Real Estate Website Promotion to Vault Your Real Estate Website to the Top of the Search Engines
If you are a Real Estate Agent, or provide a Real Estate service you know how important it is to have effective real estate web promotion. Or perhaps you don't. Perhaps you think effective real estate website promotion is beyond your grasp, too difficult to master, too expensive to afford, or just too mysterious to understand.

The Importance of Scoring Well With The Search Engines
The simple fact is, if your real estate web site does not score well with the search engines for your local market, then it is almost a waste of time and money to have one. The good news is that effective real estate website promotion is easy, if you know how to do it. It does not take a lot of money, and effective online promotion does not employ a lot of questionable tricks. No. The principles are quite simple and straightforward, and it is actually quite easy to apply these principles to real estate websites. Many real estate agents have simply given up trying to score well in the search engines for local real estate searches because they don't properly understand the process.
But before you give up, consider what is at stake...
Consider these two cases... Now remember, more than 70% of all prospective real estate customers do online research before contacting a real estate company or agent, so...

Case 1 - Ineffective Real Estate Website Promotion
When potential customers look for "Real Estate Mytown" your site is nowhere to be seen. The same aggressive, web-savvy sites come up time and time again, and that's where all those online prospects end up going.

Case 2 - Effective Real Estate Website Promotion
When potential customers look for "Real Estate Mytown", your site comes up in the first two or three positions in all the major search engines. This results in a steady stream of prospects. Your name and business are constantly in the face of all those online prospects. This results in hundreds of leads.

If there was a simple way to convert you from a Case 1 into a Case 2, would you be interested? How much would that sort of real estate website promotion be worth?
Quite a bit, right?
Well you'll be surprised to hear just how simple the process is, and how little it costs to get this kind of effective real estate website promotion.

Who are we and Why Should You Deal With Us?
Before you go any further, you should know a little bit about us. We are a Canadian company with an exclusive focus on online promotion and a special interest in real estate website promotion. We have a select roster of clients, and when it comes to real estate websites, we accept only one client in each significant market.
Our objective is to vault our real estate clients to the top of the search engine results pages within their local market. As we've previously pointed out we use a concentrated program of techniques to do this. We help our clients create a pinpoint focus for their primary website and we create other sites or blogs specifically for each client which target less competitive, but still very important search terms that will draw traffic.
There's one more important thing about our service. Our clients appreciate the fact that they can pick up the phone and call us from anywhere in North America and talk to a real person. That's pretty rare in the world of online promotion where you often end up dealing with someone on the other side of the world. Our clients also know that when they send us an email message we will respond, normally within an hour or so. We value your business and try to make our service as effective and client-centered as we possibly can.
To get a really good grasp of how we would approach the job of promoting your site, read this page carefully, or listen to the audios. We tell you exactly how we will proceed. There are no tricks or mysterious "secret" techniques that only the initiated can understand.
And feel free to contact us at any time. Call us at our toll free number, or fill in the contact form and we'll get back to you just as soon as possible.

Our Real Estate Website Promotion Strategy in a Nutshell
As we've already said, we think search engine marketing is pretty straight forward, and it is not all that difficult to dominate the search engines for specific keywords or search terms - especially in Real Estate. The problem is that you are often going head to head with a number of aggressive online marketers for ranking for the most competitive search terms in your area.
It is still possible to do extremely well for these competitive search terms - to get on the first page of Google, for instance. You simply have to outdo the competition in terms of content "optimization". If you want to score well for a term like "real estate Phoenix" or "real estate Ottawa", really all you have to do is pack your site with good information about Phoenix (or Ottawa) and focus your home page in a very deliberate way on those search terms.
It is not magic. The search engines like focused content. They generally assume if your site contains lots of content relevant to "real estate Phoenix" then it should be shown high in searches for that search term. However, as we've said, the problem is that there are already a number of others sites offering good content focused on that search term, so you are going head to head with sites that have previously established ranking, and it will take time and some work to get past them.
That does not mean you should not keep on trying. It simply means you should be patient, and in the meantime find some less competitive search terms to focus on as well. For instance, if you are in Ottawa, but most of your clientele is in Kanata or Nepean, then you should focus on those smaller markets - at least in some of your marketing efforts. That way you have a chance of more quickly getting results in a significantly smaller and less competitive market.

