SEO Y Yo

And that's all the Espaňol I'm bringing to this one, but it was way too cool a title to pass up. Please stick around though - the story might interest you.

Mary and I have been using the internet since well before it was the internet. I used to have a user account with Colorado Supernet when there was no web - we used tools like Archie, Telnet, and Gopher, and I belonged to a bunch of Usenet User Groups, including alt.urban.folklore - the precursor to Snopes.com. We used early Macs, dial-ups and 240 baud modems, and cobbled-together bulletin board programs like Red Ryder to set up sharing networks. And in 1987, I designed an early intranet for a division of Control Data Canada.

One day in early 1994, Mary came home from a conference and said she needed a "website". Neither of us had any idea what that was - or even why we needed one - but I started doing some research, got my hands on a copy of Mosaic - the first web browser - and downloaded a copy of the HTML protocols from CERN in Switzerland. Four days later, we had the very first Realtor website in Northern Colorado - and it's been up and running ever since.

Our website - www.maryanddick.com - has had three lives.

Life 1 - We were the first, and for a long time, the only real estate website out there for our area. And since we have a lot of high-tech employers here - and hence a lot of geeks - we got found. The first 2-3 years, we did a huge amount of relocation and re-sale business with engineers and techies moving into or out of the area - we were sending out sometimes 20 relocation packages a month. The website was focused on us - it was a way for us to be noticed and it worked really well as a marketing tool. But it didn't last.

Life 2 - One day we woke up and there were literally hundreds of real estate websites for Northern Colorado. Agents could go buy a template site and have it up and running in a matter of days. Mary & I disappeared in the clutter. Consumers were still doing searches for things like Fort Collins Realtor or Fort Collins Real Estate, but we were no longer the default result. And gradually the calls stopped coming in.

We didn't want to give up on our website, so we re-purposed it. It became a focus for working with our client base - we used it as a place to post our listings, publish our market reports and newsletters, and provide useful links. It was, now that I think about it, an early kind of blog. Our client base did make use of it, and we could link from MLS to our listings, but we weren't getting much business from it. And it stayed that way for a long while. By last year, it had mostly vanished - I doubt that we had 100 visitors in March of last year.

Life 3 - And then we found out about SEO (for those of you who really haven't been paying attention, that's Search Engine Optimization). And that wasn't easy knowledge to come by - for years, I had probably hung up on a dozen telemarketers a week, all of whom were trying to sell me page 1 Google results - you know the drill. But one day last March, I got a call when I wasn't busy from a telemarketer, and I baited him a bit by inquiring if he thought he could get me a page 1 Google result. Instead of the usual garbage, I got an honest answer, enough so that I didn't hang up, but stayed on the phone and started learning a bit about SEO. After a fifteen minute discussion, I went off to do some research on my own and to check out a few links he had given me.

The results were interesting - something was going on out there that we needed to be part of. More phone calls, more research, and Hey Presto! - we had a new website (actually a new sub-domain appended to our old website). It was an indexable IDX site, with lots of neat bells and whistles - but it wasn't quite ready to start providing results.

My new website company had been brutally frank: "If you don't do your part - providing back-links - you're just wasting your time and money". And I learned that meant I had to start blogging. They suggested that I check out AR, and you know that drill as well. I started blogging and learned how to do those back-links the right way from Bob Stewart and AR University, and things started happening.

Since April, 2011, we have been getting a steady stream of leads. We have new buyer and seller clients. We have had closings. In the last 30 days, there have been 3,110 visits and 11,740 pageviews on our IDX site. We're on page 1 on 29 of 31 long-tail keyword Google searches related to our neighborhood and market segment web page categories. And our numbers are steadily trending up. Our web page is back from the dead - and just in time, those wolves howling just outside the door were starting to worry me.

SEO matters. A lot. It brought our business into line with the way consumers are approaching real estate today, opened up new possibilities for growing our client base, and help us adapt to major changes in the market. It can help you too.

As a side note, because their service and results have certainly earned a shout-out, my webpage company is Dynamic Page Solutions, and my main guy there is Dan Revel - 480/820-0630. They have been completely honest, have delivered everything they promised on time and as advertised, and have always been available for questions and advice. And they were affordable. I couldn't be happier with them.

Mary & Dick Greenberg Coldwell Banker - Fort Collins 702-A W. Drake Rd. Fort Collins, CO 80526 970-689-4663 www.maryanddick.com