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Google tips

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 http://www.ClearwaterDreaming.com. It went online in Sept, 2005. There were 2 main keyword phrases that I did GOOGLE optimization for:

Clearwater Real Estate

Clearwater Condos

I picked keyword phrases that have a lot of search activity. This tool http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ searches will give you 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. I did put a lot of work into it . Here are a couple of ideas.

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.

1. Make a lot of custom searches with your IDX solution. For example, http://www.ClearwaterDreaming.com/pinellas_county.htm. 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 http://www.Wikipedia.org. 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 http://www.ClearwaterDreaming.com/cities/dunedin-florida.htm 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.

As I am new, I don't want to overdue it. I will add more tips shortly.

Best wishes,

Sheldon Goldberg

Posted by Sheldon Goldberg on 05/30/2007 05:24 AM

Comments (16)

google

16 Comments on Google tips

MAY

2007

Thanks for the tips Sheldon, I'm definately take them into consideration and try to use them accordingly. Welcome aboard!

Have a question. Should we copying and pasting the code you put in to see what you are talking about? Or does the code need to be reinserted? Love the information here but a bit hard to understand.

thanks Sheldon, good tip< I bookmarked your post to go through each item, thanks again!

Sheldon, Good Advice - and well, welcome to A/R (ActiveRain) I always appreciate input on new or even old ideas (that helps me remember some basics) So keep the ideas flowing. Thanks

Welcome to activerain. We welcome your tips and advice.

Thanks for the tips and advice Sheldon. And welcome to ActiveRain!!

Welcome Sheldon!

Thanks very much for the tips, as we are constantly trying to make sense out of google.

Thanks for the tip. I need all the help I can get to expose my company to the web.

I'm a newbie too!

Ray DeLao

Thanks a bunch... I had never thought of custom IDX searches. That is a great idea.

Devon Cerniga
Northwest Arkansas Real Estate
www.ISellNWA.com

Thanks so much for these tips----I especially liked the Wikipedia suggestion.

Sheldon, this is a fabulous posting. I am most appreciative that you took the time to lay this out for all of us who have so little understanding of how it works and how to monitor our offerings to the web.

I hope you have fabulous success in your new career. I have to think that you're a shoe in. Let us know how the rest of us can help you from time to time.

BILL CHERRY, DALLAS BROKER-REALTOR. MY 43RD YEAR SERVING TEXAS! 972 380-7347

Thanks so much, Sheldon! I will try to implement some of your proposals on my website -

Thanks for the tips. I'll have to look into the Widipedia thing that you suggest.

Sheldon, Thank You! I like your post about this, I am going to implement the tips. I would like to know more about those custom IDX searches...very interesting!

Thanks so much to Jason Sardi for showing me how to make my links clickable. The post should be easier now to follow.

Shel

For those of you that asked how create custom searches, here is an example from this page: (warning - this is somewhat technical).
http://www.clearwaterdreaming.com/clearwater_belleair_condos.htm . Assuming you have a template type page for your website where you can create pages - I used my template and added this code

What it does was create a frame with my idx results (if you are trying to follow this, it would be good to click on the link above to get more reality). My mls id=426919, not sure what "quick" means. Price is anything equal to or greater than $100,000. Property code and city are obvious. Sort "pa" means sort by "price ascending" (start with lowest price). width and height are how many pixels on the screen. frameborder=0 - means no border on the frame. and scrolling=no prevents a scroll bar from appearing next to the search frame. To scroll down, users will use the scroll bar on the right side of the browser.

For each custom idx page I made, I just changed this <iframe code to meet the criteria.

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