How The Content Oriented Approach Works
So you can see how important it is to select the right search terms - what we call your "primary keywords" - because those should be the focus of your marketing efforts. Here is an outline of how we proceed.
1. Understanding keywords (or search terms) is crucial. Every web entrepreneur including every real estate agent or company wanting to have online success needs a detailed analysis of their primary keywords. The result of this analysis is a specific keyword group which represents all the important search terms you are going to focus on.
2. Once we have determined the appropriate keyword group we create or modify already existing "web properties" where we will be driving traffic. The first, and perhaps most important web property is your primary website. But in the short term this may not be where you get most of your traffic. You will want to create web properties focused on less competitive keywords within your keyword group. It will be much easier to dominate these, and therefore easier to generate traffic with them. Depending on your circumstances these other web properties may be "mini-sites", tightly focused blogs or even a specialty site like the ones you find at Squidoo.com.
In other words, each keyword group should have three or four focused web properties all of which are aimed at pulling traffic from different keywords within your keyword group.
The key with all of these web properties is to fill them with a significant amount of tightly-focused content. This is what will set them apart as resources worthy of the attention of the search engines. It is what will first and foremost give you ranking in the search engine results pages, and will ultimately bring you targeted traffic.
Why have multiple web properties rather than just try to drive traffic to your main site?
We've already touched on the main reasons, but we'll elaborate a bit further. First, each of your web properties should have a slightly different keyword focus. Rather than trying to focus your primary website on a combination of "real estate Phoenix", "real estate Scottsdale", "real estate Mesa", etc., build a different web property to focus on each one of these individually.
Second, the search engines often regard different types of web properties differently. Tightly focused blogs - especially if they are part of a larger site like blogger or wordpress almost always get crawled more often and are given more weight than brand new websites. Google owns blogger, so it makes sense that they might give blogger sites a bit of a leg up. Squidoo is another story again. Squidoo lenses (focused pages) often do well in search results - perhaps simply because the good ones are so tightly focused.

Building Links to Your Web Properties to Strengthen Their Position
Creating inbound links to your web properties is very important, but it should not become your focus until after your web properties have been built, given a healthy amount of targeted content, and tightly focused for your main keywords. Remember, your web properties should not be viewed as a source of links to primary website. They should be seen as "traffic bait" - places to draw traffic from keywords that are more easy to dominate.
However, once your targeted web properties are in place and we have a good amount of highly targeted and optimized content for each of your main keywords, the emphasis shifts to building links into each of these web properties. Not just to your primary site but to all of them since you want each of them to gain search engine ranking and attract traffic.
Inbound links from external sites will strengthen the association of your web properties to the specific keywords we are targeting. Creating inbound links is often considered one of the most difficult parts of web marketing. Fortunately this is one of our main strengths. We have access to literally hundreds of websites and blogs where we can place links to all of your web properties.
In order to create links we create a program where we make posts on a monthly basis to many different real estate blogs. The program also includes an aggressive article marketing component. This is one of the most effective strategies for real estate website promotion. By writing and distributing articles focusing on your community we are able to create effective and relevant links in several hundred influential sites. The impact of this targeted link building program is to strengthen the association of your web properties with your primary keywords and to push you up in the search engine rankings, literally leap frogging you over your competition.

Benefits of Online Marketing Public Relations

Benefits of Online Marketing Public Relations
Aside from possible media exposure, online press releases are an extraordinarily easy and effective way to increase your website's reach and rank within search engines.The reach of your website is dramatically increased as your promotional press release makes its way all over the web through news distribution sites. This larger reach opens up numerous channels for traffic to get to your site and helps you to be more popular over web.In addition to increasing the reach of your site, online press releases also increase your site's rank. Search Engines rely on more than keyword frequency within a site to determine if the site should be displayed or not. They also rely on the number of sites linking to your site. The thinking is that the more sites that link to yours, the more likely your site stands as credible and expert. Hence, this improves visibility and appearance of your website over search engine results pages(SERP).Whenever you submit any press release to any press release submission website, within minutes the release is featured all over the web from new-related sites to industry blogs. Overnight your site will be seen by search engines as being linked to by not one or two sites, but rather hundreds. This increase in the number of sites linking to your own will both increase the number of channels for traffic to make it to your site, but also increase your site's rank. This helps in achieving a higher position in related search engine queries.

