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Dirty Sexy SEO

By Kay Frenzer-Zeeh

Services for Real Estate Pros with Buzz Marketing Pros

December 30, 2007 12:07 PM

Quick! What is "Dirty Sexy SEO" you ask?

It's a revamped Cosmo title. Would you have looked at this post if the title was:

Make Your Titles Resemble Those on Cosmopolitan and See How Many More People Read Your Posts!

Cosmo Titles

Fact is, enterprising SEOs have done some research, and have discovered that making your blog titles resemble those on Cosmo really do pull in a lot more readers.

I've been doing a little research of my own, and when one of my posts gets poor readership, I tweak the title until it goes up. So if you thought you were losing your mind, relax, it was just me.

Using the January 2008 Cosmo cover, these would be my titles:

How to Stay Hot for SEO
Google Astrologer 2008 - SEO Predictions
Fab Directories
SEO Diva - the Secret Reason I'm Smiling
SEO Sessions That Ended in the ER
Feel Happier! 20 Ways to Make SEO Even Better
Yowzer! 40% of SEOs Do This in Their Sleep
Top SEO Experts Share New and Naughty Link Strategies

Ya know, I really like some of these titles - I may be using them in future postings!

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!!

P.S. Six hours later, I rank #1 on Google for the keyword phrase "dirty sexy seo." What an accomplishment!

See my challenge in Stay HOT for SEO.

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Deborah Burns ~ Seattle Real Estate Agent

Realty Executives -BRIO - Seattle, WA

Well I just wandered over from your post "Stay Hot for SEO" and your theory is a Hoot! I actually thought that your title was based on the TV program "Dirty, Sexy Money"...I think that Cosmo stole their title from the TV program, LOL! See you just can't keep a good concept down.....

Jan 01, 2008 02:34 PM

Kay Frenzer-Zeeh

Buzz Marketing Pros - Chandler, AZ

Real Estate SEO

Deborah - well, there you go...it must work!

Jan 01, 2008 02:42 PM

Robert Krames

Smart Media Creative Solutions - Gainesville, FL

As the Brits say "You got to sex it up a bit". There's been a lot of hubub around the net on people using sex to sell real estate. One guy got fired from his broker for making a slide show with chicks in bikinis to sell real estate. It didn't even have any pics of houses. It did get him a lot of traffic to his web site though, not sure how good of a conversion rate he got from that traffic, but it did get traffic. :)

Jan 02, 2008 12:47 AM

Bartley Wilson

Virtual Pictures Corp. (VPiX) - Monument, CO

VR Software and 360° Solutions

This technique only works until Google finds out you spoofed them, then you can get black listed. Or, you piss someone off and they manually report you. Then a live person comes to your site form Google and then there's Hell to pay.

When that happens, your domain is essentially dead. When I worked for Netscape almost ten years ago, I did silly things like posting: britney spears, beanie babies, or russian wives into my metas. A day later, WHAM. Instant top of the search page results on AltaVista, Northern Light, Excite and others. Google wasn't around back then.

But times change and you need to be careful when you use terms that will catapult your site ranking due to piggy back SEO techniques like this. While the current Webmaster resources do not have this specific technique in the black hat SEO list of SEO no-no's, I'm wiling to bet $20 that if you call Frederick Marckini, Danny Sullivan or Serge Thibodeau... even Bruce Clay... you'd find out they'd not recommend this technique either.

Jan 02, 2008 12:10 PM

Anonymous

Whoa Bart, what are you talking about? Spoofing Google? I can use any words I want in a post, and Google could care less. Dude, there's nothing in my meta tags...this was done with a title. SEO's do it all the time to prove a point - you can reach #1 on Google for anything if it's not a popular search term. I have absolutely no idea where you get the idea there's anything black hat about this!! I think you're confused about what we're doing here. Trust me, the boys don't have a problem with this.

Jan 02, 2008 12:21 PM

#21

Bartley Wilson

Virtual Pictures Corp. (VPiX) - Monument, CO

VR Software and 360° Solutions

I see I ruffled some feathers here. I DO get the the point of the BLOG. The point that I was making, or thought I made was NOT to use the words Dirty Sexy SEO as part of your website's SEO structure.

Let's be logical for a minute on this point.

You have heard of Google's AdSense right? This is the program that can pay you lots of money for putting Google ads on your site. But what are the sites they do NOT allow? Adult content is one of them.

