So why does it matter? Well, anchor text is used by search engines to determine the pages relevance. A keyword typed into Google is going to return relevant results. How does Google know those results are relevant? Well, hopefully the content is relevant, but what happens when there are millions of other pages with similar content? That’s where anchor text helps Google determine which site is MOST relevant.

Anchor text links are the backbone of SEO. If you want to rank for fairy pumpkin pie land, you should build links to your site using the anchor text “fairy pumpkin pie land”. However, how many people would actually link to your website naturally with your exact anchor text?

We can relate this to real estate. You want to rank for City homes for sale, but is that how you would naturally get links? Not usually, as most people link your URL, your brand, your name, or perhaps the inevitable “Click Here”. Natural linking is hard to get people to do, and it’s even harder to get natural links with your exact anchor text preference. This is the reason Blackhat and Grey hat SEO exists. It’s used to manipulate rankings using the correct anchor text or people buy links with their anchor text.

In a perfect world, i.e. Google’s world, no one would link to their sites trying to manipulate anchor text, but let’s be honest, this just doesn’t happen. Everybody does it unless you have an already established website. However, if you don’t have an established website, or you’re trying to get rankings for your keywords, you have no choice but to actively seek out links that will help you get rankings.

But, if you get caught trying to manipulate anchor text, you could get your site filtered algorithmically, or, in a worst case scenario, de-indexed by a Google engineer. Which leads me to the point of this post:

Natural SEO Is All About Anchor Text

1. – Keep It Natural 

A normal anchor text profile would be extremely diverse. People would naturally link different types of anchor texts to a website as well as inner pages. Which means that if you plan on linking to your site, you need to mimic a natural link profile to the best of your ability. When I do link building, I like to follow these guidelines when linking to a client site:

• 20/30% Exact Match Anchor Text

If you want to rank for a keyword, you obviously have to have exact keywords on the page as well as links coming to your site with those preferred keywords as the anchor. This is not new and will likely never change (at least until Google figures out social) in the near future. Make sure you get your keywords in your anchor text about 20 to 30 percent of the time to let Google know your site is related to that keyword.

• 20/30% Phrase Match Anchor Text

Phrase match anchor text is something like this: “check out this cool city state real estate website” – The anchor text “city state real estate” is an exact phrase match of our desired keyword, but there are other words in there as well. Having this type of anchor text with many different variations to your website is a natural way people would link to your site.

• 40/60% Random/Brand/URL Anchor Text

This one is big and it’s more important than ever. Google is giving preference to strong brands, and branding your website is not easy. Making sure you use your brand in your anchor text will help you establish your site as a brand. This is one of the reasons why exact match domain names are easier to rank for the desired keyword than non exact match domains. If you have an exact domain name “www.cityrealestate.com” it would only seem natural then that most of your links would have the mention of your URL’s brand giving you more leeway.

2. – What do you mean by branding anchor text?

Branding your website with anchor text is as simple as using the URL or the main site name as your anchor text. For example, my website is http://pursuittroop.com/. My brand is “Pursuit Troop” and it would be natural to have anchor text relating to my brand as the most linked to phrase. As a real estate agent, you have your brokerage name. Branding your site with your brokerage name would therefore be natural and a great way to build your brand.

3. – What proof do you have?

I’ve done a nice bit of testing on my own sites as well as client sites with this theory. Sites that have a 50% or better brand type link profile rank much better across the board than those sites who have obvious link anchor text manipulation. The weird thing is, those sites with obvious anchor text manipulation usually rank pretty well for the targeted anchor text, but they seem to be filtered/throttled on long tail and keyword variances. It makes sense if you think about it. The unnatural link profile causes Google to lose trust with your site which would make the site less visible.

When you think about sites that dominate in the real estate vertical, you see the big brands everywhere. Yahoo Real Estate, Realtor.com, Zillow.com, and Trulia.com are in almost every real estate keyword you search. These big brands have paid big money to brand their sites, and Google loves a big brand. Follow the leaders if you want to play the game of SEO. Leaders in real estate are branding and you should be to.

4. – Websites in the top 5 seem to have a nice varied anchor text profile.

Is your website stuck in positions 6-15? Have you been building links with only your keywords? This could be the reason you’re stuck and not making it into the top 5 for your keywords. In my studies, I’ve found that more times than not, (and I mean a lot more), those sites sitting in the top 5 tend to have a heavier brand anchor profile than a specific anchor text linking profile. It makes sense and it shows in just about every search market when I look at the competition. The only difference is if the site as the keywords in the domain name.

Conclusion – Keep it natural baby! When you’re building you own links to your site, be sure to mix it up about 50/50. Use your URL, use your name, use your brokerage name, use different combinations of anchor text with phrase matches, and you will see your once stagnant rankings move up the ranks as your link profile becomes more diverse. I’ve seen it happen many times, and I’m sure you will to.

