Real Estate SEO, Getting to the Top of Google

Those of you that have been reading this blog know that I am using the search term Agents Online and the associated website AgentsOnline.Org to demonstrate in real time how to get your website to the top page of a search engine for a specific phrase.  For this specific example, I have chosen the phrase “Agents Online” and I am slowly moving the site up to the first page of google for that respective phrase.  

To provide an update on where we are on this experiment, I signed up the URL AgentsOnline.org less than a month ago and created a basic website optimized for the term.  Next I added links from this blog and built a Squidoo page which in turn linked to the site.  I also created a twitter account dedicated to Agents Online.  Currently there are about 16 total sites that are indexed on the search engines and link to this site.  

Now for our progress on Google.  If you search for the term “Agents Online”  in quotes, the page ranks as number seven among the entries on the first page of Google.  Not bad for having a site established for less than a month.  When you search on google for Agents Online  without the quotes, the page pop up as number 21 on Google which is at the top of the third page.  While this is not as significant, it does make the point that by building  a page optimized to a specific term, and using your target term as part of your URL, you can capture a premium place on the ranks of google very quickly.  

Now to move the site rank up from number 21 to within the top ten we just need to add some more high quality, high page rank links.   The can be achieved simply by posting comments on real estate related blogs, associated websites and forums.  

As you read through this post, you will no doubt realize that this is a very easy way to boost your web traffic without extensive Pay per click.  However,  as a word of caution, this process doesn’t always work.  For example our Real Estate Country site has yet to show up at an acceptable level for the term Real Estate Country.

Real Time Update on Getting to the Fist Page of Google

As I mentioned before, this blog thread is attempting to show you how you can get your site to the top of the search for a given long-tail keyword on google. I am little less confident in this post due to the challenges in getting realtestatecountry.net to show up on the first page of google for the term real estate country. However, I think I will have more success with the term “agents online.”

Anyway, to provide an update, I registered the URL agentsonline.org on Friday with godaddy.com. The URL cost $14.00 which is an insignificant cost in comparison to the traffic that should be seen if this process works out. I have spent two hours today drafting the text that will appear on the agents online website and will be posting it over the next few days. If I have the time and things actually go according to plan this time, the site should show up under the term agents online within the next two weeks.

Keep in mind that the process that I am describing, if it works, should be easily duplicated for whatever long tail keyword you are trying to optimize. For example, if you are trying to optimize for REALTORS in Naples, this methodology should be relatively successful.

Improving Keyword Search Traffic

My ideas building squeeze pages is not unique, and is in fact becoming a widely practiced technique for search engine optimization. As a reminder, a squeeze page is a search engine optimized keyword specific landing page to gather leads. An example of this would be my expired listing lead site, realestatecountry.net.

Here is a link to a Marketing Sherpa article on how Jelly Belly has used this technique to grow their online customer acquisition and conversion by 200%. Now for many REALTORs, using an enterprise system to create 500 keyword specific pages is just not economically viable. However, I can tell you that similar results can be achieved with a simple WordPress blog, templates and a godaddy account.

Just to keep score on which of my links are currently getting first page exposure for a search term on Google, “Real Estate country” is still low on Google, but gaining rank. Expired Listing lead and Expired Listing Lead software is dominated by my links. For my wife, “Chewable Prenatal Vitamin” shows up on Google twice with a link to Bloom’en Nutrition, and I just registered PregnancyVitamin.net so we shall see when it finally ranks after I get the pages loaded.

The Step by Step Domination of the First Page of Google, Continued

I have been a bit lax in my activities of getting links to realestatecountry.net to cover the most of the first page of google for the search term “real estate country” This is primarily due to a lot of other activities going on such as helping my wire promote her chewable prenatal vitamin website. Anyway, I am making some small progress and thought I would update some of my real time activities to continue to demonstrate how to get your site and sites managed by you to the top of the search engine for a given search term.

When I last posted, I was mentioning creating a number of squidoo and hub pages for Real Estate Country. While these are still a priority as my next step, I decided to create a blogger blog for the topic instead. I posted my first article today which was a very basic introduction to the blog. As time goes by, I will continue to post real estate country related articles on that blog as well as the other real estate blogs that I manage in an effort to get that and other blogs to show up under this keyword. The strategy is to have this blog and the other related blogs show up in the top ten under the search term so regardless of where the searcher clicks, they end up connecting with me.

I chose to create the blogger blog before the sqidoo page because I recently read that both Squidoo and Hub pages provide nofollow links which means that the search engines don’t really count them for backlinks. I have also read that Google may disregard this feature for these sites, so the jury is out. With that in mind, I thought getting at least one of my real estate country sites onto the first page of google should be the priority.

So the next steps in this step by step strategy are to:

1) Create one or two keyword-specific blogs and start populating them with good content. Use blogger as it has a very high PR as part of the google platform.

2) When you have time, start creating squidoo lenses and hub pages on your specific topic and search term.

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.

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.

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.