Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an interesting topic with huge potential for business. Everyday across various Google services several hundred million searches are performed. Some of those searches are refined and many result in visits to websites, videos, photos, news articles, blog posts, sales pages, and profiles. SEO considers how search engines work and what people are searching for to increase the visibility of a web site or web page.

For some, SEO is debatable topic with varying beliefs and hat colors. A person referred to as a Black Hat uses deceptive strategies to better rankings while White Hat conforms to the search engine guidelines. Rules can be bent but ultimately black hat techniques are at risk against the evolving search engines.

What is SEO Success?

This is a trick question since SEO is an ongoing process and the evolving search engines create new opportunity and competitors.  SEO success begins when your website is generating targeted traffic and a positive return on investment in the form of sales leads, purchases, contacts, brand recognition, subscriptions, connections, etc.

The image below shows the consistency of search engine traffic specifically for PhoenixPowerSearch.com a website with near top ranking for "Phoenix real estate" and several variations of the phrase like "Phoenix Arizona real estate" and "Phoenix AZ real estate". Last month Google, Bing, and Yahoo! sent 3,892 visitors to this website. In my opinion the value of consistent targeted traffic to a site from organic search ranking is often underestimated.

Begin with Keyword Research

A proper SEO strategy has clear keyword goals with an understanding of the content and inbound links necessary to produce the desired results. The first step is to identify keyword phrases that your target audience is typing into Google on a consistent basis. From my experience for real estate these will be "city"+"real estate" and "neighborhood"+"real estate" search phrases, "real estate" can also be exchanged for "homes for sale".

Generally, the most common keyword phrases (aka the ones search the most) are the most competitive. Finding keywords that are localized to your market will usually have the most search traffic without being unnecessarily competitive. The two services I use the most when research keywords are the Google Keyword Tool that reports the estimated search volume for any keyword as well as other suggestions, and SEMRush that also reports search volume along with Pay-Per-Click estimates, competitors, and other useful data. Use these two tools to determine the right keyword balance.

Content

Google loves unique fresh content and so will your website visitors. Using software to browse and index millions of web pages, Google examines the site title and measures keyword density to quickly analyze any page. Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. Optimum keyword density is suggested to be 1 to 3 percent.

Include your desired keywords in the site title and blog posts titles, write content that supports your overall topic, and structure content with categories and tags to ensure Google has a clear idea of what keywords are relevant to your site.

For those with WordPress sites I recommend the All in One SEO Pack to edit title's and meta tags, Google XML Sitemaps to properly index your site, and Keyword Density Checker.

Link Building

Quality inbound links from other sites to yours are valuable for search engine positioning. In a recent survey of over 100 search experts worldwide inbound links are agreed as the largest influence on organic search engine rank, the top 5 factors for organic search ranking are listed below (Source).

1. Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links
2. External Link Popularity
3. Diversity of Link Sources
4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
5. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains

Some linking will happen naturally, if you're blogging quality content it's natural that your visitors will share or reference your content on other sites creating links for yours. To compete on competitive terms it's generally necessary to be more proactive with link building. Some other ways to build links to your site are...

• Social Media Links - Many times social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn let you add a link to your website in the profile. While some of these social networks have "nofollow" links meaning they do not pass search engine authority there is a growing benefit both for traffic generation and ranking influence.
• Blogging - There are many benefits from blogging and one of them is link building. Blog posts can be linked between each other to boost rankings. Sites like ActiveRain that allow you to blog on them should include links back to your site. I'm a Seattle Real Estate professional.
• Comment Links - Many sites that allow comments on their posts will allow you to leave your name and website. This type of commenting for links can be considered spam if the comment isn't of value. Your comment and link will have a better chance of being approved if the comment is thoughtful.
• Natural Links - Based on the quality of your site and the content, people will bookmark and link to your site naturally. Giving visitors ways to easily share your site with others will encourage more natural links.
• Press Releases - Press releases can be helpful for building optimized links to your site. While search engines have gotten better at discrediting this type of link building it is still used with some results.
• Reciprocal Link Exchange - Reciprocal linking between two sites can be a good way to build inbound links. This starts with first evaluating a site to determine if it is good potential link partner, then emailing the owner of the site requesting to exchange links.