Google Is Lying To You About Your Rankings

When checking rankings on your own computer, you may see something completely different than the computer your co-worker sees. You may see something different on your iPhone.

You may also see something different at a different time of day. Google likes to shuffle rankings depending on many different factors from being signed into your Google account, flash cookies on your machine, mobile results, A/B split testing different data-centers and customized search results based on IP location.

So how do you find out where you’re really ranking in Google? Here’s what I do to get a better idea:

#1 – Use a search engine that hides my IP address at https://startpage.com/.

#2 – Use a Google Scraper that hides your IP address at http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm.

#3 – Use a free proxy service that hides your IP and can give you results from many different areas in the USA, UK, Netherlands, and other places: http://hidemyass.com/.

#4 – Use a tool (I pay for it but you can get the basic features for free) called Rank Tracker. You can download it here: http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/

#5 – Use another tool called Market Samurai *. This tool is free for the first 7 days and then it’s like $97 one time fee afterwords. If you have $97 to spare, I would recommend you buy this tool if you’re serious about keyword research. It has the best keyword training videos that teach you how to find good keywords and the best keyword discovery tool that I’ve found on the market. If you like keywords, this is a great tool to find them!

#6 – Ask others where they see my rankings. I have a bunch of friends on FB that I ask to check my rankings periodically. It’s a great way to see what someone else is seeing as well as start a conversation. As Realtors, this could be a great way to “touch” a previous client or friend that you haven’t spoken to in a while.

After using all these tools, you can usually find the correct rankings for your site. They’ll usually differ by a couple, but you’ll at least have a better idea of where you rank so you know what keywords you need to work harder on.

*Disclaimer – That link to market samurai is an affiliate link. If you don’t want to use my affiliate link, you can visit their site by clicking this one instead http://www.marketsamurai.com/. Whether you buy this program from my link or not, I still think it’s the best keyword tool on the market. If you don’t believe me, just search reviews in Google, there are millions.

If you know anything about Google, Bing, Yahoo; you know that in order to rank highly for your desired keywords, you have to optimize your site using on-page (content/keywords/meta tags/titles/internal links etc.) as well as off-page (Link building/social media/citations/mentions/brand development etc), but what many fail to do/realize is that doing your own SEO can lead you to the Google doghouse.

So, is there such thing as over optimized? Can your page be too perfect? Can you build too many links? The answers to these questions are yes, yes, and yes.

Anytime you’re actively pursuing rankings, you have the ability to affect your rankings both positively and negatively based on everything you do.

What worked once may not work anymore. A page that ranked before may have dropped due to a new algorithm change, filter, or even penalty. Tracking and knowing what you’re doing is key to ensure you’re on the right track.

If your site seems to be stuck or pages that rank for your keywords aren’t pages that you want to rank, you may be suffering from over-optimization blues. Here are some general guidelines I like to follow when doing SEO for my clients that can help you:

On Page SEO

Keyword Density – To me, keyword density is basically a useless/old way of doing SEO. It’s a dated practice. Yes, it’s still extremely important to have your keywords in your content, titles, meta description, etc. but worrying about keyword density is unnecessary.

When you’re reading a blog, are you worrying about how many keywords the blog has in it? When you go to a page to look for listings, are you worried about how many keywords are in the listings content?

Doesn’t that sound a little ridiculous? Google does too. Google wants relevance, quality, and a good user experience. Make your content relevant and do the best you can to make it useful for a user. Keywords should be naturally placed in your content, not forced.

On Page SEO That Works

I use this checklist (in my head) when creating a web page:

Keyword in title tag? Check.

Keyword in meta description? Check.

Is the meta description useful? Check.

Keyword in first paragraph? Check.

Keyword mixed into the H1,H2,H3 tags?  Check.

Keyword naturally spread throughout the document? Check.

Sprinkled in related keywords? Check.

Mixed keyword usage? Check.

Keyword at the end of the page? Check.

Internal link to related page? Check.

At least one photo with keyword ALT tag? Check.

Related Video? Possibly.

Does it seem natural or does it seem forced? Check.

What do you mean does it seem natural?

Is it written like the New York Times? Or is it written like a keyword spammer? If your document reads more like the New York Times than a keyword spammer, your on the right track. If it reads like an SEO document that a keyword spammer wrote, re-do it.

If you’ve ever searched and came upon a Google page you may notice that almost every page has a video on it, it’s easy to read with bullet points, has more links to related/useful information, and it’s extremely useful information. They usually only use the keyword in a title tag and in the title of the page. Does your page look like a Google employee wrote it?

Examples:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/payload.html

Off Page SEO 

Building Backlinks – Building links is probably one of the top 3 reasons you’re on AR if not the top. But where else are you building links? And are you using the same anchor text every time you link to your site?

