Hi - I am new to Active Rain.  I have looked over many of the posts in this group.  And, I apologize if any of this sounds redundant.

Although I am a definitely a realtor, I have been in the software business for 25 years.

My first real estate website is <a href=http://www.ClearwaterDreaming.com>www.ClearwaterDreaming.com</a>.  It went online in Sept, 2005.   There were 2 main keyword phrases that I did GOOGLE optimization for:

Clearwater Real Estate

Clearwater Condos

I wanted to pick keyword phrases that have a lot of search activity.  This tool  <a href=http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion>Yahoo keyword tool</a>  gave me a good idea of how many searches or a particular word or phrase were done last month on Yahoo's network.  Google doesn't provide this info.  The more searches, the harder it is to get to the top.  It would be very easy to get to the top for "Clearwater underwater basketweaving"

It took me about 9 months to get to the top for the above chosen terms.  My site is normally #1 for both.  Occasionally drops to 2 or 3.

If your site has been around for a while, implementing these ideas will work faster.  Google is very partial to age.

You have probably heard from others that having many pages is helpful.   From what I've observed, having many pages with your targeted keywords is the most important  (besides the importance given to age and links).

If you go to Google and enter:  site:yoursite.com, you will see how many pages of your site Google has in their database.  Entering: site:ClearwaterDreaming.com  normally returns 1100+ pages.

Now 1100 pages sounds like a lot of work.  Here are some tips on getting more pages.  I recommend your checking the mentioned pages to get greater reality on what I am talking about.

1.  Make a lot of custom searches with your IDX solution.  For example, <a href=http://www.ClearwaterDreaming.com/pinellas_county.htm>Pinellas County</a>   There are somewhere around 100 pages here that only took me about 3 hours to do - as the only change is the query criteria.

2.  Make pages from <a href=http://www.wikipedia.org>www.Wikipedia.org</a>  You are allowed to copy and re-distribute this info as long as you post a reference to wikipedia.org.  (This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License ).  See the bottom half of my homepage where the cities are all named.   Take, Dunedin, Florida <a href=http://www.clearwaterdreaming.com/cities/dunedin-florida.htm>Dunedin, Florida</a> for example.  You can use the custom Dunedin idx searches created in #1 above and add them to the top of a wikipedia based page on Dunedin.   This accounted for another 100+ pages.

As this is my first post, I don't want to overdue it.   Hope this has been helpful.

Best wishes,

Sheldon Goldberg