7 Winning Search Engine Optimization Tactics

7 Winning Search Engine Optimization Tactics

Search engine optimization should always be considered long before your website structure, colors, layout, and overall site design. But, the majority of people usually get caught up "in the moment"... thinking of riches instead of "how" they're going to attract more website visitors. This article is meant to get you back on track, and provide you with 5 winning search engine optimization tactics.

Identify Keywords

1. The single biggest mistake that most business owners make is trying to think of a "cool name" for their website, when they should have chosen a keyword-rich site name like 'prevent-corporate-bankruptcy.com' instead of SmithLawOffice.com' (as an example). Your potential customers search for keyword phrases... not business names... unless you're already a household name like Wal-Mart, eBay or Apple. Facing reality, many business owners gave up on websites ever helping their business a long time ago... usually because of a poor website name choice. And, it doesn't have to be this way.

Simply, discover what terms people are searching for. Identify the "action" keywords and phrases that people are actually using when they are searching Google, Yahoo, MSN or any of the other major search engines. I highly recommend looking for keyword phrases that incorporate the following keywords: buy, want, need, order, download, etc. I'm sure you're getting the idea now. Then, you need to purchase website names that are centered around the most popular keyword phrases. And, redirect these visitors to your current website. And, I promise that you can setup a website redirect in less than one minute... even if computers scare you. You just need to have access to your website hosting interface, with cPanel being the most popular choice.

Optimizing Your Web Page

2. After identifying a minimum of 10 keyword phrases, I recommend optimizing your current website pages' title tags, meta tags, image "alt" tags. You need to start using these keywords within your webpage content in bold text, underlined text, and as text links. Do not overuse these keywords though. These keywords should only comprise 4-6% of each page. So, if you have 500 words on a webpage, limit your keyword usage to 20-30 words. Most of the major search engines index every word of your page and compare them to your title META description and META keywords. So, you should never hide or add non-related keywords to your webpages: like Anna Kournakova, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, etc. This is a "black hat" tactic and should never be used, unless your want your website to be permanently banned by the search engine directories.

Most of the major search engines don't even consider the META keywords anymore, which is why the actual content of your webpages is becoming more and more important. Excessive repeating of keywords is considered as spamming, which will get your website penalized with a lower ranking. And, be sure mix your keywords in different combinations throughout the page and in your ALT tags, instead of using the same phrase over and over again.

Link Popularity

3. One of the most important factors to achieve a high ranking in the search engines is link popularity. The overall number of links to your web site is important, but the quality of the links are even more important. All the search engines are very fond of "on topic" links. Links from sites that contain your same keyword content and are focusing on the same topic as your site, are known as "on topic" links. Three of the best ways to get "on topic" quality backlinks are to comment on other industry-related blogs, make comments in industry-related forums, and to submit articles to article directories. Just make sure that you're adding comments or articles to high pagerank sites, avoiding low page rank sites.

Misspellings

4. Adding misspelled keywords within your META tags can also boost your website traffic, because many people are likely to misspell your keywords when browsing the search engine directories. As an example, here are several popular misspellings I found people making when they searched for a site submission service, as follows: "free search engine submision", "sumit", "subit", "search egnine submission", "submition", and "saerchengines".

Add Fresh Content

5. Adding fresh content to your website on a regular basis is another key factor that plays a critical role in your search engine rankings. Adding new content regularly gives your visitors a reason to come back. Search engine robots will also visit your website more often, once they notice that you update regularly. This is one of the main reasons why WordPress blogs are so popular right now. When visitors leave comments about blog posts you have made, the search engine bots see this as new content. And, it really helps your site rankings when a visitor makes a comment with a permalink back to their high pagerank site. This helps website owners save time, by allowing website visitors to create content for them.

Don't Kill the Search Engine Crawlers

6. Avoid using flash intro pages where it says "Click Here to Enter Site", because the search engines have a very difficult time indexing (seeing) anything beyond the intro page... unless you've submitted every webpage of your site to the search engine directories manually, which is very time consuming. Even if you use the alt attribute to specify alternate text for flash images, that text will not be anywhere near as important as real text on a main index page.

Provide Relevant Title Tags

7. Making your page titles simple, descriptive, relevant and "keyword rich" makes it easier for search engines to know what each page is about. Keyword rich titles help the search engine directories provide consumers with more relevant search results, helping them determine whether your website contains what they are trying to find. The title description is the most important element of your website design, after you have chosen your website domain name.