Over optimizing your anchor text and building links from the same websites is over optimization and can be considered spam.

Anytime you place a link to your site or a website/blog you control in order to manipulate search engine rankings (according to Google), you’re spamming. Yep, you are.

Does Google really care? Most likely not as everyone does it, but there is a point where you can go to far. There’s also a point of diminishing returns.

Having the same link anchor text all the time is a clear sign that you’re doing something unnatural, and linking from the same site 10′s, 100′s or even 1000′s of times doesn’t look natural either.

So how do you combat this to get your site where you want it? What does a natural link profile look like? Is there such a thing? Who knows, but you can sure try to mimic what a natural link profile would look like and here’s how.

Building Social Mentions – Are you socially active? Do you actively engage others to share/tweet/like/+1 your content after you post it? If not, you should. Social media is a great way to not only show your site is engaging to search engines, but it also provides social proof to your visitors. If you go to a page and see that the page has been shared on Facebook a few hundred times, are you more likely to share it too? If you need social, why not ask your friends/office staff/blog buddies to share your information? Is it not good enough to share? If not, you need make it better!

Off Page SEO That Works

Building Relationships – Do you have friends? I do, I do! Friends can be a great place to build an SEO relationship if they have a website.

How many people do you interact with on a monthly basis that also have a website? Inspectors, title companies, lenders, friends on AR, social media etc. are all great places to ask for a link in a natural way.

Ask them to add you to their resource pages, talk about you in a blog post, or even write a blog post for them. This is called guest blogging and it’s a great way to get a link back to your site that’s white hat and Google approved.

Diversify, Diversify, Diversify  - A diversified link profile will have many different variations in keywords, many different websites on different IP addresses, and social mentions from all sorts of social media outlets.

Now, not everyone can have the perfect link profile, and as an SEO it’s my job to build these links in order to improve my clients visibility in search, but there are two ways to do it. You can try to mimic a natural link profile or you can spam your way to the top. One will last, the other will lead to your eventual downfall. I prefer the former.

Guest Blogging – If you’re on AR, you have a massive amount of potential to gain links through guest blogging. Imagine if you had a friend that you could have write a guest blog once or twice a month on your site in order to keep your content updated frequently. Wouldn’t that be great? It is, and it’s a great way for you to also build links.

Guest blogging is a great way to get your sites link profile diversified and gain links from highly relevant websites. Write a guest post and add link back to your site in an author profile. Easy peasey. In fact, if you’re looking for guest blogging opportunities, I have many clients that engage in the practice and can point you in the right direction, just send me an email.

Fantastic/Unique/Passionate Content - Writing great content or link-bait is a great way to get natural links that you would otherwise not get. I think one of the best in the industry at doing this is Jay Thompson of http://www.phoenixrealestateguy.com/. He’s authentic and has a massive following. He works his butt off to engage people and you know that what you see is what you get. He writes with passion and has very strong opinions.

I don’t know Jay personally, but I subscribed to his blog the first time I read it. Writing great content and sticking out from the crowd is extremely hard, but it can have a great effect on building natural links/mentions that you couldn’t have gotten otherwise. Can you be the next Jay Thompson? You bet! Start building relationships and you’ll be well on your way.

SEO today is not the same as it was a year ago. It changes all the time but one thing will always remain the same. Write great content, don’t focus on keywords and make sure that your content/website is useful for a user. No one likes a spammer, including Google.

HootSuite is a tool by which you can manage all of your social media related activities. The tool easily integrates with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Foursquare, and Google+, and consists of a dashboard that allows you to monitor all of your different social media accounts. HootSuite users can post updates to all, or as many as they’d like, of their networks from one place and by only doing it once. No need to agonize over the time it takes to jump from one site to the next, putting in your login details, and going through the update process each time.

Uploading or updating you property listings can now be done and disseminated throughout your networks quickly and easily. The same goes for any of your blog post, photos, virtual tours, and so forth. Just do it once on your HootSuite dashboard and you’re done. This is an extremely efficient way to streamline your online marketing efforts and free up time for other activities.

HootSuite also allows you to track your marketing efforts. Through the use of URL shorteners (a built-in feature of HootSuite) as redirect links, you are able to produce analytical data for all traffic coming through these links, such as who clicked on each link that you sent out as well as the number of those who did. This will give you the opportunity to tweak your prospecting efforts accordingly.

Generally, what works for one individual may not necessarily work for another, this is true for social media channels in particular, being able to measure which is producing the best results for your efforts can be invaluable. It will allow you to ramp up your efforts on the producing channels, and modify your approach on the others.