I recommend the Contextual Related Posts WordPress plugin to automate the healthy cross-linking between your own blog posts that is also useful for your readers.

Lastly...

There are unique situations in SEO that require unique solutions. If you've followed the suggestions above and your website is not showing up in the search engines it could be that Google is having an issue indexing your pages properly. I encourage everyone with a site to register at Google Webmaster Central which can be useful to diagnose issues. Leave any questions or comments below and I'll be happy to take a look!

Twitter lists have been around for a few weeks and until this point I only somewhat understood how to effectively use them. When they first came out I jumped in, made a few lists of my own and moved on not taking any significant time to explore them until now. What I have since found are that Twitter lists can be very useful.

It’s a known fact that following any number of people can produce a lot of noise. Add business Twitter accounts to the stream and many Tweets are drowned out and never read. The thing is, sometimes the noise is a benefit providing a shared link, resource or inspiration. Twitter lists allows the best of both worlds, the ability to organize groups of followers into broad or very defined categories to easily view a specific live feed of Tweets through the Twitter.com site. Previously the best method for oranizing groups of people or businesses on Twitter was to use 3rd party services like Tweetdeck, Seesmic or Twibes. With lists being centralized at Twitter.com it makes them much more public, powerful and accessible through the Twitter API so developers and use them in app they create.

Here are a few of the lists I have created..

• @GabeHoggarth/barcampers - People who have attended local and online Real Estate BarCamps.
• @GabeHoggarth/realestate - Real Estate Twits.
• @GabeHoggarth/brilliant - A very selective group of smart people who I learn from.
• @GabeHoggarth/wordpress - Interesting members of the WordPress community.

Brilliant. Here’s where I think it gets interesting, as Twitter lists grow in popularity they are becoming a very important metric to determine Twitter credibility and a great way to discover people and brands within nearly any category. The new site Listorious has jumped at the task of organizing lists for discovery. I’m excited to see how this plays out, I see some very popular category lists forming that will be valuable to sort just about any topic.

Here’s some continued reading…

• 10 ways you can use Twitter lists: http://mashable.com/2009/11/04/twitter-lists-uses/
• What Twitter lists say about you: http://www.mustexist.com/list_tags
• Top Twitter users based on followers: http://twitterholic.com/ 
• Top 237 Twitter users who will follow you back: http://socialnewswatch.com/top-twitter-users/ 
• Directory of the best Twitter lists: http://listorious.com/

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about social media lately, we're two months into a company and social media launch of eXp Realty and I have had a lot of opportunity to run analytics on a various marketing strategies. Starting from the ground up it's interesting to watch a company from relative birth spread through the efficient and real-time web. We all know that in social media there is no one thing, rather a compilation of many things mixed with consistency, value and conversation.

With Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google and hundreds of other broad and niche social networks out there it becomes an important task to figure out what is relevant, how to engage and respect each online community while maintaining a consistent brand across them all, and somehow pull it all back together. Is what we're doing today going to work tomorrow? The only constant is change. Facebook and Twitter are powerful now, are they going anywhere immediately? No. Will they be around forever? Only if they evolve to something else.

All of this swirling thought mixed with the desire to coach social media newcomers the best, and most simple way to put this whole plan together, I decided to reign in my own social media presence; my brand. The following is what I have determined essential in the focus of my time and effort..

• Personal Website
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Additional Recommendations

• Yelp
• Google Profile
• Many various niche networks

Mentioned before, create consistency and interact. Interlink your personal website with your LinkedIn profile, give Facebook users a way to access your Twitter, etc.. That said I personally want to give all of the users from these networks a place to gather where I have the most control and ownership of the content. That thought lead me to create a "/me" page, a custom landing page on my own personal domain for all of my social network friends and visitors where I can control the content. I have the freedom of adding personal and company sites, projects and additional ways to connect while collecting analytics. I'm not the first person to create a custom landing page for social networks but it is something I am surprised not to see more of. The goal of this page is to provide the most targeted and most useful information to the visitor, immediately. Visit my "/me" page and let me know.

