Why search engine ranking?

The days of people relying primarily upon classified real estate ads to find their new home are behind us. Even those great full-color real estate listing freebie magazines only impact a relatively small audience. Don’t get me wrong – these classifieds and booklets are great, but today people are looking for more.
Today’s movers and shakers (a.k.a./ home buyers) are used to instant gratification. They want to know about a house the minute it’s listed, not a day, week or month later. They want lots of pretty pictures to tell them a story and plenty of detailed information available – even if they only glance at it.

The Web gives them exactly what they want – no questions asked. They can search for their new home while at the office, the local coffee bar or even on the commuter train with their wireless PDA (Palm, Blackberry, etc.). According to Realtor.com...

• Homebuyers used the Internet more than other media to search for homes; Internet usage for searching was 71%, which is more then used newspapers (41%), home book or magazines (24%), Television (17%). (NAR Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers 2003)

• Homebuyers who search for homes online are more likely than other buyers to use a real estate professional to buy their home. (NAR Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers 2003)

• Homebuyers, who found an agent online, were more satisfied with their agents than traditional buyers in all aspects of the home buying process. (CAR Internet Versus Traditional Buyers Study 2003)

Consider what being in the top 10 matches of a bigname search engine like Google, Yahoo! or MSN can bring. How about the top 5 matches? Does this sound impossible? It's more attainable than you might think!

Posted on Wednesday 07 of December, 2005 [14:54:58 UTC]

Is there a special formula for keyword placement on a page?

We don’t know of any one single special keyword placement formula that is guaranteed to work, but we have worked hard with a number of SEO specialists and narrowed a seemingly winning formula down to the following considerations...

Where a keyword appears in the text can be as important as how often you use it. Try to place over 50% of your keyword usage in the first couple paragraphs of the body text without stuffing — 55% to 75% is ideal. This can be tricky, but well worth the effort. It's best to break it down into three parts to simplify it.

If, for example, you used “New Hampshire real estate” as a keyword phrase seven times throughout the page, try to break it down like this:

Part One: 4 mentions in the first two paragraphs

• Put the first keyword instance as close to the beginning of the first sentence as possible.

Part Two: 2 mentions in the next paragraph or two

• Try to get one at the beginning of the first paragraph and one in the middle of this or the next paragraph, depending on how many paragraphs you are spanning.

Part Three: 1 mention in a paragraph toward the bottom of the page

• If you can place this within the last two sentences of visible text on the page, that is ideal.

Please keep in mind that it’s becoming more and more important to try to keep your text in a natural language sort of flow. Many search engines look out for blocky sentences and phrases that are not combined in a natural order.

Posted on Sunday 27 of November, 2005 [23:42:01 UTC]

Generally speaking, what keywords are best?

More narrowly focused keywords are best. In broad terms, avoid using one-word keywords because they’re usually too general to bring real customers to your site. When a serious surfer types a search query, it will often consist of a product name or a specific type of merchandise. For example, if your site deals in beds, consider optimizing some of your pages for "adjustable bed" or "electric adjustable bed".

Narrowing your search criteria will not only bring you more targeted traffic, it will greatly reduce your competition at the same time. Let’s take our example above.

In September 2005, the following searches occurred within the Overture network. First you will see the search term, then the number of searches performed within Overture and to the right are the number of pages in Google competing for that search term (on 11/19/05).

Search Term	Times Searched	Competition
bed	204,763 searches	122,000,000 pages
adjustable bed	100,295 searches	2,780,000 pages
electric adjustable bed	6,777 searches	1,680,000 pages

Based on the information above we see the search term “electric adjustable bed” has the least competition but what else do we see? Look carefully at the target market VS the competition for each search term. The term “adjustable bed” had nearly fifteen times as many searches performed in one month but has only 75% more competition. That’s amazing!

Now ask yourself – Does “adjustable bed” describe what I sell? If you answered yes to that question, you’ve got a winning keyword phrase that’s worth pursuing!

Posted on Sunday 27 of November, 2005 [23:17:15 UTC]

Why do most people fail at SEO?

Lack of planning is the most common denominator for SEO failure among the hundreds of people we have interviewed.

Planning holds two distinctions. First, it is the single most important step in making a long-term positive change. Second, it is the most overlooked step in just about any process.

To start, you should track your progress on a regular basis. We track our sites weekly, but bi-weekly tracking is typical. How often you need to track your progress will depend on how much you rely on search engine generated traffic.

Start with this:

1. Look where your site is presently positioned and see where you have gone up and down by keyword.
2. See which pages are fine the way they are and which ones need improvement.
3. Take note of where your Web page is positioned, by keyword, in comparison with your competitors' sites.
4. Experience what users see and do not see in your site description summary. This is what drives them to or away from your site in a search engine and what counts most in directories (more on that later).
5. Summarize all of this information in one comprehensive form for easy viewing.
6. Make sure search engines recognize and have indexed your most important pages. Thousands, sometimes millions of Web pages are dropped from search engine indexes every day. Don’t let yours join that group.

Having this information will be extremely important for continued improvement. While you can do this by manually checking search engines, I recommend trying out a product like those available as links on SEOpartner.com or by running a search on Google for "search engine software." We also offer a good selection of product information and reviews in the appendix of this book.

If you would like to see where your site ranks right this minute for a handful of top search engines and directories, feel free to try the free rank checker at SEOpartner.com. It will show you where your site stands within the top forty listings of Google, Yahoo and MSN for any and all of your keywords.

This and a handful of other great tools are available at

http://seopartner.com/seo-tools/

Please visit anytime you’d like and stay as long as you want. You are always welcome and you don’t have to worry about installing tools on your office computer if you are just checking your site’s progress during lunch.

Posted on Sunday 27 of November, 2005 [22:55:30 UTC]

We just had a visitor ask us how the authors’ site, www.SEOpartner.com, ranks on the major search engines for its main keyword 'seo partner' (a very popular search term with millions of competing pages).

Sidney, I’m glad you asked. Check this out:

Rank Results
Search Engine	SEOpartner.com
Google	1
Yahoo!	1
MSN	1
AOL Search	1
AltaVista	1
HotBot	1
Netscape	1
AllTheWeb	1
Webcrawler	1
Alexa	1
A9	1
ICQ Search	1

Thanks for the great question Sidney - Enjoy the book!

Posted on Saturday 26 of November, 2005 [22:49:46 UTC]

Within hours of its release on Thanksgiving Day, the article titled “Business Websites Get Holiday Head-start with SEO Answer Book” claimed the top spot for the most popular search engine optimization term on Google News — ‘SEO’.

Originally crafted as a press release, this SEO book overview was picked up by more than 100 news outlets and has since become the foundation of over a dozen articles on search engine optimization stressing the importance of many facets of organic search engine optimization.

Posted on Saturday 26 of November, 2005 [22:00:28 UTC]