Another wonderful feature of HootSuite is the Klout tool. It gives you the ability to measure the influence, as it relates to social reach, of those participating in conversations that you are following. This provides a means by which to prioritize who you engage in conversations and optimize your time for maximum results. Not only that, but the tool also allows you to zero in on conversations taking place in specific geographical locations; this is huge for real estate agents. Joining in on local conversations can be a tremendous way to generate leads in your local market.

HootSuite offers free and paid versions. Depending on your needs you may find the free version to be plenty enough to cover the essentials. If not, the paid version is $5.99 a month.

Article provided by tech savvy Realtor Kimberley Kelly. Kim is a La Quinta California Realtor specializing in helping La quinta home sellers with short sales. You can learn more about Kim by viewing her Palm Desert California real estate website.

Postlets is a listing syndication platform that was founded in 2005 and acquired by Zillow in April of 2011. A few months after the acquisition, Zillow made the Postlets Pro program, which consists of enhanced listing features, free for every one to use; prior to that, the program was only available to paid subscribers.

Some are lamenting the fact that as big as it has become, Zillow is no longer being creative from within and is instead simply buying things. Personally, I say more power to them. Easier and more efficient ways to advertise listings for free should be welcomed by every real estate professional – don’t quite understand that one, but I digress.

The process for getting started with Postelts is quick, easy, and consists of the following 5 steps:

• Set up an account – in addition to a username and password, all that’s needed is an email address.
• Create a listing – using on-site forms. Your listing can include photos as well.
• Place listings on classifieds sites – after creating your listings, Postlets generates an HTML code that you simply paste into the classified sites.
• Share listings on social media sites – only requires a couple of clicks.
• Postlets will syndicate listings to other sites the next day.

And that’s it. Postlets will handle all the syndication work for you, and will submit your listings to Backpage, ByOwnerMLS, Enormo, FrontDoor, Local.com, Lycos, Oodle, Overstock, Trulia, Vast, Yahoo! Real Estate, and Zillow. You can also share your listings on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn using tools provided by Postlets. Talk about exposure for your listings – free!

Some of the now free enhanced listing features include:

• Multi-page format –  this allows you to showcase an entire website, not just a listing.
• Big photos – 700 x 525 pixel photos, they used to be half that size. You also get to upload 18 pictures, 3 times as many as before.
• Slideshow viewer – shows off all the property photos that you uploaded including thumbnail previews and artistic transitions, all while using the best-in-class flash slideshow.
• Themes – very stylish with a selection of 20 to choose from.
• Embedded maps – full size Google maps to go along with each of your listings.
• Neighborhood information – schools, nearby restaurants, stores, parks, and more are shown in detailed maps.
• Google Analytics – Google’s tracking software is integrated in your Postlets websites giving you the ability to track where your traffic is coming from.

There are more features, these are just the once that I think are best.

Postlets is an excellent service, and free to boot. Being able to reach such a high volume of prospects with just a few clicks of the mouse is priceless.

Article provided by Aaron Seekford: For more information about Aaron you can visit his website where you can search many Arlington neighborhoods including Alta Vista homes for sale and Arlington Forest VA homes for sale in Arlington.

As a real estate agent, you know how hard you have to work to get and maintain an online presence. Leads are coming from all sorts of directions, and keeping up with all of them can at times become overwhelming; not that a nice flow of leads can ever be considered a problem, but they have to be properly managed; otherwise, all of your efforts and hard work is rendered moot.

What CRM Do You Use?

CRM, Client Relationship Management, software is a tremendously efficient tool to handle all of that. It allows you to keep track of clients, scheduled meetings, expenses and revenue, your listings, your web leads, generate reports, and much more. The software will allow you to emerge from being buried in tedious and less productive admin work, and focus on the all-important marketing and sales aspects of the business – a much more productive use of your time.

I know that right about now many are thinking: “Gosh another darn new thing to learn!” Does this keeping up with the technological advances thing ever ends? The answer to that is no; however, CRM software actually helps minimize the rigors of all the things you have to cope with. In other words, it automates and streamlines the process of your day-to-day interaction with prospects.

Agents With Systems Close More Transactions Than Those Without

I came across an article on Yahoo! that featured a survey done by ActiveRain which showed some statistics that you might find encouraging. 1,758 real estate professionals were polled, 22% of them were rich realtors (making over 100k a year) and 21% were struggling (earning less that 35k a year).

ActiveRain found that the rich realtors spend 6 times more in technology than their struggling colleagues, and that the use of CRM or lead management systems was an instrumental part of their success; in fact, the use of the systems was the biggest contributor to the success of the affluent real estate agents. The survey found that the number of well-to-do realtors who use CRM or lead management systems was almost double that of the struggling agents.

You don’t need to be a tech genius to operate the software. It is generally pretty straightforward and can be used right off the bat. When selecting a CRM software for your real estate needs, you must ensure that it offers essential features such as mobile access, an automated task manager, customizable contact data fields, a real estate specific contact manager, direct mail and email management, and social media interfaces.

