The Daily Steps to Cover the First Page of Google – Day 2

This is a continuation of my real time description of how to get links to your site cover most of the first page of google for a specific search term. If you have been following along, I started this project yesterday and plan to describe each of the steps taken to cover the first page of google for the search term “real estate country.”

Yesterday I registered for the URL realestatecountry.net , and today I have uploaded the first page of the site. Because this is an experiment as opposed to a full website project, I have chosen a single page with an attached blog. In reality, it is much easier to get a larger site indexed and the search engines tend to like multiple pages that have content that routinely changes. For the purposes of this project, we are going with the one pager and associated blog.

I created the one page site featuring a link to the Redx Expired Listing Lead and FSBO service. I included the keyword a few times and even linked those keywords back to the site (see Ultimate Search Engine Loophole.) After uploading the site, I added it to a number of bookmark sites to try and get it indexed. As of now, it has not been found by our target search engine, but eventually it will.

These first steps are just to create a website that can accept traffic and appear on the search engines. It is pretty basic stuff, so I apologize for boring you with the details. After I get the site where I want it to be, I will start giving you the play by play on promotion. Just to repeate, this project is to get not only the realestatecountry.net site returned in the top ten on google, but to have many other links to that site returned as well. At the end of the project, I hope that the search term returns at least five sites that link to realestatecountry.net.

A Real Time Guide to Dominate the First Page of Google

I had previously discussed an approach to get the many of the entries on the first page returned by google to point to your website for a given keyword.  I used the keyword search “Expired Listing Leads” and the numerous entries on the first page of google that point to my sites promoting the savings that you can enjoy by registering for the RedX expired listing lead service through FreeTrainer.com.  

As a teaching tool, I have decided to share with your in real time, or at least daily posts the step by step process to cover the first page of google for a given keyword.  My approach is to choose a keyword and promote my links on the web such that at least five of the ten results on the first page of google return a link back to me. 

With that in mind, step number one is to choose the keyword, I used Googles Adsense Keyword tool for this project and determine what keyword is going to give you the most amount of traffic with the lowest level of competition.  For this project, I am promoting expired listing leads for real estate agents.   When you use the keyword tool, you find that Real Estate is extremely competitive in online promotion so after some digging, I found the phrase “Real Estate Country” which returns about 1.2 million searches per month and is relatively sparse in the way of competition. 

As a side note, if you are focusing on your own real estate business in a specific city,  the number of monthly searches will be a lot less and much more targeted.  Regardless, the same logic applies.  Choose the term with the highest number of searches that will be made most often by your target clients.  

With the above in mind, I have just finished registering for the URL realestatecountry.net and signed up for a hosting account with godaddy.com.  Over the next few days I will place the website which will be simple two or three page site, most likely with a blog or rss feed. 

In summary, here is step one:  Choose a keyword that does not have a lot of competition, but does have a high number of searches.  Register your url with that keyword.  We will work on the the site in the next discussion.  

By the way, I am still also doing this with the prenatal chew business as well and the entry returns Bloomen Nutriton at the top of the first three pages of google.  Not quiet all over the first page, but we are making progress.

Appear Multiple Times on the First Page of Google

Google  “Expired Listing Leads,”  Half of the page  references me through  4MySales, Barrett Niehus, or through my relationship with the RedX Expired Listing Lead Service and its associated savings.  Getting this type of rank can be a good amount of work, but it can also help you attract many many clients.  So what is exactly do you need to do to dominate the first page of google to maximize your web traffic? 

The approach simple, and just requires you to realize that you need to have relatively big presence online, with a keword-narrow focus.  What does that mean?  It’s simple really.  I have lectured for a while that in order to be a successful Realtor you need to serve a niche and create a value proposition that differentiates you from your competition.  That sentiment is reflected online, but with some SEO specific caveats.   

