I take on board all that you say, and I take my hat off to you. It seems to me that the key to SEO success requires a dogged determination and persistence that it could replace your life. You sound to me, and this is a compliment, that you are so focused on tweaking the system that you take it as a challenge. A little like those who happily plod on for hours to get the better of crossword puzzles, anagrams, etc.
Being a subscriber of an EU funded business group back in my old city, which keeps in touch, I have on this bag of tricks on board here; a step-by-step idiot proof system to do what you’re suggesting we do. They say that the by four months we’ll be right up there with the gods!
I am nervously contemplating it, much as one would the dismantling and putting together of a car engine. Er, Excuse me! I am not being lazy but living here in Spain, should I really be sitting here in my apple bags each night, trying to cool off, while I tweak me SEOs. Should I be cutting back on the few little pleasures of life so I can pay an optimiser to do it for me? Hey! Hope you don’t mind me being open and honest? You are appreciated.

Well, I wouldn’t say I spend endless hours tweaking my SEO’s

Most time I spent was when I was initially building the website. Since then, it’s just been a case of adding what I think will help boost the site’s search engine rankings for other keywords I might think of, or that potential clients might be using.

I probably spend no more than an hour or so a week updating the site in general, because that’s all it reallt needs.

Understandably though, with a property website, you’re looking at a great deal more work potentially, so what you’ve done or do from the offset is highly important. From then on, I suppose it’s just a case of how much time you want to devote to managing it yourself, or if you prefer to delegate it to a third party.

Congrats on your SEO efforts, heath! For the people who are finding your site when they are actually searching for properties, you might want to consider putting up a link to an online form for people to fill out. Then you can sell the leads to local real estate agents or refer them over to people like mike for a commission. Just a thought.

Mike, it’s definitely worth it to SEO your site, whether you hire someone or do it yourself. After the initial SEO overhaul of your site, you need to maintain it as you add content and new properties like heath said.

You won’t ever regret doing it…

Okay! Will do but right now I have editors (no kidding) kicking my door down for articles; most of which I subliminally slip a lead genewrator in :o)

toneloc - 02 July 2009 09:13 PM

Congrats on your SEO efforts, heath! For the people who are finding your site when they are actually searching for properties, you might want to consider putting up a link to an online form for people to fill out. Then you can sell the leads to local real estate agents or refer them over to people like mike for a commission. Just a thought.

Rather than looking at my ranking in that respect as a potential source of income, I’m just looking at it as a potential source for further clients relating to the services we offer. As for any potential link exchanges, it makes sense SEO wise to target organisations with websites that rank higher than my own. That avenue in itself can be very time consuming and not always successful if the organisations don’t want to exchange links.

There is another avenue that can be followed to boost rankings for the “Granada Property” keywords I now rank #10 for with Google. If I wished to improve this ranking, I could make posts on a number of high ranking forums, or publish on any number of the various article sites, which seem to produce good search returns. Last time I looked at that approach for a string of keywords, it took me a couple of hours work and within a couple of days, my site ranked #1 for the keywords I had used.

At the moment, I only link back to third party companies or individuals that I know personally or trust, having had dealings with them. In some respects, previously I was very wary of linking or affiliating to any estate agents, as clients experiences can vary greatly. Since the economic bubble burst though, the great majority of the rotten apples are gone, leaving only the more honest and reliable. I’m not having a pop at estate agents there, as my own particular range of services can suffer the negative PR of being tarred with the same brush when people experience a negative service. One should always be careful of who they affiliate themselves with though.

I like the approach Mike has taken on his website with the customer testimonials though. Something that I have considered adding to my own website. At the moment though, when clients ask for references, I can send them a list of all my previous clients. They’re all happy to correspond with anyone who’s after assurance regarding our reputation. It’s nice to have such great support from past clients and anyone who’s asked for references, has always ended up contracting us.

toneloc - 02 July 2009 09:13 PM

Mike, it’s definitely worth it to SEO your site, whether you hire someone or do it yourself. After the initial SEO overhaul of your site, you need to maintain it as you add content and new properties like heath said.

You won’t ever regret doing it…

Definately agree. I would say that especially for property searches, it’s important to be within the top five search returns on the major search engines.

The beauty of SEO and the search engines, is that you don’t have to be one of the big companies to be top of the pile. The “big boys” usually pay for sponsored links anyway. There’s much bigger companies than mine out there, with much flashier looking websites than mine, but I rank much higher with the search engines.

Certainly in your field of work though, it’s definately worth investing the time (or the money), to optimize your website with the search engines.