SEO Idea: Seattle Real Estate July 11, 2007
I know from the comments and emails that a lot of people enjoy the occasional SEO tweak and update. My latest change (as of 10 minutes ago) was to replace the words “Home” in the main tab with “Seattle Real Estate” (Thank you Tim for the inspiration!).
As usual, I’ll wait a few weeks and let you know if it makes any difference in how we show up in Google… (For at least six months, we’ve been pretty consistently ranked between place #10 and #15 in Google for [Seattle Real Estate] and non-existent for that term on the other search engines.)
Check out these related posts:
- More real estate mapping: MLS Maps Online
- Tech Thursday: Are you addicted yet?
- gHomes — Seattle Area MLS on Google Maps
Article Tags>> blog | google | real-estate | Seattle | seo
- Posted in : Real Estate Search
- Author : Dustin
Comments»
Another way to do this (that is less intrusive) is to leave the word home, and at the footer or gutter where your copyright is, you can put Seattle Real Estate linked to your home page. With “no undie” if you prefer the stealth link.
In real estate, the word home is not so bad. As you do sell homes. But it is important to get your main phrase in there somewhere. The word in the link diminishes or enhances the reputation of that page it links to.
I will be interested to hear your results.
Tim,
I’ll definitely let you know how it turns out!
What are the top 10 keywords used for searches recently that take people to Rain City Guide?
Oh, I see what you are talking about now. The home button at the top says Seattle Real Estate. I always thought “home” there meant back to start…like home plate.
Top 10 keywords… hmmm… I just looked it up, but before I list them I want to make the point that the top 10 keywords represent less than 10% of the total visitors that come from keywords (i.e. over 90% of our keyword traffic comes from “other” terms). This data is for July 1 through July 11 (i.e. month-to-date):
1. moving to seattle, 183 visits
2. mila, 158
3. rain city guide, 132
4. popcorn ceiling removal, 57
5. rain city real estate, 44
6. seattle real estate blog, 40
7. rain city blog, 37
8. mortgage masters kent renton, 36
9. real estate photography, 35
10. rain city, 34
I just played with my template…always dangerous especially when running out to show property shortly.
I noticed that I can add many the way mine is set up, but I can only see the code to take someone to “main page”. How do you set one up to go to a deeper page. What do you say in the code instead of “main page”? I can try a category name and see what that does.
Ardell, I’m not sure which blog your talking about… Do you mean your “searchingseattleblog” website? Because I honestly have no idea how the guys have coded the backend of that…
Out of curiosity…Do any of our top 10 terms surprise you? I’ve been looking at that list so long and it really hasn’t changed much in months (with the exception being #8 seems out of place and I think it is just a fluke of some kind).
I think it’s always important to find the balance between optimization and usability. To me, it’s not intuitive on how to get back to the start page. Typically, people know they can click on a logo in the top right corner to return to the home page. Since Rain City doesn’t have a logo, you may consider linking the header text “Rain City Guide” back to the home page. On more than one occasion, I have found myself trying to click on that text to get back to the home page. I guess strictly out of habit.
Dustin-
Lots of Branding words which is always good.
I would be curious as to your next 10%
If they are giving you seattle real estate
On the top 10%:
Yes I have professed for years the 80/20 rule.
80% of the words will be specifics made up of 1/4%’s , or as they say these days, the long tail.
However, a site always loves the traffic from a big word like seattle real estate.
Ardell- you can always just hard code it into the page. You don’t have to usually get too involved in php stuff if you don’t know it.
Another way is if it has a wordpress like feature you can always put it into what WP calls links or blogroll.
Brad and Tim… you make some great points…
I’ll definitely look at making the entire logo a link to the “home”… For better or worse, the text Rain City Guide in the header image is actually part of the image. I’m not a coder and I had one hell of a hard time trying to get the header text to look even remotely acceptable in more than one browser at a time. In frustration, I just made it part of the image and never got up the momentum to revisit the issue! It’s probably time for a site redesign as I’ve seen more than a few WP themes that have caught my fancy!
Now that I’ve started the experiment, I do not want to stop without letting it play out a bit… How about if I changed the text “Seattle Real Estate” to “Seattle Real Estate Home”? It’s getting bulky and long, but maybe that would help out with the clarity thing because my intention is not to confuse our readers!
In terms of the next ten… Nothing too surprising in the list:
11. rain city
12. seattle real estate market
13. seattle wikipedia
14. karen kirr
15. winner project blogger
16. real estate blog
17. seattle bubble
18. “david losh” seattle
19. move to seattle
20. mark hikel
There were 5,665 different keywords used by visitors to get to RCG in the past 11 days, so I can’t go through them all!
Tim, I just reread your comment and realized you were asking about the next 10%, not the next 10 keywords. A quick back-of-the-envelop calc says I’d have to go at least fifty more kewords, but probably closer to 100 to get the next 10%.
Interestingly, I just noticed that your name [tim o'keefe] makes the list at #51!
Oh oh, I am getting ready for the invoice to come over any day!