One step towards a complete social media plan (link to the original post on my blog).

There’s a correlation between search phrases, search volume and conversion rates that anyone interested in dominating their local market should understand. The graph below illustrates this relationship between short tail (highly searched, low converting) keywords and long tail (low searched, high converting) keywords.

The balance that needs to be implemented in any search engine marketing plan is that of quality AND quantity. Dominating an online market involves a strategy of achieving top search engine placement for all relevant search terms and driving lots of targeted visitors who will ultimately convert into quality leads. So how do we accomplish this?

The Problem With Targeting Short Tail Keywords

The search phrase “Real Estate” is entered into Google 45,500,000 times/month and is highly competitive. For an example let’s think about this from the perspective of a someone looking to dominate the Seattle Washington market. Only a fraction of those 45,500,000 searches for “Real Estate” would find a Seattle real estate related website useful.

Would a Seattle website ranking at the top of this search term generate leads? Sure. But with such a general “Real Estate” term some of these leads may be looking at Seattle, Denver, Miami or other cities. The extra effort it took to rank for such a generic search term would have been better spent targeting many highly searched Seattle related terms.

The Problem With Targeting Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords by definition are very specific search phrases with low competition. An example of a long tail keyword is “Queen Anne 2 Bedroom Home For Sale” (Note: Queen Anne is a popular view neighborhood in Seattle, WA) and ranking well for this phrase is relatively easy.

Unfortunately, taking a quick glance at the search volume for “Queen Anne 2 Bedroom Home For Sale” using the Google Keyword Tool there is “Not Enough Data” to report the search volume meaning this phrase is hardly searched. Despite the fact that very specific search phrases enjoy higher conversion rates into leads, even #1 ranking for this term will generate little business. So, how do we capture many of these long tails and optimize and rank for high volume related search phrases?

Finding The Balance – Quality AND Quantity

Initially keyword research and then a long-term strategy, balancing what will produce the quantity and quality of search results, are invaluable in dominating a local market. Accomplishing this takes a two-fold approach.

1. BUILD AUTHORITY FOR THE MID TAIL:

First this involves selecting a ‘mid tail’ keyword phrase, something that is highly search and relevant to the website. Based on these factors for the Seattle market the keyword phrase “Seattle Real Estate” fits wells with 8,100 searches/month, enough volume to support lots of lead generation if ranked well and the visitors will be specific enough that they will convert at a decent percentage. Optimize the main page of the website for this keyword phrase by building links and Google authority.

(Disclosure: Working The Magic manages the #1 ranked website for “Seattle Real Estate” in Google with 10,000 visitors/month that converts roughly 5% of all visitors into leads)

2. CREATE CONTENT FOR THE LONG TAIL:

Once authority is built into the website, the second part of balancing quality and quantity is to then generate content for the long tail. This involves blogging, neighborhood and community information and additional commentary on the website. Using the long tail example from above it would make sense to add content to a Seattle website about Queen Anne 2 bedroom homes that would likely rank well for that search term. The additional content will add relevancy to the website as a whole and those pages will show up in results for all types of long tail keywords.

Permalink: Short vs. Long Tail Keywords

If you would like to learn more about our Real Estate SEO services please email me at GabeHoggarth@WorkingTheMagic.com or call me direct at 888-442-5115 ext. 104.

Yesterday I posted a blog on Vlogging & Video Publishing sharing the slides I recently used for a presentation on video marketing and I recieved a couple of comments asking for a tutorial on how I created the presentation. This is a simple process and here's how...

First things first you will need to sign in to Google Docs and will need to create a Google Account if you don't already have one. Google Docs is a free service that allows users and groups to create, share and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentation.

Screenshot of Google Docs main page:

Presentations in Google Docs work similar to a lite version of PowerPoint and are made up of slides each with the ability to add text, images, videos, shapes and drawings. For this presentation I used a combination of basic text and images, most of which were photos I already had and screenshots I took of the video publishing process. Create your presentation however you want adding colors, images, bullet points, links, etc.