So, using the word Dirty Sexy SEO could be picked up by the mindless GoogleBot and might label your site with adult content. Dirty Sexy SEO is questionable term. It might get you some big kicks and visibility for a piggy back term now, but it still has the base word SEX and since the Google robots do not always have a human driving this... it stands to reason that one might risk playing with fire here and risk getting the boot by Google.

As for using the reference in a blog, I see no harm in that. I just don't want to see any REALTORS run off and take this advice and insert Dirty, Sexy SEO into their website as PART of their GET RANKED QUICK plan, as this would most certainly be a stupid thing to do.

Jan 02, 2008 01:24 PM

Kay Frenzer-Zeeh

Buzz Marketing Pros - Chandler, AZ

Real Estate SEO

Well, Bart, you are tremendously condescending. I've been blogging on AR for some time, and the Realtors here aren't stupid at all.

Jan 02, 2008 01:28 PM

Robert Krames

Smart Media Creative Solutions - Gainesville, FL

Using provocative words is more to catch the user's attention rather than SEO, when was the last time you did a search on "Dirty sexy SEO"? But if you were viewing a list of SEO blogs, that one would jump out at you more and entice you to click it. These methods were great on a social web site like AR.

Jan 02, 2008 11:34 PM

Kay Frenzer-Zeeh

Buzz Marketing Pros - Chandler, AZ

Real Estate SEO

Robert - exactly!

Jan 03, 2008 12:03 AM

Ryan Martin

Pacific Continental Realty, LLC - Bellingham, WA

Bellingham Commercial RE Broker

Kay - Well I wouldn't go as far to say that you can optimize a blog for "anything", but I do think that you can optimize for longer string keyword phrases and less competitive search terms.

Jan 03, 2008 04:33 AM

David Kyle

Charlotte Internet Marketing SEM Adwords - Charlotte, NC

Charlotte SEO

Kay is right

You can optimize a blog for ANYTHING. Yes blogs are good at getting longtails, but thats not all they are good for.

Jan 03, 2008 05:55 AM

Ryan Martin

Pacific Continental Realty, LLC - Bellingham, WA

Bellingham Commercial RE Broker

I will rephrase then. Yes, you can optimize a blog for ANYTHING, but that doesn't mean that you will get ANYWHERE with that blog in Google's SEPRs.

Kay and David, I would like to see you optimize an ActiveRain post for the keyword phrase "real estate". Let me know when that post ranks #1 in Google.

Jan 03, 2008 07:33 AM

David Kyle

Charlotte Internet Marketing SEM Adwords - Charlotte, NC

Charlotte SEO

sure thing Ryan.... we have nothing better to do with our time than work on a site for your amusement. We are desperate to prove ourselves to you. 8-p

btw a Blog and a Blog Post are 2 different things. Also you are failing to recognize that Google puts weight in aged and established sites. Blogging didn't really catch on until a few years ago.

Jan 03, 2008 07:45 AM

Kay Frenzer-Zeeh

Buzz Marketing Pros - Chandler, AZ

Real Estate SEO

Ryan, you remind me of the client who wanted me to get him to #1 for "love!"

Ranking #1 for "real estate" would take a lot of time and money. Besides, my point in all this is you can rank for "purple striped polka dot widget" and I can rank for "queen of the known world" pretty quickly - if we want to. That is because those are neither popular search terms nor do they have a lot of competing pages.

I'm going to quote Robert Krames' comment here:

"Using provocative words is more to catch the user's attention rather than SEO, when was the last time you did a search on "Dirty sexy SEO"? But if you were viewing a list of SEO blogs, that one would jump out at you more and entice you to click it. These methods were great on a social web site like AR."

That's my point. Ranking #1 for "Dirty Sexy SEO" is just for laughs. But it's also there to prove a point to people who boast about their web site being #1 for "executive real estate top producer of greater Sioux Falls." (I made that up.) But that's another AR blog post (coming soon).

Jan 03, 2008 08:00 AM

Beverly Kinnisto

VPiX - San Francisco, CA

I don't see any big deal in using the word Dirty Sexy in a blog, but here's a good question. If you cannot use Google's AdSense on a website for adult content, it's not a stretch of the imagination that maybe linking your site to an adult phrase on a blog might be a dangerous thing to do. I think Bart opened up a good thing to think about here.

So Kay, I have to apologize if this next question is a hard one for you to answer, but why is it that we do not see your site when I type in the search phrase: real estate SEO?

I see several companies on the first page of Google when I look for real estate seo firms, one of them is Voyager. I don't see yours yet you were so quick to blast Bart on what I thought was some pretty good advice. He said that using Dirty Sexy SEO within any SEO strategy was a pretty stupid thing to do. I did not see where Bart said that we (agents) were stupid. I just think he ruffled your feathers.

