Thursday, April 30, 2009

Squeeze Pages to Get to the Top of Google

If you have read my previous blog, you know that I have been spending time lately developing landing sites for our expired listing lead software that quickly get to the first page of google for a given search term. The benefit of this technique is obvious in that five hours worth of work can result in a torrent of traffic that would have otherwise cost a fortune. Unfortunately, each of these sites takes about five hours worth of work to develop using Dreamweaver, or at least three hours using Xsite Pro.

However, recently I have found a tool that promises to shorten that time investment into about an hour from start to finish, not including the research into the keyword. The tool is simply a Wordpress Theme generator that quickly turns any Wordpress installation into an active and formatable landing page. The actual term for the sites that result from this Wordpress theme are Squeeze Pages (landing pages designed to attract leads online.)

So what is the advantage of this new tool?

Actually, there are a couple. The first is that Google loves Wordpress blogs which gives you a leg up when you get started. The second is that all that is required to create an effective lead generation page is to upload a wordpress blog, choose the theme, and type your keyword-optimized advertisement. As I said before, it is a lot quicker than creating a site from scratch, and once you have modified your template, you only need to make minor modifications to the text to optimize it for another keyword. As I said, this tool promises to save a lot of time.

So just to re-cap, what do you do in order to get a site to show up on the first page of google?

1) Use the google keyword tool to find a search term that your target client would typically search. Find keywords that have a large number of searches, but few sites that are directly optimized for that site.

2) Register for the URL of that keyword. If possible, get the .com version

3) Create a Wordpress Blog (many web hosts that offer the cPanel control panel have an automated installer built in.)

4) Upload your squeeze page theme.

5) Modify the text and images of the theme to meet the needs of your brand. I would recommend making these changes, then downloading the version to your hard drive so that you only need to make the formatting changes once.

6) Publish the blog, place the appropriate links back to your real estate home page.

7) Start placing backlinks.

What you will find is that your site will initially get indexed pretty far down the google ladder, and occasionally won’t get indexed at all. (this happened to me with realestatecountry.net.) Regardless, over the next few weeks, start adding links to the site from any real estate-related websites that you have access to. Place a link back to the site on your ActiveRain blog as well as any other blog you manage. Get as many links from real estate-related sites back to the page as these will ultimately determine where your site ends up on the search engine ladder.

After a few weeks, if you have sufficient links, your site should creep to the top of the search engine ladder. As an example of how this technique works, google expired listing leads. How many entries that link back to 4MySales or Barrett Niehus can you count?

Friday, April 24, 2009

Optimizing Your Page for Real Estate Leads

I have used a number of them in getting my REALTOR lead system into the top listing on Google. One of the techniques that I have had some success in recently is creating squeeze pages for specific search terms. A queeze page simply being a landing site designed to generate leads that is optimized for a specific search term. To provide a basic example, let's say hypothetically that youwork in Orem Utah and specialize in executive homes. To date your website has not shown up under the search term “executive homes orem” or “orem realtor executive homes” but through your research you know that those terms are often searched and meet your target demographic. How you would develop and use a squeeze page would be as follows:

  • Register for the url of your given search terms. When registering these URL’s use the specific term that you are targeting. As a side note, I have found more success in not including hyphens, but instead having the word run together in the URL; i.e www.realtorexecutive. com instead of www.realtor-executive.com.
  • When creating the actual landing page, you have a number of choices. If you are versed in HTML, Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft Front Page are good toolsl. If HTML is foreign to you, then there is a quick site development tool called XSite Pro that makes creating a keyword optimized site extremely easy with no programming involved. When you develop a squeeze page, create multiple sub pages. Generally the site needs to be more than a single page to get any attention from Google.


  • There are a few basic rules that you should consider following when developing your page. The first is that for google, multiple pages with good keyword content typically ranks better. The second is that a privacy policy is smiled upon by both your visitors and your search engines. The third is that you want the visitor to take action within seconds of hitting your landing page so have a strong call to action. Fourth, if your squeeze page is requesting contact information, keep the amount of information that you request limited, and offer value for that information. All too often I see REALTORS who have six or more qualifying questions on their lead generation pages. In order to optimize your leads, capture just name, email and possibly phone. You can qualify the lead at a later date and the more information you request up front, the fewer leads you will receive. The fifth and final rule is that you want to control your visitor’s experience. For these pages, you want to limit the visitor’s behavior to submitting their information, or learning a little bit more about the offer before submitting their information. Choices equal confusion which results in hesitation and inactivity. Create your squeeze page so that you have two or three good pages that are optimized to your target search term. Include your lead generating offer on each of the pages and be sure to include a privacy policy. Where applicable, also link to your home page so that your prospect can get back to your site. This may sound like a lot of work, but if you do this part correctly, you will likely get much more traffic at a lower cost than trying to PPC advertise for your target search term.

Once you have built your site, upload it to the web and start getting backlinks to it. It is important to know up front that backlinks directly impact the page rank of your site, and that they will be necessary to get to that first page for your given search term. Fortunately, creating the backlinks yourself are pretty easy. First and foremost, create a link to your new site from your blog. Also, it would behoove you to create a blogger blog using the same URL (executivehomesorem.blogspot.com for example) and post a link to the new squeeze page from that blog. (Pleasse note that if you create the blog, you will need to post content to it as well.) Post a link to your page from your ActiveRain account, any HubPages or Squidoo lenses that you may have. Essentially post a link on any real estate related site that you can. Remember that each additional link to the site improves the possibility that it will show up on the first page of google.

Now, as a real world example, I have been spending time trying to get traffic to my wife’s business, Bloomen Nutrition and have used this technique over the past few weeks for the terms “while pregnant”, “chewable prenatal vitamin”, and “what to expect when expecting.” She owns a prenatal nutrition company and I have been focusing my talents on getting her up and running instead of focusing on real estate. Regardless, here is the example. If you google those terms what you will find is that chewable prenatal vitamin results in www.chewableprenatalvitamin.com showing up halfway down the page. For the term while pregnant, the site still needs a few backlinks because the whilepregnant.net site is showing up as the 19th link on page two of google, and I just completed the site for what to expect when expecting, so we will see where http://whattoexpectwhenexpecting.net/ ends up.