Web Designers and Search Engine Optimization

I read an article in Site Pro News this morning that I so agreed with I felt I needed to blog about it as well...the difference between "Search Engine Friendly" and "Search Engine Optimized".

The original article was written by Stoney deGeyter, with Pole Position Search Engine Marketing. The particular part that caught my attention was this...

"Most web design and development companies don't know the first thing about SEO or creating SE friendly websites. And most who claim to be are liars. Sorry, but that's just the way it is.

Hint: If your web developer says they will SEO your website for you as part of the one-time design fee, they are a liar. If they tell you they'll develop a search engine friendly or SEO ready site then there is a better chance they know what they are talking about."

That is so true, and particularly in the Myrtle Beach area...where the competition is getting tougher every day, and the so-called SEO companies have been popping up like weeds.

To my knowledge, there is one other person in our area who knows SEO...and he is GOOD.
I won't mention a name, but he works full time for a competitor, as I work full time for David O'Connell and The Myrtle Beach Condo Store. He gives me a run for the money, and is about as good as I've seen. But then again, we do perhaps have somewhat of an unfair advantage in that we work for ONE company, and don't have to spend our time worrying about getting customers and doing alot of design work.

On the other hand, one of the area's biggest web design firms has been claiming to provide SEO services for over a year...and is about as unable to do this as any I've seen. I hate to see local realtors paying these people for something they don't get. But I guess it's really none of my business.

Back to the article. As he stated above, and further into his article, a website can be DESIGNED as "SE Friendly". SEO itself really has nothing to do with designing or programming a site, although several companies have an extra service of making the IDX results into static html pages that help with content.

True real estate search engine optimization includes the traditional ONPAGE optimization, which a regular web designer can certainly contribute to...or damage irreparably.
I don't think they are teaching the basics of SE Friendly design even at this late date. I suspect any designer that knows it has learned by reading, or by working with an SEO company. But this is such a small part of SEO, that it is almost neglible. The most important part of what you have to be sure of is that they don't design a site that CAN'T be optimized...such as flash, or some database driven sites that have page URL's a block long.

I have been doing this for nearly 5 years now, and it's like second nature to me. But even I forget small things occasionally, and often second guess myself when doing a website from scratch.

Also, SEO is NOT link building. That is the most sure sign that your SEO company is worthless. Yes, a big part of what you have to do is to get incoming links, but the days of the reciprocal link directories are GONE. Yahoo has been penalizing heavy reciprocal linking for over a year, and Google pulled the plug on it the first of May of this year, banning several hundred Advanced Access Realtor sites for the massive state link directories that they have promoted for several years.

True SEO is not just a few things you can do to a site and be done with it now. It's truly an ongoing and time consuming job...especially when the real estate marketing is in a competitive or resort area. I'm not sure that the future of SEO will be able to include this. It takes a constant and everyday round of blogs, writing articles, creating classifieds and more than anything... CONTENT, to rank well in our area. For a new website, it now takes close to a year before Google really likes a website. It would cost a lot of money to really optimize a new site in some place like Charlotte or Miami. Las Vegas would be a nightmare.
Mr deGeyter says it best in one of his closing paragraphs...

"The process of SEO requires hours of additional research and a skill set that usually is not included as a part of the site development contract. There are a few development firms that also specialize in SEO and Marketing and these firms can develop and engage in long-term optimization services. But be aware that any short-term website development contract that claims to include SEO simply will not provide adequate or successful SEO marketing results."

If you are a realtor looking for search engine marketing for your website, do your due diligence. Don't assume a local web design firm claiming they can provide search engine help really CAN. Check the websites that are in the top for your area and search terms, and try to find the company that provided their service.

Be forewarned, though, that an ETHICAL SEO firm will not service competing customers in the same area. So ask around...read the forums such as Webmaster World or Site Pro News, and hopefully you'll soon have a website that brings in leads and is one of your most important career tools.
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Real Estate Marketing and Myrtle Beach Real Estate Web Design
by Myrtle Beach Web Design

Real Estate Marketing on MySpace

I've had a MySpace page for Myrtle Beach Real Estate Marketing since early in the game. William Shatner, being the internet guru that he is, was one of the first celebrities to see the usefulness of MySpace, and took his website to that site, as well as Live Video and some others. When he first created his page, he invited everyone on his mailing list from the website to be his "friend", and promptly got about 12,000 friends, I think.

Anyway, HE was my first "friend", which I still find amusing.

MySpace stayed a personal type social site for a while, and I decided to put links to my websites and describe my business on it as well...even though there seemed to be no page rank on them, and Google didn't seem to be very interested in the profile pages. It's still pretty much this way...the only pages that have much of a PR and show in search results are the ones like Shatner, who have links going to the page from everywhere.

I threw some links on my sites to my MySpace page, and thankfully it soon picked up some ranking. I used it partially as a promotional tool...but it is also such a personal page, littered with Davy Jones, Shatner, David Carradine, and animal interests, that it isn't very professional.

But I enjoy playing with it...KEEPING it personal, and I think it helps with the search engines too.

And then maybe 6 months ago, it seems like real estate agents everywhere started making a page. Its the "thing to do" to ask to be friends and link up with other MySpace people, and the realtors started doing this right and left. I thought, "Why not?" and started requesting it for all the good pages I found...although my main "friends" are the celebrities that I admire. At this point, I have probably 150 realtors as "friends" on there. It's got to be a useful tool...and I think eventually I will post a bulletin about one of David O'Connell's Myrtle Beach condos and see what happens.