Screenshot of the Presentation Editor:

Lastly, the "Share" options (found at the top-right when editing the presentation) allows you to invite other collaborators to the project, publish the presentation to the public and generate the embed code to post the presentation to your website and blog posts. 

Screenshot of the Share Button:

That's it! For more information please visit my Real Estate Web Design & Marketing Blog!

Follow me on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/GabeSEO/

It's important to understand that the ways consumers now digest their news and information is much different than years ago and I consider real estate professionals to be the best poised to benefit from the type of citizen journalism we see a lot of today.

Here are some slides I used recently for a Vlogging and Video Publishing presentation covering some of the basics from recording to sharing.

Hey ActiveRain'ers, please welcome our newest team member Eddi Hughes to the Working The Magic group!

Eddi joins our team with a strong background in web, graphic design and multimedia communication.  Eddi stood out from a number of qualified applicants for his use of social networks to connect with consumers through local niches in the real estate and automotive industries and his technical understanding of content management systems including WordPress.

As our client base continues to grow Eddi is an intergrate part of our team understanding that search engine visibility is an increasingly important investment for real estate professionals hungry to create ongoing relationships with their clients and we are excited to have him on-board!

We continue to provide great results for real estate professionals interested in succeeding in the online marketplace. Contact us to find out how we can bring more traffic to your website!

On a daily basis I am evaluating websites for search friendliness, researching effective keywords, title tags, content, lead capture and many other contributing factors to Google success. I do this for websites big and small, new and old with varying marketing budgets. My job is to create an effective personal strategy to move a website to the top of the search ranks for competitive keywords, ultimately driving traffic and generating leads. I want everyone to be successful but unfortunately I can’t help everyone and it’s not because I don’t have time (Our SEO system is scaled well and we have employed the talent to perform).

The biggest problem I see day-to-day are websites owners with little to no control of their websites.

This has happened for a couple reasons.

1. Template websites are priced right and consumers don’t necessarily know what they are buying. I’m not going to say every template website is bad, only the ones that restrict access to the website so much that even small changes are an added charge, a week delay, or impossible. For me as an owner of multiple websites myself, that is unacceptable. If there is one thing I have learned it is that Speed of Implementation is essential to success and survival in a changing Internet world.
2. Many web design companies have built a subscription based service into their revenue model. The client pays the monthly and the company evolves the platform. This can work if the design company is as enthused about change and the future as the client and they consistently evolve their services. The problem here comes when the company stops evolving and the site grows outdated while the client is stuck paying monthly. Now if the client wants to move away from the companies services (and monthly payment) their website is so entrenched, and possibly under design ownership rights of the company, that to really get away involves the client paying someone to build an entirely new site to making the switch.

TIP: Find a company that gives you FTP access to your website. It’s your own website and you deserve to have control. If a company insists that they can’t let you have FTP access, there are plenty of other companies that will.

An evolution of design and control.

With new open source publishing platforms like WordPress designers can now offer clients a customized website built on a framework that allows for complete ownership and control. No more monthly maintenance fees and open source means that community collaboration has developed and will continue to develop the platform, at no cost. As the web, search engines and design evolve the community as a whole participates in the growth for the benefit of everyone. These platforms are the future of design.

Here are a couple examples of sites I built on the WordPress platform:

SeattlePowerSearch.com - #1 on Google for Seattle Real Estate

PhoenixPowerSearch.com - #3 on Google for Phoenix Real Estate

If you would like to know more about WordPress or optimizing an existing website, please contact me at GabeHoggarth@WorkingTheMagic.com or at 1-888-442-5115 ext. 104.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/GabeSEO/

Lately I’ve been discussing the role of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) strategies in an effective SEO campaign.  For those new to this, PPC generally uses an auction based pricing system for purchasing visits to a website based on specific keywords.  Prices for keywords go up as the number of advertisers goes up because the space available for advertisers is limited.  Paid for links are then shown as “Sponsored Links” along with the organic results in Google searches and advertisers are charged a market price when someone clicks and visits their site.

