I spoke to an associate, Sam Chapman, who markets Austin real estate using a Point2 Agent website.  Sam called after reading the January Build Real Estate Results newsletter to give me some feedback about his experiences in improving his search engine rankings. 

Here’s a success story worth sharing.  Sam’s site is now #5 on Google for the search term Austin Real Estate, and he’s a very happy camper. 

From my perspective, I can see that Sam laid the groundwork for being noticed by the search engines and relating to his site visitors.  He replaced the content that comes with the Point2 Agent website with his own original content, and he wrote the content in first person, as if he is just talking to each visitor.  He added some pages on specific locations in his market area, and he also updated each page’s title and meta tags to correspond to the content of the page.

Right now, Sam’s site has about 1500 incoming links recognized by the search engines, so he’s been busy following an SEO strategy that won him a variety of incoming links.  And, these efforts got him solidly onto the second page of the Google search results.

Here’s what he’s done lately that put him over the top – onto the top of the rankings on the first page of the search results:

1.  He cleaned up the code on his Point2 site.  It’s true that the coding for template sites like Point2 is more complex than a hand-coded site.  However, the search engines do a pretty good job of dealing with Point2’s standard code. 

Sam’s problem was that he, like many new webmasters, had copied some content from Word documents straight into his website.  The content looks fine when you do that, but a large amount of extraneous code comes with the content from a Word document.  So, cleaning up the code can make the search engine’s job a lot easier.  And, in fact, Point2 even provides an icon on the editing toolbar that will help you streamline the code on your site.  (Learn the right way to add content to your website)

2.  He started a Point2 Blog.  Last November, Sam took advantage of the new integrated blog Point2 introduced.  He started publishing a blog post every 1-3 days.  Right now, his blog is a PR3 page.  And, he uses a long-tail SEO strategy in choosing the topics for his blog posts.  That means, he determines what seemingly obscure search terms his site is found for, and writes blog entries optimized for those terms.

3.  He maintains an ActiveRain blog.  Sam also has an active blog going on the ActiveRain site.  This has provided him with lots of good opportunities for cross-linking to his real estate website using targeted keywords in context. 

Actually, I think everyone in real estate should participate on the ActiveRain site.  The search engines love the site, and the cross-linking opportunities are outstanding.  Not to mention the enjoyment of participating in a vibrant community of real estate professionals.

While cleaning up the code on his site probably had a positive impact on the search engine’s ability to crawl his website, the only other things he’s done differently lately relate to his use of blogs.  So, for those of you real estate professionals who are wondering whether you should dive into the blog craze, maybe this success story will give you an additional push.

More details about blogging and long-tail SEO are to come.  Stay tuned.