A Good CRM Is Crucial In My Business!

Today, CRM software is essential to the realtor’s day-to-day activities. While the perpetual wave of technological gadgets may seem overwhelming at times, real estate agents, much like professionals in every industry, simply have to keep up or be left in the competition dust – it’s just the nature of conducting business in the 21st century.

Article provided by Mitch Ribak a Merritt Island FL real estate agent. Mitch has developed his own CRM software in order to help his Palm Bay real estate agents close more sales. With his systems, his agents are able to sell many Titusville Homes in Florida as well as other areas in the Sunshine State. If you want to learn about Mitch’s systems, you can contact him by visiting those links to his websites.

Facebook Ads For Realtors

There is another option for real estate agents to get the word out about their brand. Facebook allows its network users to create ads that are displayed in their sidebars. You can use these ads to display an important message to other Facebook users within and outside your own network. Facebook ads are not free. But, they are considerably inexpensive when you compare them to paid search advertising.

Facebook ads for realtors can go in a few different directions. Depending on your specific goal at that time, you can use your ad to advertise different aspects of your real estate business. Here are some ideas:

ñ  Yourself – You can use your FB ad to market yourself. Maybe you are a broker who considers yourself your brand. Or, maybe you just want more name recognition for yourself in your local real estate market.

ñ  Your RE Company – FB ads are great for marketing your real estate firm and/or office. Your ad can be used to make more people aware of your company brand. This will help you create a larger fan base as more and more people become aware of who your company is.

ñ  Your RE Services – Does your real estate company specialize in a certain niche? Maybe you are the best in your local market when it comes to short sales. Does your office provide free home staging services? Do you specialize in providing clients with virtual tours of homes you recommend for them? Whatever your specialized niche is, it would be wise to market it in a FB ad.

ñ  Property Listings – Just got a great listing in a prime location? Did your client just give you the go-ahead to lower the price on a beautiful home? Trying to help a client with a short sale so that they can move on with their lives? What about that foreclosure the bank is willing to pay a phenomenal commission on? Advertise these listings in a FB ad. You’d be amazed at the amount of social media users that will be lured by your social media marketing.

Targeted Marketing

One of the great reasons for using Facebook for your real estate marketing is that the ads can be targeted according to key demographics. There are three main demographics used by realtors that ensure that their FB ads are seen by their target audience:

1. Location – You can target your ads to only be shown to FB users located in a specific country, state and/or city. You can even target areas within a specific mile range of a specific city.
2. Language – Use this feature to target FB users that speak a specific language. This is a great tool for realtors who specialize in languages that most do not speak or understand.
3. Age – This may not sound important initially. But, do you really want to pay for clicks on your ad made by kids who aren’t old enough to buy property? Or, maybe have a listing on a condo in a senior community. You can target the ads to reach FB users within the age group allowable by the association.

By using Facebook ad’s, you’re not overwhelming your current friends list, and can still get your name out there in an indirect way. Facebook users expect to see ad’s from Facebook, not their friends.

About The Author: Kimberley Kelly is a real estate agent located in Indian Wells CA. You can learn more about her by checking out some of her Indian Wells neighborhood pages such as Desert Horizons Country Club and Eldorado Country Club.

So what does it take to get a full understanding of keyword competition and the likely hood you can rank in a rather short amount of time with little effort? It takes a lot of work and understanding of the niche you’re targeting. In real estate, you can bet that almost any keyword related to “town real estate” is going to be, at best, mildly competitive, if not extremely competitive. So where should you start?

Keyword Research Step 1. – Brainstorming

When I take on a new SEO campaign I pull out a sheet of paper and brainstorm. I put myself in the searchers shoes and write down everything I can think of related to the keyword I want to target. For real estate it would go something like this:

Top Level Keywords

• Real Estate
• Real Estate For Sale
• Real Estate Listings
• Real Estate Properties
• Homes
• Homes For Sale
• Home Search
• Houses
• Houses For Sale
• House Search
• Listings
• Listings For Sale
• Properties
• Properties For Sale
• Property Listings
• MLS
• MLS Number
• MLS#
• MLS Search
• MLS Listings
• MLS Properties
• Foreclosures
• Foreclosed Properties
• Foreclosed Homes
• Foreclosures For Sale
• Foreclosure Listings
• Foreclosure Properties
• HUD Homes
• HUD Listings
• Fannie Mae Homes
• Freddie Mac Homes
• Short Sales
• Short Sales For Sale
• Short Sale Homes
• Short Sale Real Estate
• Short Sale Listings
• Neighborhood
• Neighorhood Homes
• Neghborhood Real Estate
• Neighborhood Listings
• Neighborhood Properties
• Subdivision
• Development
• Land
• Waterfront
• Beach
• Condo
• Townhome
• Luxury
• Horse Property
• Animal Rights
• 55 And Older
• Active Adult
• Maps
• Commercial
• Apartments
• Rentals
• Farms
• Acreage
• Lease Options
• Statistics
• Buyers
• Sellers
• Agents
• Realtors
• Builders
• Addresses

As you can see each of these one and two word keywords can have multiple keyword multipliers added to them. I chose to do a few so you can see how I would do this with each keyword, I’m sure you can use your imagination to figure out the other ones.

