Hello Everyone,

I am new to the whole SEO thing and I need a dummied up version. I've been reading the forum and it says do this but not this, this only on tuesdays, and something about bad neighbhors. I feel like a baby in a topless bar, overwhelmed. Can someone please explain where to find PR's, how to tell who's good to link to and who's bad, and put me on the right track?

Thank you kindly!

Part of the problem is the source you've selected to question. Google is the top search engine on the internet, best ask them what they like;

http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/

You can ask a SEO expert, but now your into voodoo and the sales pitches to promote patrinage.

Ask Google?.....surely you're kidding

Google is not very forthcoming in explaining their algorythms in any meaningful way....ever And by all means...stay away from anyone that studies and performs seo for Real Estate companies for a living....

By the way...can anyone tell me how to sell my home for top dollar without using one of those Realtors that will try to sell me their listing agreement .... Not trying to start a flame war but just making a point. Your host here, Doug, can provide all the help you'll need

Ben, these days good old common sense may get you further than studying seo Do what you think makes sense. I'm serious about it, too. If you like a site, link with it. If you can buy advertising somewhere for a good price, do it. Don't get too caught up in the seo game. And btw, if you really want to learn, there are about 1,000 threads in here about related subjects

Mike

P.S.: Welcome to Agentsonline

Ask Google?.....surely you're kidding

...all those SEO experts staring blindly at Google's 'for web designers' page, thinking, what happened?...

Back to the question ..

SEO = Search Engine Optmization = taking the steps to improve your ranking on the search engines.

There are a host of companies that sell services designed to improve your rank. Most focus on refining your key words in your meta tags (every web site has a header where you can specify the relevant key words), making your content key-word dense (repeating your key words in the copy) and obtaining incoming links to your site.

I broker an agency with several web sites and many agents with individual web sites. I keep a close tab on our positioning and here are a few observations:

* The key to good placement is good content. This is where most of the template sites fall short. You need to take the time to write about your market in detail, not only on your home page but on the other pages.

* Most folks' meta-tags are very poorly done. The vast majority of real estate searches are in the following form: "place name + real estate". Yet, most folks only put in their major community. Consider incorporating zipcodes, key subdivisions, and surrounding communities --- and add your state also.

* A web site is an ongoing process. Stale content, ie. not changed for 6 months or so tends to be penalized. I try to modify and improve our agency sites every month or so.

* Pay-per-click helps to get a site recognized intitially. But, it doesn't guarantee position. If you are doing the job right, you can restrict your pay-per-click once you get on the first page of a search engine.

Anyway, these are my observations. My personal belief is that most of the "tricks" don't help that much.

I speak from the perspective of having the #1 site on google/#3 on yahoo (top local site) for my primary market for the past 4 years. And, the web sites for my other two offices are rapidly moving into similar positions. My agents' sites in one of our markets have 4 of the top 10 positions (and only 2 others are local).

Anyway, my thoughts.

Steve Taggart
Broker
CENTURY 21 Advantage
"Southeast Idaho's Real Estate Leader"

I have a couple of suggestions for you. As it has been stated Seo is common sense. I would recommend that you do read up on Seo in a few Seo forums. There are several you can take a look at to get started.

I hope I will not upset the Mods or Admins for this. Take a look at Digitalpoint forum, Seochat forum and Webmasterworld forum. These forums will give you a little insight to the basics of Seo. After this I would also follow Matt Cutts blog, he is the head Google Engineer and offers some good advice and a little more insight to what Google looks for in sites. You can find all these by searching google, sorry I do not want to add urls to these sites out of respect for this site.

Some general things you need to start with for common sense Seo.

1. H1 + H2 Tags
2. Title Tags
3. Meta Tags
4. Navigation Structure
5. Write Lots Of Content
6. Maintaining acceptable density levels for your keywords.
7. Create Sitemap
8. Get Backlinks
9. Setup Blog write articles and create backlinks to portions of your main site.
10. Submit press releases, dont just write to be writing, create an article that readers will find interesting, do not create press releases for self promotion.

These are just some common sense Seo practices. Follow these guidelines and it will take you time but as long as your site stays clean you will acquire rankings in the search engines. Sorry but one last piece of advice..Content Is King, write lots of it. The more real estate content you have the better. Word of warning though do not copy someone elses content, that can land you in court and cause your site to get ban by the search engines.

Plain english....

SEO is this dude you give a little money to and he screws around with your site... if you get a whole bunch of traffic you give him a lot more money. If he pisses off Google, nobody ever sees your site ever again and he changes his phone number.