The popcorn ceiling one surprised me, but the activity on it has made it such a fabulous resource!
I’ve been wanting to do a lot more like that, but with podcasts. Thinks people ask me about the homes they just bought, which is where the popcorn ceiling thread came from.
I have a whole list of things that new home owners ask me about all the time. Especially people with no close relatives nearby and people from out of the Country. Simple things really, but ones many people have questions about.
The most asked question of me, is if I will come to their new home and stage it for them to live in, after I stage their old home to sell it.
Dustin,
My header is my home. But there was also a “home” link in the navigation panel of the sidebar. I changed the code and also copied the code for Redmond, Bellevue and Kirkland. But I’d like to navigate to a page or pages devoted to those separate cities. I’m going to make them into cateogries and see if I can navigate directly to a category the same way it will to “home”.
Another tip ~ rename your images to include the most popular search keywords (alt tags).
For me, that means my images have filenames like “Boise ID - Boise River”, etc.
Phil-
With all due respect that is sooo 1999.
In other words the alt tag is meant to describe a graphic for someone who does not have the graphics on.
Thus if it is a banner it should say “banner” or ‘banner with a picture of a house” at best if has a house like above.
It probably wont cause a penalty but it could be seen as spam. Either way it wont help.
Funny enough I literally just had a banner remove its old spammy alt for just “banner”
Tim, spot on with post #1! Adding the term on the bottom of the page (bolded) followed by a couple of sentences maybe has been working best for me. Seems to me that Google likes to see the keyword where normally the company name appears.
Mike
Yes, I do enjoy the SEO chatter, and I’m always trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. It’s interesting that you made that change. I’ve always tried to be #1 for the term “Seattle Real Estate” and the highest I ever got in Google was #4, where I stayed for years until I got (falsely) penalized early in 2007 for supposed “link spam”. I still believe that exchanging links with other real estate agents around the country is useful and legitimate, but it’s not worth the risk if Google bans your site. I’m still #1 for the term “Seattle Homes” in organic search, but would gladly trade that for higher placement for “Seattle Real Estate”. I’m still #1 for “unusual homes” and “Seattle vintage homes” and #3 for “Seattle modern homes”, but am always looking for ways to boost my placement and PR. Any ideas would be appreciated to get me back up on page 1 in Google for “Seattle Real Estate”.
Marlow… If search engine traffic is the goal, then don’t follow in my footsteps just yet! While I still have high hopes for this test, organic traffic is down about 18% since I made this change over typical levels… I’m (pretty) sure that over time the organic traffic will bounce up over previous levels, but for now, it’s lower than usual…
BTW, have you looked in Alexa recently to check your ratings? I’m not sure how acccurate it is, as I think they’re only tracking those sites who’ve downloaded the toolbar or submitted their sites in their Open Directory, but it’s interesting, nevertheless…..
http://www.alexa.com/browse?&CategoryID=301898
Redfin’s #1, but I probably could be too with all the the dough spent on PPC last year, though I have noticed they seem to have discontinued that lately.
With no advertising budget, RCG is # 2 and two of my sites place in the top 10, http://www.360Digest is #7 and http://www.SeattleDreamHomes.com is #10. They, like RCG, have climbed there organically, with no PPC, paid links, nor millions in VC, so not bad at all.
Ben Kakimoto’s site done great at #3….. But I’m surprised to see the Prudential site of Frank Rutledge doing so well, as that’s just appeared in the top 100 just recently. His appearance there makes me doubt the whole list, though it could just be a change in algorhythm that has made his site rise so rapidly in the last few weeks.
Interesting enough, the most visited sites, the brokerages like Windermere, Coldwell Banker and John L. Scott, are not listed at all, nor do they do any PPC and I’m guessing they don’t have anyone on staff who do SEO and it shows. Instead they rely on their agents and traditional advertising to direct people to their site.
If you want to know wheter Alexa is accurate: It can be, but it can easily be fooled, too:
http://www.frogengine.com/blog/should-i-use-alexa-as-an-indicator-of-how-much-traffic-a-site-gets/
[...] Probably the craziest part about blogging for business is that you really have to accept the fact that you are not in complete control. My guess is that Ardell could point you to 10 articles that she thinks would be more valuable to the typical real estate consumer than her article on removing popcorn from a ceiling, but she is not in control of the search engine algorithms that drive a majority of the traffic to our blogs… Just as I’m not. (Although that doesn’t mean we can’t try out best to influence those rankings! ) [...]
Hey guys you are my favorite blog of all times in terms of structure so here are a few more tips.
Unless you have special arrangements move as many links on your blogroll to
http://www.raincityguide.com/linkation/real-estate-blogs/
Also Create a similar page for Seattle neighborhood blogs and move your sidebar neighborhood blogs to that page. Otherwise you are giving away a lot of PR away for no reason rather than allowing your own pages to rank higher.
If possible start creating categories for major keywords such as Seattle Condos, Seattle Homes, Seattle Mortgage, Major neighborhood real estate (don’t know the names of neighborhoods in Seattle), etc. This should help you tremendously in your SERPS.