advanced Access, Homes.com, Z57, etc. They tend to only be of value to THEM, not to me as those sites usually don't rank well (or at all), their link pages are often framed, many aren't even linked to the home page...

Research the internet for SEO topics and absorb it all in. The SEO-Guy site that Matt mentioned is great.

I launched my homemade website 4 months ago and having implemented SEO strategies it's finally starting to pay off. I've focused on six keyword phrases and I'm now in the top 10 organic results for 4 of the 6 keywords. The two more popular ones, well, I've got some work to do. But, I'm now 66th for my primary keyword phrase (e.g. name-of-city real estate)...three weeks ago, I wasn't even in the top 1000. It's weird though because some days I'm in the 130's and other days in the 60's.

On the other hand, I only have a page rank of 1. Nevertheless, the point is, it can be done.

Not sure if it's kosher to promote other forums, but I learned a lot from webmasterworld.com and realestatewebmasters.com. Also, these sites were helpful too:
spider-food.net
tamingthebeast.net
searchenginewatch.com
googlerankings.com

"How do you find that information about what was searched and how many times it was searched?"

I use: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Don't take it literally, but as a guidline. Then to see the competition on that search phrase, put that phrase in quotes in google. It will say 1 - 10 out of "5,012" pages. The "5,012" is the number of pages google has indexed that have that exact phrase. I use google since google has the largest index to date.

Again, use these number as guide-lines...