Simple as pie.

There's some good info and some outdated and old info so far... SEO for real estate sites is a unique animal and can vary litterrally by market. Definitely by far the most competitive area for those seeking ranking.... besides the gambling and viagra sites that is...LOL

There are so many variables it's nearly impossible to answer intelligently without seeing your site and knowing exactly what keywords your seeking to capture so lots of analysis can be done before you start doing anything at all... I know that's a pretty vague answer but being more specif without more details is pointless... .... oops...gotta go call the phone company now

Hi all,
SEO will allow you to get business. Unfortunately it is not an exact science. Many people try to optimize their site with no sucess and many SEO guy's are don't know half of what they should. To find a good SEO, try first by analyzing results of what they have done in the past and in how long they produced theses results.

Kamal
Miami Beach Real Estate
Miami Real Estate

Ben,

SEO is really just looking at the sites that rank above you, figuring out what they are doing to rank well, and then incorporating that knowledge into your own site. The list given by MyGoRealty is a good list of things to look for to begin your comparisons.

The best thing to do of course is to do all of this BEFORE you have a website designed because trying to optimize a site after can entail making major changes to your site.

For competitive commercial keywords Google has simplified all of this for us though. If you look at the site that has been #1 in your area since the Florida update in November 2003 you will find that the reason is that they have "traded" lots of links over the years. The thing is that they really have not traded at all as their own links pages actually reside on a different website - meaning they have all one way links pointing at their site. Google thinks they must be a great resource because so many people have linked to them without getting a link in return.

Your job is to do the same as they have (without being called a cheat)

Here is Search Engine Placement we can all understand:

Remember those cool kids in High School? Well, they were only cool because the other kids thought they were cool. And to be cool it took one of two things: appeal or money.

If you want high search engine placement, then you have to appeal to other "cool" sites so they exchange links with you or you just buy your position like the rich kid whose father gave him a corvette for his 16th birthday (fair warning: This can also backfire for your site just as it did for the "snotty" rich kid).

Since most agents don't have tons of money to waste on online marketing (and most of it is wasted), your best bet is in getting other cool sites to link with yours by increasing your online appeal. Make sure you use key terms in the text of your site, not just the metatags: homes, houses, sale, buy, your city, neighborhood names, etc. Make it easy to use by adhering to the unofficial 3-click rule: get visitors to the information they want within 3 clicks or they'll find a site that will.

I suggest finding the highest ranking site of your competitors and then track down their links. Exchange your links with the same sites that list your competitors. Rule of thumb: Don't pay for simple link exchange.

And whatever you do, do NOT exchange links with sites not in real estate. Remember, if the band geeks thought you were cool, that didn't mean squat to the in-crowd, did it?

PS: Before you hire a SEO "expert", get references and then check them out.

SEO making a site rank high in major search results and be able attract users or visitors.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/search.php?searchid=1108225

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seo

This ebook (SEO for dummies) is always a good place to start :
http://downloads.zdnet.co.uk/0,39025604,39114402s,00.htm

This is SEO in a nutshell. you have to make your site relevent to the searches you want to target. Then you need to get other sites to agree that you are the most relevent site for that search term! Nothing more, nothing less! There are many who will tell you that content will do the trick. This is FALSE! other sites linking to your site with proper anchor text for your keywords is 80% of SEO! anyone who says different is lying or just has no clue!. And If you are wondering why I say this as an absolute. I am an SEO expert. I have taken several hundred sites to top rankings in the big 3. This is what I do for a living everyday. its not a hobby! And I have never failed once I learned the basics(4 years ago). It is not rocket science but it is an exact science!

"... as their own links pages actually reside on a different website - meaning they have all one way links pointing at their site. Google thinks they must be a great resource because so many people have linked to them without getting a link in return."

This is a GOOD one... See the Linking forum for my post on Page Swaps and Swapping one-way links. I've been doing this for about a year and enjoy many #1 positions across search engines.

When you track down your competitors, how do you find out what pages are linked to them?

Use http://www.SiteReportCard.com

Each site has a main KP. Each page also has a main KP. Without keyword repetition throughout the page in specific locations, there will be rankings increase. All sites should meet these minimum standards:

Meta Tags - In Code Header

Title Tag: - Main KP for site or page should go first in title. PROXIMITY COUNTS! Important keyword phrases should go at the beginning of sentences.

Description Tag - This is the sentence that shows up in search results. It should also contain the page kp if it's an interior website page, or the main site kp if it's on the index of the site.

