Improve Website Ranking

Most commercial real estate brokers think Loopnet is invincible. It’s not. In fact, a little known secret is that commercial real estate brokers are some of the least savvy when it comes to SEO because in the past, so much of their business has come from business relationships, not search engines. That’s changing.

While the commercial real estate business is still heavily dependent upon business contacts, as younger portfolio managers and facilities decision-makers move up the corporate ranks, the less generational memory there is for past corporate contacts. These younger professionals are increasingly turning to the search engines to help in their investment property or corporate relocation search.

The relative lack of competition among brokers for good keywords (compared to the housing market, which dominates real estate search results) has made it relatively easy to rank well for niche commercial real estate keywords. Granted, you won’t rake it thousands of commercial buyers per day by nailing “Yourtown Office Buildings,” but you will net some nicely targeted traffic.

If you are a commercial real estate broker, don’t underestimate the power of SEO. With a little creativity and a sound SEO strategy, it is possible to beat Loopnet on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Website owners would make lousy hunters. Many webmasters make the mistake of trying to get one site or one article to rank well for too many broad keywords. That’s like a hunter shooting into the trees in the hope of bagging an elk, a bear, and a few wild turkey, all with one shot. It just doesn’t work that way.

In life, if you want something bad enough, you have to be willing to do the hard work necessary to get it. The same is true when you are trying to improve your website rankings. You can’t have SEO goals so broad that you are not able to focus on a specific keyword target and go after it. Yes, it’s hard work, but if your overall market has the potential to be profitable enough, then the sum of its parts should be as well.

Go extreme in your niche marketing

Specificity is the linchpin of good SEO. You don’t market cars with no details for your customers about what kinds of cars you sell. You don’t market professional services with no details for your prospective clients about what kinds of professional services you provide. The devil – and the profit – are in the details.

You should be willing to write at least one article with the on-page SEO designed specifically for a targeted set of keywords. Of course, that page may rank well for other keywords as well. Consider that a bonus. But if a narrow niche is not worth the time and effort to even write a page about it, what makes you think Google, Yahoo, or Bing ought to rank your site well for it?

If you are wanting to market for a broad subject area, you need to break it down into its niche market components. For instance, someone marketing architectural services would want to break it down by the type of architectural services: Film studios, custom homes, commercial, retail, office, warehouse, etc.

Each niche can also be broken down into micro-niche markets. Retail can be broken down into strip malls, shopping centers, big box stores, etc. You could add restaurants and other food service buildings to the list.

The point is to break your subject matter down into its smallest components. Niche works. Scattergun doesn’t.

Press releases are a powerful way to communicate with the reporters and bloggers who shape the news. A traditional press release is an attempt to give reporters an idea for a story. You are acting as a sales person, but you are “selling” a story idea, not a product.

There is another aspect of writing press releases, however, that deserves some attention from website owners wanting to improve their website’s rankings on the search engines. Press releases can be optimized for search engines in much the same was as an SEO copywriter might optimize a website article with savvy keyword usage.

SEO Press Releases

SEO press releases are press releases that are distributed online. Yes, they typically show up in some of the same places a traditional press release shows up, but they have an added bonus as a backlinking tool. An optimized press release distributed through the correct channels can land your website hundreds or thousands of quality backlinks from quality news websites.

For instance, real estate news portals might pick up the press release and post it on their site. Google News will typically display the article in its news feed. And of course, tens of thousands of reporters and bloggers subscribe to various keyword-targeted press release distribution services, so you could get your story picked up by one of them.

If you’re wanting to improve your website ranking, you should start writing press releases, or talk to us. We’ll handle everything including writing copy, checking your website rankings prior to distribution, getting it distributed, and following up with a rank check in a month.

Interested? Call us at (208) 249-8893.

We’ve just unveiled a new site to provide mission-critical information to business owners, web designers, and SEO companies who need to measure their SEO effectiveness. The new site, appropriately called Rank Checking Software, is intended to add value to our network of SEO sites, providing new tools to boost performance fast.

The first step in improving your website rankings is to know what your rankings are. With this full featured SEO software, you can monitor your rankings at hundreds of major and regional search engines. Of course, the Big Three are covered (Google, Yahoo!, and Bing), but you also have the ability to check your keyword rankings on many country-specific search engines.

The detailed reports are fabulous and make great fodder for meetings, whether they are client meetings, meetings with your employer, or staff meetings with colleagues. The charts and detailed breakdown of keyword rankings give invaluable data for decision-making to help you plan your SEO campaign and allocate SEO resources.

You can download a copy of this rank checking software for free!