So what are the steps to get your links listed on the first or ten results on google for a specific search word go back to you?  It all starts with picking the right search words.  Depending on the group and cities that you want to target, start creating a list of keywords that you feel that your clients will be searching for.  With this list, use a keyword tool (I actually prefer the Adwords keyword manager for Google) and take a look at the relative number of searches that your target keywords get per month.  

After choosing your keyword, optimize your website for that word.  I won’t go into details on site optimization, but be sure to update your meta tags, description and the keyword frequency in the body copy of your site. 

The next step is much more critical.  Start increasing your online footprint to feature that keyword and link back to your site.  Start a blog on blogger and choose that keyword as the URL (for some reason hyphens aren’t currently searching as well as run-on words so choose URL’s such as realtorleads.blogspot.com  as opposed to realtor-leads.blogspot.com.)  Post a few keyword-rich articles to that blog and add links back to your home page on the blog-roll. Add other links to your blog roll as well, but if possible add nofollow tags to those links as they do affect the pagerank of the blog.  If you have a similar topic with a related keyword, you may choose to two or three related blogs.  However, don’t overdo it as legitimately keeping these blogs up is a challenge and at certain levels it could be considered spam.  For me I have just two blogger sites dedicated to real estate, the most active dealing with viral marketing for REALTORS.  

After completing this work on blogger,  you may choose to do something similar with Wordpress.  The idea is to get five to ten quality blogs that you can legitimately maintain by posting just an entry per day.  After you have created your sites, be sure to ping them to the various blog search networks so that they get indexed promptly.

 

Next, turn to social networks and for each netword, choose a username that is your keyword.  Create your profile using keyword rich text, and use these pages as well as your blogs as selling opportunities.  People in the network will find you and connect with you, so put your best face forward.  Spend time getting to know the community and post information that will help the community grow.  

After creating your presence in the communities, spend some time on Squidoo and Hubpages creating lenses and pages that feature your keyword and link back to your site.  Once again, the idea is that when a person searches a specific phrase, multiple pages from different sites all linking to you show up.

 Once you have done all of the above, it is a matter of maintaining the content on all the sites (I allocate an hour a day for the prospecting expireds system.)  and adding content that serves your target search term.  

It is a fair amount of work, but the system does work.  My current project is Bloom’en Nutrition Prenatal Vitamin Chews.  I just started last week with the search term “prenatal vitamin chews” so there are only two entries on the first page of google that go back to Bloom’en Nutrition.

Yet another Way To Increase Your Search Ranking

I spent a fair amount of time reading message boards a few nights ago trying to find new ideas to get backlinks to the RedX expired listing lead service when, after a lot of reading, I ended up on Yahoo Answers. As an individual with a background in real estate, marketing, and strangely enough nutrition, I started answering questions about short sales, foreclosures, bank owned properties, etc. On every answer, I put a link back to my 4MySales.com site and a keyword-rich description of my area of expertise as part of the source box. After about two hours of answering questions, I went to bed.

Anyway, I checked my backinks yesterday, and a number of my answers showed up as indexed by google. These indexed pages were short lived, but they may have had an effect on my overall rank.

With that in mind, here’s the approach and possible benefit. If you do not yet have a yahoo answers account get one. Spend some time with your profile as it is an extension of your professional bran. Do a search for a real estate topic that serves both your area of expertise as well as your local geography. Start posting answers to questions, and in the resource box make sure to include a link back to your site, with a keyword rich description of your qualifications.

The benefits are that many people read the questions and answers so you may get quite a bit of traffic from the post. In addition, it looks to me like the links do get indexed which should help with your overall search engine ranking.

Finally, if you want an application that runs on your desktop that will notify you when a question that you can answer is asked, answersniper or answereye may be something to look at. Both can also be configured to be abused, BUT DON’T USE THEM THAT WAY.