Keyword Tag - The keyword section is devalued and doesn't mean much, but it's still good practice to add keywords here, starting with the main kp for the page.

Page Origin & Engine

Topper - The first word in the top level keywords should be the main kp for the page. These are the most important words of the site because they get read first by crawlers.

Bottom - The last words on the page count a lot. The bottom keyword section should contain the same keyword phrase as the main kp for the page (or site).

Headers

The headings of the webpage are crucial to search engine optimization.

The H1 should be the same as the other elements in this section, containing the main kp of page or site.

The H2 should be the same as the other elements in this section, containing the main kp of page or site.

The H3 should be the same as the other elements in this section, containing the main kp of page or site.

No word yet on whether this tag counts.

Alt Tags on Images

The alt tags should contain alternating keywords that are sprinkled throughout site. If you get too repetitive or if you overload the site too densely with keywords you will get blacklisted. Once you get blacklisted it is difficult to get back in the SERPs. Varying your alt tags on images using a variety of keyword phrases (including page and/or site main kp) will help your page look more natural.

If you get all these things to match on a page for a highly searched keyword phrase that's not too competitve, you are half-way to the top!



Here are a few unbiased websites that give great SEO information:

SEO Process

SEO Elements

Types of Links

Ethical Linking Strategies

Reciprocal Linking

SEO Directories

Here's some good information to get you started...

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

This is the best source I have found. It is deep, but comprehensive and well written.

I use many of the concepts on my site and have a page rank of 5 so it must work...

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners.php

Quote: "I've been reading the forum and it says do this but not this, this only on tuesdays..."

I love it! Great sense of humor Ben!

I won't overwhelm you with any more information overload than you're already getting. I'll just offer two simple bits of advice:

1. Build a quality website with plenty of helpful content relevant to your audience. (More people will link to your site that way).

2. Visit the reputable SEO education websites and join their newsletters. When somebody has been doing SEO for clients for 10+ years and is still in business ... they're worth listening to! Danny Sullivan and Jill Whalen are a couple of those people.

Here are the websites they run:

http://www.highrankings.com
http://www.searchenginewatch.com

Both of these sites also have great newsletters:

http://www.highrankings.com/advisor.htm
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/searchday

Hope that gets you moving in the right direction.

Keep up the sense of humor!

SEO is not exact. The Problems is that once you get "it" done, they change their methods of analyzing. www.REindex.com just links to you where you work - no optimization necessary.

But, stay away from flash and sound. Flash loads too slow, and sound drives the people who surf at work, away.

Make your personal listings available - easily. That is what surfers are looking for. Provide content, but don't make the site "busy" or cluttered. Also, most viewers are women. Have a woman review your site - they think differently than men do.

Again, SEO is a nebulous concept that not only changes every 90 days by search engine, but is individually different for MSN, Google, Yahoo, AskJeeves, and all the others. Trying to optimize for all of them is very difficult.

Link from a sites like www.REindex.com and let them worry about the optimizing dollars and time.

REindex...nice link farm...LOL... Seriously though... This type of directory isn't very helpful these days...

Besides that...Of the dozen or so town pages I checked not a single one was indexed... sorry folks... a link fro REindex isn't going to get you to the top of the serps

Yeah, isn't helpful to you.

300,000 page views a month and growing! Not a link farm. An simple alternative for brokers like me who are tired of paying the sites that download my listings from mls and then charge me to get the traffic back.

(www.reindex.com/reindexmission.html)

AND an alternative, for those of us who are tired of spending lots of dollars on services like SEO companies like yours that don't understand the real estate business.

What was MLS started for? Brokers to communicate - not for the public. The Internet has lulled brokers into thinking that opening our "MLS books" to the public is ok. It used to be a violation to show the public our MLS books.

Now MLS publishes it. REindex allows local agents and brokers to recover their traffic, without a fee and without any expense for SEO.

You make money off the realtors that have to keep optimizing because of the frequent SEO changes. If you don't sell real estate, I think your comment is pretty self serving. At the very least - you don't understand the real estate business from the real estate side. You only know the SEO and web site side. By the way REindex.com has a higher alexa ranking than your site. So much for your SEO. REindex.com has 1000 times the competition!

There are a lot of you out there. www.Reindex.com is intended to let the realtors get back to work selling real estate.

Yes, not all towns are not populated. (there are 30,000 pages on www.REindex.com) But for the towns that do have content, we return pretty well in the search engines! But who am I to know about SEO - just a hard working Broker who uses his spare time to develope a resource for his business associates - for free.