I have attended many real estate marketing workshops and seen Voyager at Inman Connect and Realtor EXPO. I met Bart two years ago and have found him to be a no-nonsense kind of straight shooter. He has a refreshing, NO BS kind of style and I never found anything he had to say condescending in the least.

He is a persuasive speaker and he make REALTORS think for a change. He does ask us to wake up and ask questions before we spend our hard earned commissions on half-baked real estate marketing firms that over promise and under deliver. The dead give away for getting good or mediocre SEO services is easy to measure. If I am going to have a firm do my SEO, then they should have no problem proving they rank on page one of Google, Yahoo and MSN before I spend one dollar with them.

Right?

By the way, I did call Bruce Clay and the first question I asked the account manager I spoke with was about using dirty sexy real estate in my search term. He gave me a list of seven things why this was not a good idea, so Bart didn't give anyone bad advice to anyone here on Active Rain. Trickery is one of the terms he said, and he pointed out that a firm in Las Vegas called Traffic Power had did some shady things and they got the boot (black listed) from Google and never returned. He confirmed he same thing Bart said. It is a questionable term and he recommended to stay away from it as for one thing: a real estate site has nothing to do with being sexy. It's a wasted term and if you get caught using trick words to get Google to rank and artificially inflate your site... and they find out about it, you will get black listed.

Anyone want to call iProspect or some other SEO firm as ask them the same question? This way Kay doesn't see that I'm the only one questioning her SEO strategies here.

Jan 06, 2008 08:40 AM

Kay Frenzer-Zeeh

Buzz Marketing Pros - Chandler, AZ

Real Estate SEO

Beverly, you make some good points. However, there is a difference between a blog title and optimizing for a web site. Blog titles are often catchy, and I can give you a list of well known SEO bloggers that did the same thing I did and didn't get blacklisted from Google. Google is NOT going to blacklist a blog for using a title like that. It's not shady, and it wasn't an attempt to "trick" Google in any way. I was not selling "sexy real estate" - I was writing a post about blog titles. I'm also not placing Adsense on my blog.

Regarding the search term "real estate SEO" - well, I have only been blogging about that topic since August 2007. My goal here has not been to become first on Google for "real estate seo," and I haven't made any attempt to optimize them for that keyword phrase. My purpose has been to give some help and advice on the basics of SEO in this niche, because I know how difficult it is, and I like the people here. I have had hundreds of business clients that have reached Google's first page, so I feel pretty confident that I know what I'm doing.

My primary site, RazzleDazzled.com, is on the first page of Google for "real estate postcards" (and other top tier keywords) and was #2 until I got so busy I neglected to stay on top of the SEO for it. I get thousands of visitors a month to that site. So you see, I am on the first page of Google for my chosen niche. If I promoted it more within my AR blog postings I'm sure it would move up quickly, but I don't feel comfortable throwing links to it in them.

Perhaps Bart is a nice guy, but IMO he came into Active Rain like a bull in a china shop, shooting everyone down in every comment he made. Perhaps I'm just used to people on AR being nicer.

Jan 06, 2008 09:08 AM

Kay Frenzer-Zeeh

Buzz Marketing Pros - Chandler, AZ

Real Estate SEO

Google #2 "real estate seo blog." 'Nuff said.

I think this has been drilled into the ground at this point, interestingly enough by 3 people who are brand new to Active Rain. I don't know why you and your acolytes have to ruin what was a fun blog posting Bart, but I'm tired of it.

Jan 07, 2008 04:35 AM

Stephani Hill

Virtual Point Photos - Fort Smith, AR

True, I am new to AR. Everyone has to be new at some point, but surely that fact alone does not invalidate my post.

You both really do make interesting points. Your title did make me click-I enjoyed your post. Without eye-catching headings, we end up wading through a thousand nondescript titles. That being said-Bart does introduce some relevant facts about SEO and Google. You both have made valid, compelling points...

BTW, when Bart and I disagree, we respect one another's opinions. Sometimes we have to agree to disagree...that does not exactly jive with acolyte-but it is a fun word that I have not seen it in a while!

Jan 07, 2008 05:20 AM

Margaret Mitchell

Coldwell Banker Yorke Realty - York, ME

Seacoast Maine & NH Real Estate

Long story how I got here BUT I loved your post!!! You make SEO fun!

Sep 28, 2008 02:37 AM

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