The Magic of Meta Tags

The Magic of Meta Tags

Search engine optimization or SEO is seen to be a major tool that is used for getting a high page ranking for your website. This would in turn divert more traffic to your website. Meta tags play a very significant role in SEO. Some of the important meta tags that must be given adequate weightage are:The title tag is what indicates to the search engine as to what the particular site pertains to. The title tag would help search engines classify your website under a particular head and therefore, would divert traffic pertaining to the particular title tag to your website. The keywords that are of utmost importance must be included in the title tag.Description Meta tags may not have a direct impact on the page ranking by the search engine. However, the description tag is used by the search engine to describe your page. Good description tags must be provided to all the pages of your website only then would it make your website attractive to a visitor. Description tags need not contain keywords as they do not play a role in deciding page ranking. However, an interesting page description may sound very inviting and make the visitor click on your website link.A keywords meta tag plays a very significant role in generating traffic to your website. The keywords tag too must contain important keywords relevant to your website.Robots meta tag is a recent concept evolved by Google. However, it has gained tremendous popularity in the short period of time that it has been around and is now being used by several other search engines too. The Robots meta tag is actually an instruction to the search engine regarding whether to index a given page or not.It is only the title tag that is visible to the visitor. The other meta tags like the keyword tag and the Robots meta tag are only a means to communicate data or information to the search engine. The meta tags convey information regarding the content of the website to the search engine. The pages are thus, ranked based on the information provided to the search engine in the form of meta tags. Thus, it is important to give due importance to meta tags. Properly written meta tags may actually prove to be very beneficial in search engine optimization or SEO. The meta tags thus, have proved their importance in diverting more traffic to your particular website.Use appropriate meta tags for your website content and observe the difference that it would make to the number of visitors visiting your website. The right use of meta tags could actually make a positive contribution to the profits of your firm. Discover the hidden power in meta tags that make it so very important for SEO.

The Importance of Meta tags

The Importance of Meta tags

If you want to make your presence felt online then knowledge of SEO is very crucial. It is fast gaining ground and is an important tool that is used for making your website more popular. Competition online is very tough with several thousands trying to make a place for themselves. In such a situation just having a website of your own is not enough. Efforts to increase traffic to your website play a very important role in online marketing.A website that figures in the first three pages of the search engine search results are the ones that would be able to attract the prospective customers.SEO thus, plays a very important role in diverting traffic to your website. To make a beginning online, having knowledge regarding SEO is a must. The basics of SEO for all you beginners that would help turn your business into a huge success include:• First and foremost submit the URL of your website to a search engine. Content is of prime importance and one that is rich in keywords would make indexing and crawling by the search engine a much simpler task.• Selection of keywords is very important for SEO. You could select few of your very important keywords that describe your product or services best. With a little bit of research you would be able to find keywords that are generally searched for by prospective customers. Make use of all these keywords while formulating the content for your website. A keyword rich content would facilitate a high ranking by the search engine thus, adding to your overall business and profitability.• Meta tags play a very important role in communicating information regarding the website to the search engine. There are SEO experts who would be able to help you. The experts are familiar with the concepts and understand the requirements perfectly. It is advisable to employ the services of experts who would be able to guide you in the right manner.• The title plays a key role. Your title must be catchy only then would it interest the person making an online search.• Find websites dealing in similar subjects and get reciprocal links to your website. Post articles and other interesting material regarding your field of operation that makes it interesting for the visitor. Special promotional campaigns, discount offers and the like would interest the visitor.• Updating your content on a regular basis is important. There must be something new and interesting on your website only then will the visitor re-visit your website. Attracting attention is important but retaining it is of immense importance too for developing a good client base.An appropriate mix of all the above mentioned would help you attain a high search engine ranking for your webpage. This in turn, would mean more traffic and greater profitability to your online business.

