Positive Real Estate Professionals

One of the daunting feats that we all want to do is to keep people on our page. One of the newest ways to do that is to embed Google SERPs (search engine results pages) in your site. This way, when someone comes to your site looking for your informative post and want to do research, they can with the click of the button and never have to leave your site. Now, before you all say that this is old news, let me go into it deeper. The picture to the right is actually OLD news. However, that is not quite what I am talking about here.

For those of you that do not know, Google now has a feature through Adsense that allows for you to have the Google search engine results pages show up inside your website. This way, a reader or consumer can stick around on your site for some extra time. The one thing that I am not keen on with this product is the fact that it has to be at least 800 pixels wide. For most people, this is a majority of your content display. For people that employ the 1200 pixel themes, this really would not be a problem if you have a single sidebar or two that are less than 400 pixels total.

In closing, it is still a great tool to add to your site if you want to keep people hanging around. If you click on the picture to the left, you will be able to view a site that has this in action. If you notice, the header is still active. If you want to see it in action for yourself, visit SEO Info Now. For any PREP member that would like to add this feature to your PREP site, contact our office at 865-951-0522 and we will help you walk through it.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

Over the last month I have discussed mastering search engine optimization with many of our members of this online real estate network as well as clients of R & D Art. In those conversations, it always seems to end with me telling them that to master SEO it is not all about the meta keywords that are in your site. Actually, that might be the weakest link to mastering SEO and getting the search engines to recognize you. With that said, I think the biggest problem is that people think they need to master Google and forget about Alexa, Yahoo, and Bing. Regardless what my personal feelings are on the search engines, I still have to pay homage to them.

If you notice, I have linked to several keywords in my first paragraph. However, only one of those keywords is something that I really key on for our real estate based site to show up in. That is: real estate network. Over and over, when we blog, we want to make sure that we are keying on this phrase. With that said, it is not certain that phrase that will drive readers to our site. We make sure that our articles are packed with keyword enriched content. I have said it many times before and I will say it again; CONTENT IS KING. No matter where you go on the net, anyone that knows anything about SEO will tell you this. Great content will win every time.

One of the things that I see that people do is have a very short post on their site or even worse, a recipe, and they hope that it pushes them up because they wrote a blog. Unfortunately, writing a recipe on a real estate site really is not going to carry much weight with the search engines. People might think you are more down to earth and come looking for more recipes, but frankly, the search engines won’t. It is the same with many topics that do not pertain to your main topic. The great thing about the main blog for PREP is that we can discuss SEO, SERP, blogs, social media, social media marketing, financing, the housing industry, and a world of other topics and still be point on. The great thing with a Realtor® is that they can discuss local events, neighborhoods, dining, schools, shopping, and much more and still be right on target. However, if your blog is about USDA or FHA, home staging, or home inspections, appraisals or home repair, then most readers are going to want the articles to be about that. They do not want to sort through all the fluff to get to the meat.

Here is one thing that I also see that people have a tendency to do; they write on a level that not many can understand. So many times I have had to tell bloggers to “dumb it down”. For those that do not understand that, it just means that you are probably writing on a college or doctoral level. I do not really know many people that understand that. The key element in this is to write on a secondary or grade school level. It means leave the 6 syllable words at home. With that said, don’t sacrifice your article for the sake of this procedure.

I would have to say the next thing that I see in bloggers that ask me why their sites are not showing up at the top of search engines has to be the lack of consistency. In the last month I have talk to two different bloggers in reference to this fact. One had 8 articles published and the other had 6. Both wondered why they could not be found on the first 3 pages in the search engines. Well, frankly, if I were only writing 8 articles over a 6 month period, I would not be found either. Blogging is not something that you can do just when you feel like it and magically appear. You have to work at it. And by working at it, I am not referring to 20 hours a week. However, being able to sit down and post 5 or 7 post during your downtime and have them automatically publish is a great feature. Not many platforms can supply that fact. But, even if you do not have that opportunity, 2 to 5 hours a week can still net you the front page of keyword searches where as neglect cannot.