Automated Directory Submitting, Fast and Easy

Previously, I suggested a quicker way to submit your URL to the multitude of internet directories to grow your backlinks. I did this for a few hours on Friday to grow the links to the discount page of the RedX expired listing lead software and system. Fortunately for me, in my search for an even better approach to directory submission I found a website that automates almost all of the process. I spent another four hours on Saturday submitting 4MySales.com to promote my relationship with the Real Estate Data Exchange (Red X) to the list of directoris and received about 400 backlinks by the end of the process..

The website that I found is http://www.availablescript.com/submiter/index.php?menu=join with the corresponding password of hallo. What the system does is uses a script similar to that of directory submitter to populate all of the fields of your target directory. The only think that you need to do is enter the captcha (human identifier string) and choose the best subdirectory for your particular URL. It is a pretty cool tool and the number of link confirmations that I received in my email confirms that it does work.

An Easier Way to Get Backlinks

There are many tools that I have found to promote the RedX real time listing lead service, and although many of them have been found on discussion areas and groups that focus on the more seedy approach to online marketing, some of these tools do have an application in the white hat world of online marketing.

One approach that has potential is simply what I have been doing manually for the past ten years. Searching for lists of directories with high Page Rank, going to those sites and submitting my link manually. The frustration that I run into is that it takes a whole lot of time to search each directly and after page ten or so in Google, many of the links repeat.

So turning to the black hat guys and their discussions, I think I have found a faster and still white hat approach to get backlinks from directories. I have been using Article Submitter to automatically submit my articles to the various e-zine article directories on the web. The tool shows the link to the website in the top window and the actual website in the lower window. When used to submit articles, the software automatically (more or less) accesses your account for each site and automatically (once again more or less) posts the article. However, there is an purpose application for the software, specifically because it does show the website in the bottom window. That application is to speed up the subscription to hundreds of online directories.

This is the approach. Article Submitter allows you to upload your own list of URL’s. To use it for directory submission, search online for a list of good directories, or Google online directories and start copying web addresses. You can also use what is known as a URL scraper and search for directories to expedite the collection of directory sites, but these are typically tools for spammers so use at your own risk.

Once you have collected your list of URL’s, upload them into Article Submitter. Add your link information into the software and start manually clicking (you won’t be able to use the auto-submit feature for this) each of the links on your list. Because the URL’s show the website in the bottom window in the software, you can manually go through the registration process for each directory. Your progress is expedited because the software automatically populates forms within the site.

Now I am not saying that adding your link to directories is not still going to take some time, especially if you are doing it legitimately. However, just by having a single list with the ability to automatically insert your links into forms is going to save a great deal of time which adds efficiency and will hopefully result in a lot more backlinks.

Online Marketing Resource; The Best That I Could Find

It is obvious to most of you reading this post that online marketing is going to be the most cost effective way to attract new business. You have the farthest reach, can touch the most people and it is the only advertising that you can do to get prospective clients when they are sitting at their desk at work during the day. This is no shortage of places to learn about marketing your site online, and making the conversion process more streamlined, but I have to tell you that the information taught by MarketingExperiments in their bi-weekly webinars is by far the best. I attend their online marketing optimization webinars every other week and have a lot of success in growing the conversion and even the page rank of 4MySales.com and leveraging the benefits of the RedX real estate lead attraction system.

Marketing Experiments is owned by Marketing Sherpa, which is one of the most best known online marketing resources around. Their entire approach is to take the websites of small businesses and organizations, and run optimization experiments on those sites to increase lead capture by focusing on various aspects of the website and the steps that the prospect goes through as they convert to clients. The online webinars are hosted by a well respected team of researchers whose only job is to find out what best practices actually result in additional sales for a given website. The link to their site is above, and if you want a great resource to learn how to improve the effectiveness of your website and online marketing I would recommend Marketng Experiments.

Increase Your Online Traffic Using Two Simple Methods

I am learning about to promote the RedX REALTOR Lead generation service so I have spent time on the SEO blogs, am a regular attendee of online marketing webinars, which by the way I am applying to Bloom’en, and spent hundreds of hours reading and watching videos on online promotion.

