For some, SEO is debatable topic with varying beliefs and hat colors. A person referred to as a Black Hat uses deceptive strategies to better rankings while White Hat conforms to the search engine guidelines. Rules can be bent but ultimately black hat techniques are at risk against the evolving search engines.

What is SEO Success?

This is a trick question since SEO is an ongoing process and the evolving search engines create new opportunity and competitors.  SEO success begins when your website is generating targeted traffic and a positive return on investment in the form of sales leads, purchases, contacts, brand recognition, subscriptions, connections, etc.

The image below shows the consistency of search engine traffic specifically for PhoenixPowerSearch.com a website with near top ranking for “Phoenix real estate” and several variations of the phrase like “Phoenix Arizona real estate” and “Phoenix AZ real estate”. Last month Google, Bing, and Yahoo! sent 3,892 visitors to this website. In my opinion the value of consistent targeted traffic to a site from organic search ranking is often underestimated.

Begin with Keyword Research

A proper SEO strategy has clear keyword goals with an understanding of the content and inbound links necessary to produce the desired results. The first step is to identify keyword phrases that your target audience is typing into Google on a consistent basis. From my experience for real estate these will be “city”+”real estate” and “neighborhood”+”real estate” search phrases, “real estate” can also be exchanged for “homes for sale”.

Generally, the most common keyword phrases (aka the ones search the most) are the most competitive. Finding keywords that are localized to your market will usually have the most search traffic without being unnecessarily competitive. The two services I use the most when researching keywords are the Google Keyword Tool that reports the estimated search volume for any keyword with additional keyword suggestions, and SEMRush that also reports search volume along with Pay-Per-Click estimates, competitors, and other useful data. Use these two tools to determine the right keyword balance.

Content

Google loves unique fresh content and so will your website visitors. Using software to browse and index millions of web pages, Google examines the site title and measures keyword density to quickly analyze any page. Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. Optimum keyword density is suggested to be 1 to 3 percent.

Include your desired keywords in the site title and blog posts titles, write content that supports your overall topic, and structure content with categories and tags to ensure Google has a clear idea of what keywords are relevant to your site.

For those with WordPress sites I recommend the All in One SEO Pack to edit title’s and meta tags, Google XML Sitemaps to properly index your site, and Keyword Density Checker.

Link Building

Quality inbound links from other sites to yours are valuable for search engine positioning. In a recent survey of over 100 search experts worldwide inbound links are agreed as the largest influence on organic search engine rank, the top 5 factors for organic search ranking are listed below (Source).

1. Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links
2. External Link Popularity
3. Diversity of Link Sources
4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
5. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains

Some linking will happen naturally, if you’re blogging quality content it’s natural that your visitors will share or reference your content on other sites creating links for yours. To compete on competitive terms it’s generally necessary to be more proactive with link building. Some other ways to build links to your site are…

• Social Media Links – Many times social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn let you add a link to your website in the profile. While some of these social networks have “nofollow” links meaning they do not pass search engine authority there is a growing benefit both for traffic generation and ranking influence.
• Blogging – There are many benefits from blogging and one of them is link building. Blog posts can be linked between each other to boost rankings. Sites like ActiveRain that allow you to blog on them should include links back to your site. I’m a Seattle Real Estate professional.
• Comment Links – Many sites that allow comments on their posts will allow you to leave your name and website. This type of commenting for links can be considered spam if the comment isn’t of value. Your comment and link will have a better chance of being approved if the comment is thoughtful.
• Natural Links – Based on the quality of your site and the content, people will bookmark and link to your site naturally. Giving visitors ways to easily share your site with others will encourage more natural links.
• Press Releases – Press releases can be helpful for building optimized links to your site. While search engines have adapted to discount some of these mass press released this type of link building it is still used with some results.
• Reciprocal Link Exchange – Reciprocal linking between two sites can be a good way to build inbound links. This starts with first evaluating a site to determine if it is good potential link partner, then emailing the owner of the site requesting to exchange links. Software can automate requests and managing link partners for scalable reciprocal link building. I recommend Zeus or IBP for the tech savvy.