How to Use the Internet to Move Your Irish Business into the Fast Lane

How to Use the Internet to Move Your Irish Business into the Fast Lane

Whether you're a caterer in Kildare, a racehorse breeder in Roscommon or a designer in Dublin, having a web presence is vital to the growth and success of your small business. You website is your brochure, your catalogue, and your sales pitch. It’s also the first impression many of your customers will get of you so you need to make sure you look good and give the visitor what he wants. Let's look at the characteristics of a successful website. First, there's design. Your website needs to immediately establish who you are and what you’re offering. And it needs to do this in a way that establishes confidence. For this you need effective use of colour, graphics and layout. Having an amateur looking website will brand you as an amateur company.On the usability level, your website needs to load quickly. Webs users can be impatient and it's very easy to click away. The best way to ensure fast loading is to use cascading style sheets (CSS). Using CSS results in fast-loading websites that are easy to maintain and update.Next your website needs compelling content. Your visitors arrive at your site looking for information so you need to give them what they want clearly and accurately. This demands expert copywriting that understands both the nature of the online reader and the demands of the search engines. Now your website need to attract targeted visitors actively seeking the product or service you're offering. To achieve this, your site has to show up in the SERPs (search engine results pages) that come up when people search on keywords or phrases related to your product or service. And you need to show up high in the results. If your company is buried at the bottom of page 7, your competitors on page one have already grabbed the business. To rank well you have two options - organic or paid. Organic means optimising your website so that it naturally ranks high in the main search results. This is highly desirable but it's not easy. You need to make sure the words on your site are optimised as well as the tags, links and titles that the search engines read when they visit your site. Plus you need to build incoming links from authority websites. The search engines see these as a vote of confidence and so award you a higher status. All these things take skill and time.Paid refers to pay-per-click (ppc) advertisements. These ads usually from google or yahoo show up on the right hand side of the page under the heading sponsored links. For these you pay every time a visitor clicks them. Using PPC can be a quick way to get visitors but it can be expensive. For today's small Irish company, success depends on a strong web presence with a properly optimised site containing compelling content. Get this right and the world's your oyster. Get it wrong and your competitors will eat you alive. So if you’re looking to build your business online, or if your existing website isn’t working as you’d like, look for a local professional help. For efficiency, it’s best one firm to handle your website design http://www.cwwd.org , copywriting, SEM and search engine optimisation jobs. http://www.cwwd.org

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Run a search on any of the 200 major search engines, and the results will come up in similar orders on quite a few of them. How a website owner/operator gets their website to the top of a list is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Optimizing a website involves many of the same techniques, whether the aim is to optimize for Google adwords, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves or others. There is a list of what not to do as well, and that list is applicable to all engines, as it mostly refers to tricks and hacks unscrupulous designers use to try to trick the engines. These kind of pages generally get removed by automated tools and don't generally last very long, so they are not recommended to bother with.Website optimization starts with content. If the content is irrelevant, the website will not last long in the rankings, no matter how many keywords are included. The best way to get relevant content is to get an expert to write the content. General content may be more friendly to beginners, but in the search optimization arena, content is what is going to keep readers coming back and webmasters linking to the page. Many search engines use link counters to rank sites. If enough people like and value the site, they will link to it from their own site as an example of expert help for visitors seeking more detailed information than they can provide, or are willing to provide. Often, general-interest sites will link to expert sites, thereby also driving their own traffic up as the initial portal to those expert sites and improving their own rankings in the optimization listings. The quality of the sites linked is also a major factor in the rankings, as quality sites such as Microsoft and Google are going to be more effective "heavy hitters" than a link to Bob's House of Website Optimizing. When the content is being created, keywords are the "anchors" that search engines hook onto, but just filling your content with keywords risks being dismissed as a spam site, as many spammers merely fill a page with keywords, hoping to hook anyone searching for anything. These kind of pages are usually removed quickly, but they exist nonetheless. Specific keywords are the key--instead of Search Engine, use Search Engine Optimization for Google, or combinations of the key words or phrases. Optimization for Search Engines in one area, then Optimizing for higher Search Engine rankings in another increases the chances of an engine ranking your website content a little higher than it may have otherwise.The guidelines for content also go for Meta tags such as the title. Title is very important, as it is one of the bigger spots for an engine to catch, as well as the hook that draws a surfer in once the rankings have been displayed. A recommended length is 50-80 characters (including spaces), with keywords located near the beginning in case the window is resized on the screen. A good example would be "Search Engine Optimization tips and tricks for Google", instead of "How to do important SEO for websites." Search Engine Optimization--what to avoid: Don't use huge strings of keywords without relevant content--you may be labeled as a spammer and blacklisted off the engine(s) you're trying to climb. Stay away from pop-ups, excessive load times (by keeping the page clean and using fast hosting servers), and lots of flash animation, as this takes time to load and also detracts from the readability of the site.