Hello, I'm new to the board. I'm in the los angeles area and looking into making some leads from our website into actual sales. I have a nice flash intro but I'm not sure if the content is interesting enough and also search engine friendly. I tried to put as many keywords that the search engine could find in the intro as well. Let me know what you guys think, here is my website link and info. I'm also trying to convert this into a spanish website, does anyone have any companies that won't charge per word? http://www.homenloan.com, or here is what I have.

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Our search engine placement isn't that great yet the content is the same as other websites or even more, but yet they are on top of us..??!!


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"Serving Southern california!!"

It's a nice site. It has a lot of nice functionality and useful forms to capture leads. The Flash intro is very nice, although it's generally tough to optimize such pages for the SERPS.

Also, search engine optimization will require a lot more than just putting many keywords in the meta tags and body and submitting to the SEs. There's the issue of selecting the proper keywords that make sense for your market and prioritizing them by importance (which includes the popularity and competitiveness of each keyword/phrase), and having different pages focus on a set of keyphrases. Then, you need to find the optimal mix of usage of the keyphrases in the title, headings, body, internal links, etc. for each page. How much work on each one will depend on your competitors' positions for each of the keyphrases.

Then, you need to get good incoming links from other sites and directories, that highlight your most important keyphrases. You have to increase the link popularity of your site with an eye on your important keyphrases. A place to check link popularity is http://www.linkpopularity.com. Your domain was created way back in Oct 1998, but it's very, very light in link popularity.

It's going to take time and some work to do search engine optimization. You might not have time for it, so it'd be a good idea to find a good webmaster/search engine optimizer for it.

A quicker way to get traffic that you can use to supplement your SEO is to try pay-per-click. You will need your list of important keywords and compete against other agents in the bidding wars.

Best of luck to you!

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Ruperto Elpusan, MBA, e-Pro
Broker/Officer
Beverly Hills-Malibu-Palos Verdes Real Estate
Torrance/South Bay Real Estate

[This message has been edited by Ruperto (edited 08-25-2004).]

Well very quickly...

Can the flash. 1) Nobody cares, except maybe you. The #1 most often clicked thing on the internet is SKIP INTRO. If you walked into a store and they forced you to watch a 1 minute movie, you'd be not thrilled. Flash is usually good for one thing.. to please the designer and the owner of the site. Customers don't care a bit. More importantly, search engines see it as a big fat ZERO. They can't index graphics OR flash (which is a graphic). They index TEXT. You have NO text. Therefore, no indexing. It's that simple. Get rid of it.

Secondly, can the rollerskating music. Nobody wants to hear MUSIC, especially chosen by you. Most people surf at work and most people are not supposed to, therefore they have sound turned off. For those who have sound turned on and they hit that cheesy music, they're gonna be out of there faster than you know what happened. It's not professional unless you're selling music - and you're not.

Thirdly, iHouse2000 sites are all framed sites, with the exception of the first page. Google won't index any of them except your home page.

If you're really interested in getting good search engine placement, get a custom site, not a template site. Unless you do a tremendous amount of customization, you'll never really win with those sites. Overall, they will be more expensive for you... because they don't work very well.

Are any of the sites that place above you iHouse2000 sites? Or custom? My bet is custom. iHouse2000 sites rarely ever place well in search engines I've found.

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