Contextual Related Posts is a WordPress plugin that will automate the healthy cross-linking between your blog posts, and it’s useful for your readers!

Lastly…

There are unique situations in SEO that require unique solutions. If you’ve followed the suggestions above and your website is not showing up in the search engines it could be that Google is having an issue indexing your pages properly. I encourage everyone with a site to register at Google Webmaster Central which can be useful to diagnose issues.

To learn more about real estate websites and search engine optimization visit WorkingTheMagic.com.

Google has a huge advantage in the search market, but by how much?

That inspired me to dig into the stats for a quick comparison. With the help of Google Analytics I reviewed the traffic sources of SeattlePowerSearch.com a site we manage on the Working The Magic network that ranks #1 organically for “Seattle real estate” in Google, Bing, and Yahoo!.

Combined for September, the top three search engines sent a total of 3,118 visitors to the site from the phrase “Seattle real estate”. Google referred the most traffic, Bing a distant second, and Yahoo! third, the analytics broken down respectively are below.

Google Traffic – 88%

Bing Traffic – 6.8%

Yahoo Traffic – 5.4%

It’s clear that Google drives the lions share of search traffic for this term. The good news is, from our experience optimization is similar across the various search engines meaning that the best strategy is to focus on Google and positive results in Bing, Yahoo!, and others will follow.

Originally posted at Google, Bing, or Yahoo!? on Working The Magic real estate websites.

With Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google and hundreds of other broad and niche social networks out there it becomes an important task to figure out what is relevant, how to engage and respect each online community while maintaining a consistent brand across them all, and somehow pull it all back together. Is what we’re doing today going to work tomorrow? The only constant is change. Facebook and Twitter are powerful now, are they going anywhere immediately? No. Will they be around forever? Only if they evolve to something else.

All of this swirling thought mixed with the desire to coach social media newcomers the best, and most simple way to put this whole plan together, I decided to reign in my own social media presence; my brand. The following is what I feel are essential for any company or person staking a piece of Internet pie..

• Personal Website
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Additional Recommendations

• Yelp
• Google Profile
• Many various niche networks

Mentioned before, create consistency and interact. Interlink your personal website with your LinkedIn profile, give Facebook users a way to access your Twitter, etc.. That said I personally want to give all of the users from these networks a place to gather where I have the most control and ownership of the content. That thought lead me to create a “/me” page, a custom landing page on my own personal domain for all of my social network friends and visitors where I can control the content. I have the freedom of adding personal and company sites, projects and additional ways to connect while collecting analytics. I’m not the first person to create a custom landing page for social networks but it is something I am surprised not to see more of. The goal of this page is to provide the most targeted and most useful information to the visitor, immediately. Visit my “/me” page and let me know.

One step towards a complete social media plan.

The balance that needs to be implemented in any search engine marketing plan is that of quality AND quantity. Dominating an online market involves a strategy of achieving top search engine placement for all relevant search terms and driving lots of targeted visitors.

Original post: Short vs. Long-Tail Keywords

The number one commonality between all these successful salespeople was their Speed of Implementation, or simply, the time is takes between hearing about an idea to acting on an idea. Researchers found that the most successful business and sales people are regularly putting ideas into action immediately. Their speed of implementation was faster.

This mindset of implementing ideas faster in my own life can feel somewhat counter-intuitive. The voice in my head says “lets think about this”, “lets weigh out pros and cons, make a list of benefits and side effects”, “let me run this idea past 2 or 3 of my friends to see what they say”. And then usually through deliberation and backwards rationalization the idea fizzles and never gets implemented. This is called Education Paralysis, the art of learning everything and never putting anything into action.

In the video below Eben explains the research and follows up with case studies from business people who have taken action with their quantified results.