There is a formula for getting #1 rankings, or at least page one rankings on Google quickly and easily. The formula is quite simple; anyone can implement it with the right tools in a few minutes, a few hours, or a few days, depending on the tools available and the writing skills of the webmaster.

As an SEO guy myself, I’m a little hesitant to share all my secrets, but for those who are do-it-yourselfers anyway and wouldn’t spend the money to hire SEO help, I’ll provide a brief overview of the strategy. You’ll need to decide if you want to be in the webmastering business or some other business which needs the skills of a good webmaster. I do a lot of real estate sites, and there are some agents who can handle both their real estate business and their website SEO effectively. Most can’t.

In any case, here is quick summary of a strategy that has worked for me over and over to achieve page 1 and #1 rankings on Google.

Formula for a high-ranking website

Pick a good domain

Better yet, do your keyword research before picking what you think is a good domain. Many real estate agents come to me with a dozen “good” domains they’ve bought, only to find out that none of them will give them an advantage in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Keyword research involves keyword discovery (or compiling a list of prospective keywords), then analyzing the metrics of those keywords to determine which ones would be good candidates for SEO. This is determined by a number of factors, primarily popularity and competition. In other words, how many people are searching for those exact keywords each month, and how many competitors do you have who are attempting to rank well for them?

A metric called KEI (keyword efficiency index) can be useful in setting SEO priorities for keywords, but I also don’t let KEI trump my own experience and instincts. KEI helps you to go after the low-hanging fruit; but don’t let it stop you from also going after the “big kahuna” keywords that are more competitive.

Use Joomla for the content management system

Joomla by no means is the only way to improve your website rankings fast, I’m just sharing with you my formula that I’ve developed over the years. We all develop tools, tricks and techniques honed by our experiences, and I’ve been ultra-successful developing Joomla websites that outperform other platforms – even WordPress (such as this site). WordPress is great, and I have to admit that I like writing in WordPress a lot more (sort of like I enjoy working on my Mac a lot more than working on my PC). But in the final analysis, I can do far more SEO on a Joomla site than on a WordPress site.

I’ve even had Joomla sites down for maintenance with the “down” page SEO’d make it to #1 on Google. Granted, the keywords were not hugely competitive in those cases, but still, Joomla is very pretty impressive for its SEO capabilities.

Write good content

“Good” is subjective, obviously. There’s no way I can tell you an exact formula for what to write, how many times to repeat a keyword or phrase, etc. I can just say that you need to make your content both readable to humans and accessible to search engines. You should give plenty of clues to search engines as to what your site is about in the content by making good use of headings, lists, as well as bold, strong, and emphasis markup.

Pick a good page title

This is not as subjective as it sounds. Simply use the same keywords you identified in your keyword research, and which are included in your domain. That is your page title, with very little extra verbage. Less is more. Focus like a laser beam, don’t try to be all things to all people. That’s a formula that only works on large, mature sites with a lot of “authority.”

Of course, you should pay attention to your meta description tag to improve the click-through ratio when your page does make it into the SERPs. You can pretty much ignore the meta keyword tag. Search engines ignore it, so why waste time with it?

Use internal links to your advantage

One of best “clues” you can give to a search engine about what a particular page is about is to link to it within your own site using the best keywords as the anchor text. If you have a page title of Blue Widgets, somewhere on your home page (preferably in your main menu navigation) should be a link to “blue-widgets.html” using the anchor text and title attribute of “Blue Widgets.”

Get backlinks from high-authority sites

Most of the above formula for improving your website rankings for a new site is what’s called on-page SEO (things that can be done on-site). You should also work to get some somewhat-related sites to link to yours. This will get your site indexed faster than if you just let Google find it randomly, or if you just submit it using Google’s submit form (which is largely used by amateurs).

Submit a sitemap to Google and Yahoo

There are plenty of good sitemap creation tools. They basically crawl your site, identifying all the URLs that are “visible” from the home page, and create a list of these URLs. Google’s sitemap format is an XML formatted file. Upload that to your site, and let Google know it’s there by entering it into Google’s Webmaster Tools.

If you follow this formula, you will have a great chance at getting page one rankings for your website in as short a time as possible. Of course, this depends on the quality of your content, the competition you have, and how well your Joomla CMS is set up for maximum search engine performance. If you need help improving the rankings of a real estate site, give me a call at (208) 249-8893.

If you are needing to get your website to the top of the search engines organically, you’ve found the right place. Here, you’ll learn all about how to improve website rankings from seasoned Search Engine Optimization (SEO) pros who have been doing it successfully for years.

You’ll find:

• SEO tutorials
• Techniques for improving your organic ranking
• SEO case studies
• Studies on SEO vs. PPC marketing
• General information on why SEO is a good investment