Yeah, sit back and jab at the site. You didn't even submit the sites you have worked on - great SEO master you are. Links from content sites like www.REindex.com improve ranks.

How much are you charging the companies on your site for the "Web savy" links? www.REindex.com 's are free. And most agents don't even know we've linked to them!

Yeah, www.REindex.com isn't helpful to you.

OUCH Geeze.... I almost don't know where to start :rolleyes: I'm not putting down what you do MR. REindex.... Your stated intentions are admirable. I'm simply stating the obvious so people don't think REindex is a replacement for the other things they should be doing for their sites. As far as the personal attacks on me go...I'll ignore them since your new around here but I've been giving free advice to members here for quite some time and for those that are clients of our... our results are above reproach.... I don't offer it here publicly because I don't use the forum to solicite business. I'd be happy to give you the contact info off the forum for clients that run multiple teams of buyer agents and close hundreds of millions (not a typo) annually from web leads. What we do isn't for everybody and your right... we do charge for our services. Our waiting list is long and I'll leave it there.

IMHO... If your creating a true Portal for Real Estate Referrals for the listed agents/companies you should consider having it professionally designed. I'm one that believes in deferring to the appropriate specialists.

more IMHO info:
Alexa rating = Meaningless
Links from content sites improve rankings...True

Links from REindex from unindexed pages = no rankings improvenment...

300,000 pages views...meaningless... number of transactions closed from leads generated....meaningful

LIke I said Mr. REindex... My comments are not personal...ever. I simply meant to convey that REindex is not the answer to anyones prayers as it seemed to be made to sound as...

300,000 page views = business to those linked - for free. We have had offers to pay us for links. We don't accept that from listing companies. We just link to their site directly. Your characterization of REindex.com as a "Portal for Real Estate Referrals" is once again an SEO "professional" looking to make a buck. Our site is supported by our own real estate company's sales. The site doesn't cost us much besides time. The links to other companies' and agents' sites are FREE - NO FEE NOT a Referral! No tracking, no logins, just links.

As for you characterizing my post as the idea that REindex.com is the end all: re-read the post I made "sites LIKE REindex.com". All the major search engines have local places. They are filled with more "professional" distractions than REindex.com is, but they are there. What is zillow, or trulia, or local yahoo/google? That was the last line in a series of suggestions.

Our site isn't filled with gee gaah text and pitches - just links to the realtors that know the town.

"Professional"? The obvious? Ever think it is designed that way? Designed not to keep them at our site, but to get them to the site they really need - fast, without pitches or distractions. Those in the SEO "profession" comment on the simplistic aspects of the site. I guess a "non-professional" can't get 30,000 pages on the net and constantly grow traffic. Not bad for a "hobyist" though. And those that live on SEO always try to couch it the way you have.

May be new to these forums, but not to the net or the real estate business. REindex has been growing since 2000 when we started it to allow the agents and companies without your "wait list" budget a place to get seen.

"don't ... solicit business": Generous of you to be here to answer questions of the "unprofessional". Sort of like giving a FSBO advice on the sale. We know many of those turn into clients.

Personal attacks? Interesting how some people call the truth, personal attack

IMHO, and all the other internet chat acronyms, LOL, my original post was to help people stay away from a few "professional" gimmicks that surfers don't like. (only based on feedback and reviewing tens of thousands of real estate links over the last 6 years.) All you responded to in my post was relative to your job security. Just mho.

... I wonder if you'll let this post through as moderator?

If I'll let it through....LOL...that's funny

I'll send you a shovel if you want to keep digging ...

lets agree to disagree... anyone that has any interest in this can make up their own mind so let's leave it there.

I've never seen so many people with such wide variations for a question.

I am SEO and Webmaster, as this is my new forum

I am listing some tips here:-

- First of all proper meta tags (Title, description and Keyword) should be placed in the head tags.

- Your web site contents should be clear and informational to users. You should try to BOLD, ITALIC and use of h1 or h2 tags for your important keywords.

tags are very important to tell google spider that Paragraph is started and is used to indicate the Paragraph END

- You should use alternative keywords also in your website contents, for example to find alternative keywords for "Casino", open http://www.google.com and type "~casino", it will provide you all alternative keywords in BOLD letter in website titles.

Above tips was for ON page SEO........Now some tips are for OFF page SEO

- Link Building :- This is very important for good ranking, here again case is same that you should not use only one anchor text for your link building and link exchange, you should also link the website with alternative keywords. You should exchange links with theme based web sites.