So what have I learned? The answer is quite a bit, but to simplify my learning, there are two basic approaches to increasing links to your site and increasing the site’s visibility on the main search engines. The first approach is to attract organic backlinks from the trillions of websites that are out there. The second approach is to generate your very own websites that you administer and place links on those sites to your own. Both approaches can be accomplished legitimately, or through black hat methods, but using both approaches together is very effective at generating the links that results in higher search engine placement.

We are all very familiar with the first approach, so I will spend my time on the second. The second approach is what I want to talk about because we are talking about creating decent page rank links to your site from other sites that you control. So what do I suggest? I have the following list to help get you started:

1) Online social networks rank really well. Odly enough, pageflakes and not so strangely facebook show up well on search engines as does Linked In links. If you don’t have accounts with links to your primary site, it is time to step up your online footprint.

2) Squiddo and Hub pages: If you have not created a lens in sqiddo or a hub page, consider doing so. By creating and administratin these pages, you can create some great links to your site from a page that has a relatively high page rank.

3) Create your own directory, forums and management websites. There is a lot of software available in the open source community that you can use to create unique sites that cater to your area of specialization or your neighborhood. Create them and sponsor them from your home page with anchor links.

4) Multiple blogs. I know it is time consuming, but as a google product, Blogger has a very high page rank; which means any links from a blogger site will have a high weight. Create a number of blogs, (don’t link them together) and add backlinks to your primary site. Recruit guest bloggers or pay per article ghost writers to create content. There are software programs out there that will actually scrape content from other sites, but these will get you banned from blogger. Unique original and legitimate content is best.

The intention with this program and what I have described is simply to expand your online footprint wherever possible. If you can create single page websites, or sites that have a lot of content, use them to drive traffic to your primary website. I know that time is valuable and what I have discussed above can initially take a lot of time, but the real estate market is becoming extremely cutthroat and your success may ultimately rely on how many people can find you online.

Grow Links to With a Black Hat Tool

I am learning about the sneaky world of black hat marketing, and there are a number of tools that can be used to ethically promote links and traffic of your own website.  As before, this is all in an effort to promote my relationship with the RedX expired listing lead system and the discounts.   I am also saving money with some of this software by promoting my wife’s prenatal vitamin company, Bloom’en Nutrition as well. 

Anyway, a few posts ago I mentioned an interesting software that automatically submits your entry to a couple hundred article and e-zine websites.  Using the software quite a bite over the past few weeks and have found that duplicate content is a major hindrance to increasing my rank on the search engines.  In doing some reading on the SEO and black hat forums I learned that Google may actually penalize your site for having duplicate content spread across the web.  This leads to a conundrum, on the one hand you have at least hundreds of backlinks per article of various page rank, but on the other hand the penalty for duplicate content may bring your ranking down.    

The solution, interestingly enough is another black hat tool designed specifically to increase SE rank.  The product is known as a word spinner and what it does is takes your article posted on blog and randomly modifies the text to make is unique enough to make the resulting text 40 to 80 percent different than the original.  The specific product that I found was WP Spinnner and it is a simple Wordpress plugin.  To use it, you simply add an article and some alternative text or sentences to your article and post it to your wordpress blog.  Each time you refresh your blog the WP Spinnner will change the article to read differently enough to appear as a new article.  This is great for search engines because it makes the spiders think that there is new content on the blog each time it spiders the site, regardless of your posting schedule.  

The real power of the spinner however is the ability to create multiple unique articles that can be submitted to the 300 plus article directories.  It adds a little bit more time to the submission process, but instead of having 300 submissions that count as one link on google, I now have over 300 quality backlinks from unique articles every time I sit down to write and post.  

Now if I can only find a software that combines the article submitter with a spinner, I will be set.