Keyword Research Step 2. – Add Keyword Location Identifiers

In real estate, they say location is everything, and the same is true with your keyword identifiers. For each short tail keyword, we can use a range of location identifiers based on your area. For my area my identifier list would look something like this:

Keyword Location Identifiers:

Cities

Each of these cities can have a state location identifier, development, subdivision, or other type of location identifier unique to your area. As you can see, this is some serious work and could take hours to complete, but the effort is worth it when you see the results. For each of these keywords, you can create a unique landing page for higher conversion. Next is to study these keywords in the search engines to see how hard it’s going to be to rank for them.

Keyword Research Step 3. – Competing Pages

Analyzing the competition for a particular keyword takes experience. I’ve done it so many times I can look at the top ten and have a general understanding of how hard it’s going to be to compete. However, there are some simple rules of thumb you can use to gauge the competition even if you haven’t a clue!

Search for a keyword you are trying to compete against and notice how many related pages the search engine returns. For example, if I search Salt Lake City real estate, Google tells me there are  22,800,000 competing pages.

That’s a whole lot of competition, but it’s not the whole story. We can use search operators to get a better grasp on how many pages are actually optimized correctly for this keyword. For example the inurl and allintitle operators (inurl:Salt Lake City real estate & allintitle:Sale Lake City real estate) show that the competition may not be so bad after all:

These two photos tell me that in reality, I’m competing not against 22 million, but more like 1.7 million as the other pages don’t have a fully optimized page. It’s still a lot of competing pages, but only 98,000 of those pages have the specific keyword in their title tag. This keyword would be, to me, a mildly competitive phrase and it would be realistic to hit the top 10 within a reasonable amount of time. (Less than 6 months.)

For this type of analysis, you can base your judgment on these basic rules of thumb. If the “inurl” operator brings back less than 500,000 results in Google, that keyword would be considered not very competitive. If you use the “allintitle” operator and it brings back less than 30,000 that keyword would be considered not competitive. These are general rules of thumb that can be applied to this technique, but they aren’t set in stone.

In order to really gauge the competition, the next step is to look at the top 10 results and see how those websites are doing with their on page SEO as well as their off page SEO. I use a few tools to help me with this process, but for this blog I am going to do some manual work to show you how you can do it yourself.

Keyword Research Step 4. – Analyzing The Top 10

To ensure you are getting the correct results when using Google, since they like to give you results based on your recent search history, I always recommend using the Scroogle Scrape tool for unbiased results. Just type in your keyword and grab the top 10 URL’s and put them into a spread sheet.

Next we need to look at their on page SEO and gauge how well the pages are optimized. For each page in the top 10, do a quick look to see if they have the keywords in the title of the page, in the page itself, in the domain name, and in the url. Count how many pages out of those have 3 of 4 of these implemented. If every page in the top 10 has 3 of the 4 done, then you know that they are heavily optimized for the keyword and competition will be tough.

Next is to do off page analysis, which means backlinks, pages indexed, page rank, domain age, etc. To make this easy, you can install the SEO Quake toolbar for firefox, or if you use Google Chrome, you can install the SEO Quake chrome extension. Take the average page rank of the pages, the amount of pages indexed, and the number of linking domains. These numbers will give you a good idea of the competition. Here is a short video on how to use SEO Quake:

If you see page rank 0′s in there, that’s a good sign the keyword isn’t that competitive, however if you see all page rank 4+, you know you have your work cut out for you. Also, websites with thousands and thousands of pages indexed usually means they have a lot of internal links to use to help them rank, and you will be at a dis-advantage if your website is smaller.

Also, the amount of external linking domains is extremely important. It’s a sign of authority. If a page has thousands of linking domains, then it’s going to be hard to compete with them. On the other hand, if the page itself doesn’t have very many linking domains, or zero, you can beat them very easily with a few links from AR.

Keyword Research Step 5. – Take Action

After compiling your list of keywords, adding location identifiers, and researching the keyword competition you should have a ton of work to do. You can create hundreds of pages and start ranking for the lower end keywords first, and as you go along, start working on the harder keywords. The more pages you create the more authority your site will gain, and the more traffic it will generate.