To make some sense of this the average cost per visit for the keyword “Seattle real estate” is $5.03 or an amazing $100 for 20 visits.  Wow, seems expensive to me but if a website is converting visitors into leads and closings at a rate that produces a positive return on investment, even though that site is probably not maximizing profit, it can make sense especially if work is being done to improve organic rankings in the interim. 

Thinking about it, here are the reasons PPC is appealing…

1. Immediate results.  Start a PPC campaign right now and you can be sending visitors to your site for a specific search term by the end of the day.
2. Easy to calculate return on investment.  At the end of the day marketers and site owners want to be able to crunch the numbers and report their return on investment.  I can understand this and believe this is the biggest reason there is such a large disconnect between PPC vs. search engine optimization (SEO) spending despite the real opportunity that “SEO drives 75%+ of all search traffic, yet garners less than 15% of marketing budgets for SEM campaigns. PPC receives less than 25% of all search traffic, yet earns 80%+ of SEM campaign budgets”.  What effective marketers need to do is weigh the daily ROI decisions against the yearly and long term ROI to make a clear decision.  If it is any indicator, the #1 organically ranked website for “Seattle real estate” has traffic valued at $37,400/month.
3. Keyword testing for SEO. PPC allows sites to bid and drive traffic for specific keywords and then analyze the conversion rates based of those keywords.  Keyword testing is useful to examine if “Seattle real estate” or “Seattle homes for sale” converts visitors into leads and at what percentage.  This can be useful to give direction as to how the best use of resources for managing an SEO campaign can be spent.

And the downside of PPC…

1. Lower conversion rates.  The overall conversion rate or the rate at which searchers take a desired action on a site is higher for unpaid search results than the rate for paid (4.2% vs. 3.6%).  On Google, 72.3 percent of users surveyed felt that organic results were more relevant, while only 27.7 percent rated paid results as more relevant. 
2. Not as many visits for a given keyword.  30 percent of search engine users click on paid listings, leaving 70 percent who are clicking the organic listings or refining their search.
3. Infinite investment required.  Immediate results are a double edged sword, site traffic stops just as abruptly as it starts.  There is a constant infusion of PPC spend needed to maintain traffic levels.

I specialize in finding the very best online marketing strategy for real estate professionals and am very interested in hearing your success and struggles for the benefit of everyone, please share!  Until next time. 

Related posts:

http://www.workingthemagic.com/blog/2008/06/roi-of-seo-vs-ppc.html

I was recently asked how to control the text that gets displayed along with each link in the search results.  This is a good question because this text is your chance to tell searchers exactly what to expect from your site and entice them to click on the link and visit your page. The highlighted yellow text in the image below is an example of this text at work: 

So how does Google generate this text?  One of two ways.

1:  Most often, Google grabs this text from the meta description of the page.  The meta description is a snippet of code placed in the HEAD of your website.  You will have the best results from writing a clear sentence or two that accurately describes your page or article.  Keep the length of your meta description short since there will be a limited number of characters displayed in the search results and adding additional keywords to the meta description wont give you any extra value.  Each page of your website should also have its own unique meta description.  Here's a snapshot of the highlighted code showing the meta description of this Phoenix page:

To add a meta description to your website, insert the following code (WITHOUT the four $ signs) into the HEAD section of your website and customize the descriptive sentence or two:

<$$meta name="Description" content="Your descriptive sentence or two goes here."$$>

2:  Google will sometimes display 1 or 2 sentences directly from the content of the website.  This will happen when a website either does not have a meta description OR if the keywords of the search phrase are in the content but not the meta description.  At that point Google will grab the text from the sentences surrounding the keywords in the body of the website to display.

For more information about ranking at the top of the search engines visit Working The Magic or read my Real Estate SEO Blog.

Related posts:

Search Rankings vs Click %
SEO Tool - Instant Content Visualization
ROI of SEO vs PPC
Keyword Density and SEO