- Internal Linking of Web Site :- You should try to provide internal linking in a way that each page should be linked. Home page should be linked from all pages, You can also link home page from between the text where you find any related keywords within the contents, it will help to provide you keyword rankings...

- Directory Submission services are being offered in these day by many companies, this is very best way to get cheap one way links. You can use 5 to 6 anchor text while using directory submission services.

- Forum Posting (with footer links) and blog posting are also one way to create link popularity...

I will send you more tips and you can have your website optimized yourself.... I am doing SEO from last 8 years and its also not easy in these days as because you will see that google technology is changing day by day...and learning is the continue process in this field......

Hey here's my 2 cents

SEO is basically the process of optimizing your website for certain keywords and trying to get as high as possible in the google rankings. As someone said before, Matt Cutts blog is a good spot to check, he is the head algorhythm guy for google if im not mistaken. You can also get "The SEO Book" and there is some great info in there. Make sure you learn the difference between "black hat" and "white hat" seo. That is, dirty tricks you can use to improve your page ranking and popularity but if google or the search engines catch on you'll get in deep smegola indeed my-ladio. And for good measure a crapload of relevant backlinks and reciprocal links. Good page content is also important, good original, specific content.

Well that was more like a buck fifty but i digress..

Christian

"high page rank can be accomplished by smart tweaking of your meta tags " ???

I Don't think that really what you meant Christian

ya...not what i meant to say. The point im getting to here is good well written original and non replicated content. Proper keyword research and not keyword stuffing, that kind of thing. And of course...links, but i might have a slightly biased opinion on that as i'm a link builder....

SEO is the process of getting a high ranking in internet search engines. This is a 2 phase process.

The first is the process of making sure that your website is readable by search engine spiders. They are essentially machines that sift through all of the underlying code on your website. It is essential that your website is optimized otherwise the search engine spiders could miss categorize your site. This is done by making sure you have the appropriate tags and keywords for your website.

The second phase involves increasing your websites popularity on the internet. The more popular you are, the higher you will rank in the search engines. Of course you must do this the proper way by creating actual relationships with other websites. If you try to cheat the system, the search engines could possible remove you.

SEO can often be categorized by white hat and black hat, organic and non-organic.

I would be pleased to help anyone out in this area.

Fraser Pogue
Twelve Seas Web Design
http://www.twelveseas.com/seo.html

I've managed to get lucky with google & yahoo by looking at the source of those who rank higher than I do for various search phrases & copying what they are doing. A combination of meta tags, included text, link names, page titles, etc.
I enjoy building my site, though I realize that using Frontpage is to webmasters as paint-by-numbers is to artists. I wish learning/figuring out "Flash" wasn't so complicated!!!That's going to take a really long time.

CoronasBestHomes.com

Try using Swish instead . It's a low cost alternative for creating Flash presentations. The truth is that most people will never need all of the bells and whistles available with Adobe Flash. Swish provides nearly the same capabilities, and is easier to learn.

if your local school/college offers a course in flash, you should consider.

Flash is one of those programs that when finally the 'oh I get it' hits, it's relatively easy.

Flash...NO!!! Don't do it! What do you need flash for? You don't need flash to make a site look good. Flash will kill your search engine rankings overnight!

I would seriously warn people away from Flash, it's just not necessary. The more simple and clean a site looks the better it performs. Keep it simple!

Hogwash! Who told you that? Heck, search engines can even read the text within Flash.

Most people do not make 100% Flash sites. For real estate sites, Flash is a great way to present a photo gallery of listings or provide buffered or streaming video. In fact, Flash is THE best way to render video on a web site.

Just do everything Webmaste - India said. One important point he did miss though is that SEO is a constant battle. You should have SEO tools available to you that can assist in monitoring your competition. Most of these tools can be found free throughout the Net. You can modify your web pages and add links all you want, but if you don't leap-frog what your competition is doing, your site will just flounder.

SEO in short:
All of the necessary tweaks and such that have to be done to a website in order to increase its popularity with the search engines.

Here is a tutorial about real estate seo:

http://www.agent-server.com/how-to-seo.html

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

Just go buy this book. Many seo companies own this book themselves. Its the top selling seo book online, and rightfully so. Its awesome.

http://www.seobook.com/

I agree with the commenter who said that SEO for real estate is a unique animal with unique opportunities and challenges.

Join http://www.realestatewebmasters.com and read up on the Google posts.

Also, get a copy of the Lynda.com SEO training. VERY helpful.