This process is a lot of work, and it usually takes me about 2 weeks to put it all together for a client. It’s that important. Don’t take your keyword research lightly. The more effort you put into it, the better chance you have for success. Imagine if you had over 1,000 pages ranking in the top 10 in 1 years time. How many leads do you think you could generate each month? 100′s, and that’s a fact!

Want help with keyword research? I’m always available to answer questions either by phone or email. Give me a call or send me an email and I can walk you through this process no matter your knowledge from newbie to pro. Be sure to check back next week for a video on this same process for those who hate to read walls of text!

Rule #1 – Don’t Over Do It

SEO has changed a lot over the last few years, and even more so over the last 7 months with the introduction of Panda. SEO isn’t about how many keywords or bold keywords you can pump into a post. In fact, the more keywords you use, the more likely you’re going to get slapped by an over optimization filter and lose your rankings. So how far should you go? The only right answer is to keep it natural.

When writing a post, does it make sense to put your keyword two times in every paragraph? Does it make your post seem like a monkey wrote it? Does it have natural flow? If not, and you feel like you’re forcing keywords where they don’t really belong, you’re over doing it. My general guidelines for optimizing a web page or blog post is this:

• Keyword once in title for blogs or once in the title tag for a web-page.
• Keyword once in the first paragraph.
• Keyword once per every 500 words in the body.
• Keyword once in the last paragraph if it feels natural.
• Use keyword or related keyword once in an internal or external link.
• That’s it! Done.

If this was a 500 word post, the keyword would be on the page 4 times. Which is just under 1% density. 1% is just about right in my books. If you need to use your keyword more than that, great, no problem at all, just make sure it’s for natural reasons, not because you forced it in there to please a search engine.

Here is a quote from probably one of the most notable SEO’s in the world in regards to keyword density: “KW Density sometimes makes a useful test for the webmaster, just to check whether the keywords were overlooked or repeated much too often. However I don’t think Google (or any modern search engine) uses keyword density as a metric – at least not directly. The algo’s calculations for relevance are much more sophisticated than that.

You can see pages at #1 with very low density and extremely high density. You can see pages rank at #1 for a phrase with only one of the words in the phrase on the page. As a metric, KWD comes from the last century’s approach to Information Retrieval. It’s an “ancient god” that should no longer be worshiped.” Tedster from Webmaster World Forums

Recommended reading for rule #1:

• Google Panda Iterations From Webmaster World
• Official Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF)

Rule #2 – Don’t Confuse Search Engines With Too Many Similar Posts

Google Panda dropped in late February and with it came a major upheaval in the SEO community. It used to be good practice to write as many similar posts on a subject as possible to increase your chance of rankings for that subject matter. Things have changed. Google now recommends to be concise on a subject and write only on the same subject again when it’s necessary. Google had some major problems with content farms who would write similar posts with different wording/titles just to attract search engine visitors. Panda killed that philosophy dead in the water.

It’s now good practice to combine all of your similar posts into one very high quality post related to the subject. Put it all in one place and make sure it’s concise, to the point, and extremely useful for a user. It makes sense really. How many pages from the same site will rank in the top 10 in Google? Not 100, that’s for sure.

So, you want to keep your topics concise and focused, and don’t write over redundant articles just to rank for a different variation of a keyword. Here are some quality guidelines you need to ask yourself about every page on your website. If the answer is yes, you need to re-work your content:

Read all the quality guidelines by Google post panda.

When building your website, make sure that each page has a single purpose. For real estate this is easy. Create your city pages, neighborhood pages, community pages, buyer page, sellers page, and subdivision pages. That’s all you really need, and then focus on your off-page. If something new happens in those communities/cities, write an update on your blog or update the page itself. Fresh content is great, but if it’s already been written on your site once, you don’t need to do it again in a different way.

Rule #3 – Linking Is Important So Do It Right

Links are what makes Google go around. They have many ranking triggers they use to rank sites, but external and internal links are still #1. But don’t be stupid with your linking. The ones who don’t do it right are the ones who face damages. Here are some linking rules when building links on your own website (internal links):

Reading on the subject of links:

• Confirmed SEO Facts By Matt Cutts
• Effective Techniques For Building Links (Video)
• What Is Google Page Rank
• The End Of Google Page Rank?

Digesting this post is going to take a lot of coffee, especially if you’re new to SEO. To be honest, these are just some tips if you’re stuck and want to learn more about increasing your rankings. It’s all pretty much irrelevant if you create a good website and work hard on it everyday. The best way to get rankings is to create a unique website with great content and some simple promotion.

Google isn’t dumb. If you have a great site, it will get recognized, so don’t freak out about not knowing every little thing there is to know about SEO. Write for your users and the rest will fall into place. I recommend you start here if you want to know how to build a successful website:

How to build a successful site in 12 months - The Classic Website Building Tutorial

And as always, I am here to help others. I love this stuff like chocolate. If you have questions or need some help, you can always send me an email or give me a call. Thanks for reading and don’t forget to subscribe to my blog on the sidebar. You won’t want to miss my videos on developing a WordPress Blog from scratch would you? (Coming soon to a blog near you!)