Another thing that I notice that people have a knack for forgetting about has to be linking. Rich wrote an article about linking the other day and in it he talked about linking to some of your older articles. If you have not read that post, I recommend that you do. I have caught myself forgetting to use links in post, so it happens and I can understand that. However, if we want to get pushed up in the search engines, we need to link like crazy and I am not just talking about in our articles on this site. We do it to all of our sites. Use links to your other sites through your signature and then you can make sure that you have it covered all the time.

Now, this is where most people stop when it comes to SEO. PREP does not. This is where the power of Wordpress extends to help push your SEO even further. This real estate network has a feature that allows for you to send trackbacks to other links that you have used in your post. This is a great way to get internal links built for your site, or maybe external links built using another site you own. Regardless, it takes linking to another level.

The last thing that I will talk about is the added feature of the All In One SEO Pack. For those of you that do not understand what this provides, let me state it like this. The All In One SEO pack gives you the added ability to optimize pages, post, and your site individually. Here are some features:

• Advanced Canonical URLs

• Fine tune Page Navigational Links

• Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality

• ONLY plugin to provide SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites

• Nonce Security

• Support for CMS-style Wordpress installations

• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines

• Generates META tags automatically

• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs

• For beginners, you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.

• For advanced users, you can fine-tune everything

• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.

• Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

In closing, mastering SEO is not something that will happen over night. I have seen Black hat tricks and grey hat tricks in SEO and I have seen both cost site owners their place in search engines when they are caught. In the long run, it is so much better to just do it the right way.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

In today’s time, Sitemaps are important to the search engines and to your website. I could leave it at that and hope that all of you take my word for it based on the SEO success this real estate network has. However, I am not gullible enough to believe that I can just say it and people will believe it. Most people do not even know the importance of the sitemap, so they think that it is no more than a waste of space. In reality, sitemaps are much more than that. In today’s article, I am going to attempt to explain the importance of having a sitemap of your website. Read More

I was talking to a potential client yesterday and one of the questions that I asked her was “Is your web presence staged forward?” The answer that I received from her was what I expected though I actually did not expect for her to be quite so frank. She knew that her web presence was basically non-existent. She had a profile, a account, and a company based website. But, even with that, she still could not be found in searches. Her question to me was a simple one, “WHY?” My answer back was not so simple. An hour later she understood what she needed to do to change this issue. Now, the ball is in her court and she has decisions to make. So, let’s take a look at what I explained to her. Read More

Hopefully the title made you smile, that was its intention. It is also a title loaded with high placement keywords. Now before I am accused of keyword stuffing, which is a definite no-no, all of those keywords are actually what this post is about! In a competitive industry like real estate it is important to take advantage of all the tools that are available to you. This means not only having a website and/or blogsite that looks good and is easy for visitors to navigate but having a site that is optimized to return high in search engine results. You can have the most beautiful site in the world but if nobody visits, it is like having a Picasso hanging in a closet. Read More

In a world where the competition for search engine dominance is fierce, achieving and keeping a high Google PR (Page Rank) is of the utmost importance. PR is an indicator of your site’s placement in search queries; you know how high you come up on a given Google search. Achieving a high PR is not something that happens overnight. The algorithms used to determine PR change on a regular basis and are secret and proprietary. Read More

One of the great things about Positive Real Estate Professionals is all the functionality that can be incorporated into your PREP website; if you would like to view some of the general functionality geared toward making your site more visitor friendly, simply visit the Test Account. Keep in mind that the general functionality is by no means exhaustive nor does it include SEO tweaks. Much of the work done to make your PREP site more friendly to the various search engines and visitors is done behind the scenes. Read More

Over the time that I have spent on the internet, I have seen many people employ this strategy when it comes to blogging and social media. The first thing they do is take the proverbial “big bite” out of social media and sign up for all of the networks they can not really understanding what they can do for them much less knowing how to use them. Many people think that they can accomplish so much more by doing this. However, it goes back to the old way of thinking that the fact of the matter is, ‘less is really more.’ Read More

Since Rich Dansereau and myself started Positive Real Estate Professionals – A Real Estate Network back in March, we had a vision of being able to help each and every member gain more exposure on the Internet. Since the launch in March, we have been able to do just that. Members that have started writing articles on their blogs are seeing almost instant Google alerts. With that said, I find that I am still being asked what PREP can do for it’s members. So, I thought that I would just take a little time to tell you what PREP is designed to do. Read More