Listed below, you will find interesting nugets of knowledge we pick up along the way. We use this as a venue to let you see why we ask some of the questions we ask when developing a website.
9/28/2006 SEO -- Are You Optimized?
The following article is intended for the purpose of increasing your likelyhood
of being seen from people doing "Organic" Searches.
The algorithms that search engines use are not public knowledge and they are often being tweaked and altered by the search engine folks themselves.
Being on top is extremely competitive in today’s market. Virtually any study indicates that Google owns the market right now with regards to searches performed, followed by Yahoo and MSN respectively.
The other search engines all combined make roughly 5-10% depending on who you read.
Break Down
- Google ~ 40%
- Yahoo ~ 30%
- MSN ~20%
- All Others ~10%
Key Words
You need a few well defined keywords focus on those throughout your site. If you are say a real estate company, you may focus on
Real Estate as a key word.
Now think how many websites are out there with a real estate concentration, about 532,000,000 on google.com at the time of this writing. Wow!
That is quite a bit of competition so, lets keep focused on real estate and narrow it down. How about
Real Estate Agent, 82,500,000.
We have narrowed the field down now. Lets go further, lets get a state level
NC Real Estate Agent, 22,700,000. Still a lot of competition.
I think we can narrow this down further.
Raleigh Real Estate Agent, 4,190,000. Believe it or not, this is workable.
Through a little research, I have found that as of September 27th, the time of this writing, the months search numbers looked like this.
- Real Estate Agent = 329,187
- NC Real Estate Agent = 1,034
- Raleigh Real Estate Agent = 484
The last group is really the group we want to focus on anyhow, Odds are they know what they want. The best part is they want it in our area, Raleigh.
If you can get on the first page of google.com, you are in good shape, Top 3 even better. People tend to click around on the first page,
site #1 may be completely mis-leading or difficult to navigate so they pass it by for #2 or #3, etc.
Now we know what we want to use for our keywords. But, how exactly can we?
Links.
It is very important to have links coming
into your website. The more of an authority the link pointing to you is, the better your chances are of climbing the ladder.
If you can get other sites to link to your site as “Raleigh Real Estate Agent”, that would be about the best thing you could do link wise.
You can get links by being active on lists. Don’t put your name on any old list as If you get random emails asking you to put your company on their list, it can hurt you in the end, they are called link farms. You want to get on good lists. I noticed this when I searched on NC Real Estate Agent,
#1 on the list is The NC Real Estate Commission. If you can get a link from their site to yours, you are in great shape, other sources could be Chamber of commerce, BBB if any of them have links that they can put for you.
Also, is there any business that interacts with yours? You don’t want your competition but, say a lawyer, if they have a website, they can put you on it, and you can put them in a section of your site. It is mutually beneficial. Ex. Raleigh Real Estate Law(er).
Be an Authority.
Usually this means you have
a lot of content on your site. The more information you can put about yourself and what you do, the better your customers understand
your business..
“Hello, my name is Bob”. I am a Raleigh Real Estate Agent who has been in business for x years. I am extremely familiar with the Raleigh Real Estate Market and have sold x number of homes in the past week/month/year.
If you are looking for a Raleigh Real Estate Agent, Please feel free to call on me at any time. You may also find my name listed in X magazine, or on X site, you will even see my name listed in the NC Real Estate Commission's ledger, yada yada yada.
These are the type of things you can do, write up something fancy, or have someone else write it up for you. Note the Key words. You want them sprinkled but, don't
put them ontop of each other.
Out of your hands.
The rest of the optimization has to come behind the scenes and is something that a good web designer and web developer will work together towards. If it skews too far in either of their directions, your site may become non-appealing or non-functional.
The Long Wait
Once the optimizing is done, you must wait and wait and wait. It takes anywhere from 6 weeks to 3 months for the changes to propagate to the servers.