Understanding the concepts surrounding search engine optimization and website marketing is the first step towards making your website successful as a leadgeneration and sales tool through the internet as a marketing medium.

Search engine optimization(SEO) is defined as initiatives that affect a site's natural or organic search engine ranking results (not pay sponsored results). This includes analyzing and making many adjustments to items such as title, meta data, sitemaps, verification codes, robot commands, textual content, uniqueness of content, quality of content, textual links, alt tags for images, site submission, outbound linking, inbound linking, reciprocal linking and page refreshing, participation in real estate related networks.

Search engine marketing(SEM) is building and managing pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. This can be seen in the sponsored search results section on the page displaying the search engine results (e.g. Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.), and on their content partners (e.g. AOL, Ask.com, etc.) and content network (e.g. sites that display ads by Google, or ads by Yahoo, etc.)

Pay featured ads refers to a charge to feature a site on another website that will not only act as an inbound link for SEO purposes, but helps drive traffic to the client site. This includes membership and inbound links from high quality real estate and agent related networks that charge a fee for membership.

I think this one puts me over the 20K marker - took a while, but it's been fun :o)

I love Active Rain and meeting you all - I definitely will keep blogging here well into the future.  In fact I encourage all my clients, and others I meet in the real estate business to blog here.

I have been amazed to see how well this website has done to push up it's members in the organic searche engine rankings for searches related to relocation, and several variations of this search.

LINK PARTNERS ARE FREE- and I highly recommend this site as well since it does not put a bunch of Ads by Google between you (the members) and the visitors - but is truly designed to help buyers and sellers find local agents.

Something that is as simple as writing a good effective title can be more difficult than one might imagine - but here are a couple tricks to help out.

First you probably know that the title is one of the most important identifying factors that tells a search engine, and in turn the people searching what you website is all about - so being clear and to the point is essential.

Here are two tips:

1. Keep the number of characters in your title to 90 or under - plain and simple
   
2. Try to overlap keyword phrases...for example )a very basic example, but I'm sure you get the point):

Plymouth MA real estate
Plymouth MA luxury properties

Could be written to max the search string as such:

Luxury Plymouth MA Real Estate Properties

Hope this is helpful!

One of the hardest things about the search engine optimization realm is know when to adapt your website due to changes in the search engine algorithms, but it's even harder to know when to not make changes and then act accordingly. Truly knowing when to hold steady and not make changes is (in my opinion) one of the hardest things to do in the space.

In the past couple weeks both Google and Yahoo's algorithms made some very serious changes (you may have noticed a lot of movement in the organic search results) - and this definitely affects all of us that utilize the internet as a serious marketing medium in the real estate and home staging spaces.

Only over time will one be able to recognize patterns and identify what has changed in the Google and Yahoo secret formulas (or algorithims) that has caused sites to change rankings while SEO pro's and a few endeavoring self-managed sites are jocking for the first page rankings - and this last time I noticed some changes that have come clear to me.

Keep your eyes open over time and they should become clear if you really pay attention - and oh yeah - I am making no major changes on this last Google adjustment since I think they over compensated on their algorithms and will revert back enough to correct themselves.

I am looking to build a network of Home Stagers that could benefit each other by creating a linking network - one for each area in the country so there is no direct competition, but collaboration.  One of my clients, Nuances LLC, the leading home staging company in Southeastern Massachusetts has spurred me along on this idea, and I am interested in seeing who out there might be interested?

Please let me know - this could benefit all involved and help participants sites rank better on the search engines.

Congratulations to the home staging company, Nuances LLC (www.nuances,net) of Cape Cod, MA on total Internet domination in their geographical coverage area in the category of home staging.  Take a look at these results!

Yahoo:
cape cod home staging
cape cod home staging companies
falmouth ma home staging
sandwich ma home staging
eastern ma home staging companies

Google:
cape cod home staging companies
cape cod home staging
falmouth ma home staging companies
sandwich ma home staging
eastern ma home staging

MSN:
cape cod home staging
cape cod home stagers

AND THE LIST GOES ON AND ON - ANY DOUBTS ABOUT IF FIRST SEO CONSULTANTS IS THE REAL DEALWHEN IT COMES TO SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION?

We love to tell you this Nuances, and we know you like to hear it on this occasion: We told you so :o)

How much do you think this one was for one of our clients?

www.CapeAnnRealEstate.com

And you should see how it ranks on Google and Yahoo!!

We can develop these very quickly - and they are not the limiting out of the box solutions that don't rank very well that you get from so many other providers.  Get a website that works wonders for your business!

As we know in the SEO realm, inbound links from quality sites is an important variable when organic search engine rankings are calculated. As it is everyone's goal to increase your website's presence on the internet, I thought I would share a well built and structured website with you that offers FREE link partners.

Americas Relocation Home Services

This site already ranks well for many searches, will continue improving its rank organically and considered to be a high quality website by the search engines as it has been optimized on many fronts already, and the SEO process and quality content building processes continue - so this is a great way to build an inbound link to your site, and increase your own web-presence and organic search results for your real estate website. 

It's always hard to pull the plug on a real estate website that may have been cutting edge at one time a couple years ago, back as websites get fancier and new technologies emerge it may be time to snaz up your website.

Here's a good before and after example of one we just upgraded for one of our clients:

 BEFORE

AFTER

Framesets are on the out as well