At any rate, with all the talk about the Web 2.0 and social marketing, I think MySpace is one of the best places to start. Do it right, and throw some links to it, and I think it may become one of the top marketing tools out there. I'd much rather spend my time looking at all the interesting pages on there than looking at Delicious or Technorati.

Get Off the Recip Links for SEO

In the past 6 months, Google has done alot of shuffling and changing to get rid of the spammers, and as always, to keep those of us who are trying to rank well on our toes. One of the main things that has changed so much is all the hoopla about reciprocal linking.

Google has always based more than half its algorithim on incoming links. When I first got into this business 4 years ago or so, it was fairly easy to work with links and link text...once you understood it. Realtors especially, had no clue about the search engines, and there were just a few of the internet savvy ones around who knew what to do to take advantage of the traffic that a top ranked website will bring. We talked to each other, traded links, learned from each other, and did well. Little by little our numbers grew, and everyone who had a good site with good content who didn't do the wrong things became somewhat cemented to the top. Life was good.

Then the hoards of so-called SEO people moved in. Emailing other people required too much time and too much trouble. They started inventing programs that sent out link requests automatically to hundreds of other websites. Sometimes they even tell you they've linked you first...as if that may make you feel more obligated to return the favor.

I've never done anything but delete these emails. I don't even check the site most of the time.
If someone doesn't respect me enough to send a private email to ask me for a link, then they can peddle themselves elsewhere. I've often thought it was amusing that so many of them (I probably get 10 or more a day!) are putting links to my sites on there for a week or two weeks...and the links get spidered! I never give them a thing, and even if they take it off after a couple of weeks, I still get whatever little boost there is from it, and by the time it's worn off, there are 10 more to take its place. These people are either nuts or just stupid.

But as that grew into a booming business and every town had someone who claimed they could SEO your site, reciprocal linking ended up being more and more of an obvious racket...and we've known that Google was going to put a stop to it sooner or later.

The first part of May, they did. Lots of real estate sites, particularly those put out by one of the biggest templated real estate website companies in existence, were manually removed from the index. It's assumed that by doing a certain number this way, it is intended to make everyone else get scared and remove theirs before they get it too.

And it WAS ridiculous in a lot of cases. Instead of having 2 or 3 pages with good solid links to well ranked sites with some age and "authority" status, this company had a deal going where everyone participating in the linking program was obligated to link to everyone else. They built state directory pages...many of them with 50 or more pages of crappy links to other real estate sites.

The whole thing was a joke. Again, that's how we all suffer from the actions of those who want to take the easy way out and not do the work. I would occasionally get one of their newsletters and it always ended with the most recently created new real estate websites and ordered the readers to add them to their link directories. I'm sure Matt Cutts saw these newsletters too...in fact I personally showed him several. And they realized it was getting out of hand and had to be stopped.

So many of the top ranked sites with those link directories are now banned, and have removed them...now with the problem of what to do with 50+ pages that will have to have actual content put on them...or deleted and presenting a 404 which can hurt your rankings.

It also appears that Google is either killing any boost to the rankings from ANY reciprocal links, or they've just figured out how to spot links pages. Almost everyone I know dropped an entire page rank last week. We didn't seem to lose our actual ranking in the seaches, but it will still hurt in the long run, I think.

In order to optimize a website for Google now, you are going to have to face the facts. It takes CONTENT. It takes one way links such as articles you write, press releases...blog postings...classified ads. It's going to put a stop to all these fly-by-night SEO companies very soon...which is a GOOD thing. There will be hoards of young people in India scrambling for a new job. (Outsourcing link building to East Indians was huge)

It will take months or even years before the rip-off companies will stop claiming the link exchanges still work. After 5 years I still see web design/seo services who will "submit your site to 1000 search engines monthly" and other foolishness that has never made any difference.

But if you're reading this, you're one step ahead. Stop wasting your time on doing hundreds of reciprocal links. Get rid of those inside state directories before you get reported and banned from Google like the "Progressive Passage" (haha) sites were. Hire a legitimate company with a copywriter and make your site informative and interesting about your area. Spend some time on the social sites like MySpace or writing articles and press releases yourself. If you can't do that, HIRE someone to do it. If you want a site that ranks, it's either hard work or money, your choice.
Linking is not "dead". It's how you link, who you link with, and taking the time to do it right.

Real Estate Marketing Tips from Echo Web Marketing...

Real Estate Marketing on the Internet

Finally found time to start the blog for Echo Forum!

I will try to keep this updated with the latest news on the search engines, theories and rumors going around for real estate websites and the search engines, and interesting morsels of information that I run across on the forums and blogs I read every day.

We are a partnership, from my end, of Myrtle Beach Web Design, and my partner in Huntsville, Alabama, Bryan, who has an extraordinary website, Condos and Resorts.com, which we believe will one day be a monster, and a wonderful resource for real estate agents who want to promote condos, resorts, waterfront property, and new construction.

Our joint effort, Echo Web Marketing specializes in real estate marketing, real estate web design, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and all avenues of internet marketing that Realtors need and use.

Stay tuned!