Most people have a main blog that they use as their only blogging platform/website which is great but do you build links to those sites from other sites? What I mean is, for every link you build to your website/ blog, are you also building links to those pages to give them more juice? If not, you’re missing out on a fundamental step to your SEO strategy.

Use Web 2.0 Websites To Build A Second Level Of Links

Web 2.0 websites are sites like Blogger.com, WordPress.com, and even ActiveRain can be considered a web 2.0 property. These websites allow you to create free blogs and link out to as many places as you like as long as you deliver some quality content.

When you write a new blog or a new webpage on your website, it’s a good idea to head on over to a web 2.0 website and build some links to these pages. In fact, you can create hundreds of links with the amount of these properties out there. Here is a large list of sites you can use to create links to your links using web 2.0 platforms:

• 2itb.com – Create a free website and link back to your main site.
• amplify.com – You can blog and share micro blogs to multiple social networks.
• angelfire.com – Create a free website and link back to your main site.
• areavoices.com – Simple web 2.0 blogging platform.
• blinkweb.com – Create a free website and link back to your blog.
• blogger.com – Create a free blog and link back to your website.
• bloghi.com – Create a free blog and link to your website.
• blogreaction.com - Create a free blog and link to your website.
• blogster.com - Create a free blog and link to your website.
• blogsplash.org - Create a free blog and link to your website.
• freeblogit.com - Create a free blog and link to your website.
• flukiest.com – Share photos and create a free blog with a link to your website.
• flixya.com – Share photos, videos, and blogs where you can link to your website.
• gather.com - Create a free blog and link to your website.
• hubpages.com – Creat a free “hub” and post articles for links to your website.
• insanejournal.com - Create a free blog and link to your website.
• knol.google.com - Create a free blog and link to your website.
• livejournal.com - Create a free blog and link to your website.
• multiply.com - Create a free website and link back to your main site.
• myblogsite.com - Create a free blog and link to your website.
• onsugar.com - Create a free blog and link to your website.
• posterous.com - Create a free blog and link to your website.
• publr.com - Create a free blog and link to your website.
• sosblogs.com - Create a free blog and link to your website.
• squidoo.com – Write articles and gain advertising money from your lens.
• tabulas.com - Create a free blog and link to your website.
• tripod.com – Build a free drag and drop website and link to your website.
• tumblr.com – Create a free blog and link to your website.
• ucoz.com - Create a free website and link back to your main site.
• urblogz.com - Create a free blog and link to your website.
• webs.com - Create a free website and link back to your main site.
• webspawner.com – Create a free article page that allows multiple links to your websites/articles.
• weebly.com – Create a free website and blog to link to your website.
• wikidot.com - Create a free website and blog to link to your website.
• wikispaces.com – Create unlimited free Wiki’s with links to your most important content.
• wordpress.com – Create a free blog hosted on WordPress.
• yola.com – Create a free website and link back to your website/articles.
• yousaytoo.com – Add your blogs to increase exposure, get traffic, and earn money from advertising.
• xanga.com – Create a free blog and link to your website.
• zoomshare.com - Create a free website and blog to link to your website and share photos.

This is a massive list of websites and it would be impossible to use all of them, however you can explore a few and see if they catch your interest. I would recommend you start off by re-writing some of your older content and start populating these web 2.0′s with a link back to your original article. This is a great way to get a second level of links to your content if you put in the work.

Don’t Have The Time To Build These Links?

You can always hire someone to do it for you. Like me! Or, you can head over to a freelance website like Odesk.com and hire some cheap labor. For example, you can hire a Filipino for $3 an hour to setup 10 of these web 2.0′s for you. It would probably take them two hours at most costing you just $6. You are now officially an outsourcer who is selling our jobs overseas!

Once they are setup, you can hire a writer to write a blog post for each one at around $6-$10 per 500 words for a total cost of around $75 to $80. If you think that’s expensive, it’s not. It’s really cheap and a great way to get SEO done yourself that a professional would charge hundreds of dollars for. I know I shouldn’t be telling you this, but hey, I love to share.

Once you get your web 2.0′s setup, you can use your freelancer to write 10 articles a month to keep them populated with fresh content. The more articles you post the more results you’ll see as your rankings start to climb.

Need Help? Send me an email or give me a call.

If you need help finding a freelancer or how to determine if they are worth it, send me an email or give me a call. I’ve hired many freelancers and can give you some tips to find one that will meet your needs.

That’s it for today. Start building some links to the links you’ve already created and you’ll see a nice rise in your rankings. This is a great way to beat your competition if they are only building one level.