Give Your Content The Finishing Touch

Over the past few weeks our forum members have been participating in some great discussions about improving their search engine placement and clickthroughs from the search engine results pages. These discussions have mainly centered around quality content and what goes into optimizing that content for search engines and visitors.

During this time, our wonderful consultant and bringer-of-wisdom, Greg Boser (aka WebGuerrilla), has offered incredible advice to Advanced Access clients and staff alike. Greg has also been a guest contributor to our last couple of Marketing Tips to bring the "hot topics" to all of you straight from the forums.

Two weeks ago Greg sat down with our very own Kristina Davis to chat about how real estate websites can succeed in the search engines. This interview brought to light many "danger zones" that real estate professionals should avoid in their online marketing campaigns. The most important of these being agent to agent link exchanges. Greg frankly shared with us that it's just not the way to go anymore and if your goal is to achieve and maintain optimum search engine placement (and if you want to rank at all in Yahoo) it's time for those links to go. We were delighted by the positive response from many of our clients who have been writing to us that their links are now gone. We know some of you who still need to remove these links and we are here to help you. Just give us a call at 1-866-518-1571 or an email at support@advancedaccess.com and we will take care of it for you.

During the interview, Greg talked briefly about the links pages going supplemental, and what that means for your website. As a follow up, Greg began a discussion in our forums about supplemental results and how to focus your content to make it important enough to be listed in Google's main index versus the supplemental index. We shared this discussion with you in our Marketing Tip last week (which was received a little late... we went easy on you for April Fool's this year ;)). Greg talked about PR (PageRank) making a big comeback in the importance of being indexed and placing well for your pages. We learned that focused content with good incoming links to your pages (not just your home page) is important for your success. And once again, the state agent to agent links pages were discussed. Greg said,

"When you get to a point where a percentage of your content is flagged as untrustworthy, and your PR is low, the domain as a whole tends to be treated as untrustworthy, which then causes your unique pages to get tossed into the Supplemental Index as well.

"That is the true negative impact of the state pages. Forget about all the things I've said about potential spam penalties. Even if Google never directly punishes an Advanced Access site for having them, you still end up paying a price for them because their mere existence causes a portion of your 'good' content to get tossed in the trash."

Once again, our forum members have been chatting with Greg about the important facets of content optimization. This time the focus has been on the "finishing touch" of your content; the title tag and meta tags. Last August we talked about creating proper title and meta tags for each page of your website and a few weeks ago we talked about the importance of each page having its own unique title and meta tags specific to the content of the page. Building upon this advice, including some "evolution" of our thinking, Greg brought to our attention some important points about title tags which we will be sharing with you today.

Excerpts of a Forum discussion with Greg Boser... (for more, please login to our forums and join in!)

Greg began with a brief post that spurred many questions and comments:

Just a couple quick points:

1. The title of the page isn't meta data.

2. You, should, never, put, a, comma, separated, list, of words, in, your, html, titles.

Number one is a reminder of the "techie" side of things that the title is its own tag <title>TITLE GOES HERE</title> and is not a meta tag <meta name="description" content="DESCRIPTION GOES HERE">. Your title is like a beacon to search engines indicating the subject matter of the page. As Greg continues we will learn more about the importance of this tag and how best to use it.

Number two is probably some new-to-you information. Although in our August tip about title and meta tags we briefly mentioned getting rid of your commas, Greg will be talking about the commas and what flags they raise for search engines. He also goes over the readability of your title which is likely to change some perspectives on the use of other characters, such as hyphens.

We continue with Greg Boser...

Commas are bad for many reasons. The three biggest being poor clickability, keyword dilution and supplemental index flags.

Usually, when someone is writing titles that include commas, they are attempting to get that particular page to rank for too many keyword combinations. They also tend to apply that strategy to every page on the site, so they end up having multiple pages with near-identical titles, which is a huge supplemental flag. And when they do get ranked, they tend to not get clicked as much because of how they read.

I'll use Pam's site to explain a bit further. Here's her current title:

Jacksonville Florida Real Estate | Orange Park Florida Real Estate

So Pam is using half of her homepage title to target the phrase "Orange Park real estate." But the actual search activity for that phrase is extremely low compared to other combinations of "Jacksonville real estate." (See numbers below). That is a complete waste of title space. Orange park should be addressed using its own page. The home page should focus on hitting as many exact match combinations for the above list as possible. It should also try and generate good "close proximity" matches as well.

If you follow that rule, the homepage title would be:

Jacksonville Florida Real Estate Agent Pam Graham

It's under 70 characters, so it won't get truncated, it reads much better, so it will get clicked on more, and most importantly, it generates several exact matches.

Now let's look at some Florida real estate search numbers (Pulled from Keyword Discovery):

florida real estate 1253520
real estate florida 72838
florida real estate agent 16082
jacksonville real estate 14226 (close proximity match)
jacksonville florida real estate 7740
jacksonville fl real estate 2202 (treated as an exact match)
real estate jacksonville florida 1252 (close proximity match)
jacksonville florida real estate agent 379
orange park florida real estate 305
real estate agent jacksonville florida 138 (close proximity match)
orange park real estate 94
real estate orange park 76
real estate orange park fl 13
jacksonville fl real estate agent 12 (treated as an exact match)
florida real estate in orange park 10
orange park real estate agent 9

So we give up the idea of using the homepage for Orange Park, and in return, we get a better title that will have the potential to generate a much greater amount of traffic.

Now of course, the mention of the agent name being used in the title tag brought up some questions, as we have often advised against it. However, when used properly (not as a my-name-must-be-first thing) we find that it's actually quite appropriate. When asked about the name being included, Greg replied, "Using the agents name creates a title that reads properly. And combined with a well written description, will produce far better click through rates than a similar page that chooses to sacrifice readability in order to stuff and additional word or two into the title."

Some had concerns that even though this format would make the title more 'readable' that it may decrease the placement. Greg's comments were:

I'll take a #4 or #5 spot with a well written title and description over a comma fest title any day.

The thing that's real important to understand is that splitting the focus of your homepage can quite often put you in a situation where you don't rank as well as you could for either term. And at its worse, it can actually prevent you from ever ranking for the best of the two.

For me, the strategy for the homepage is always built around whatever I feel is the most relevant top level term. Once I decide what that is, I try and build the homepage in a way that will not only support that top level term, but also support the generation of long-tail derivatives of the main phrase.

The main reason I do that is because it may be a long time down the road before I rank for the top phrase. But I can rank fairly quickly for some of the longer variations. And that means I will still have the opportunity to put my message in front of a subset of people who might have originally searched for my dream phrase.

Applying that to my ongoing fictitious real estate site, my top level term would be "Santa Clarita Real Estate." Now I may live in Valencia, and I may prefer selling houses in Valencia. But Valencia will never be the focus of my homepage because adding that word to my title dilutes the focus and creates competition.

It creates competition because Valencia Real Estate has its own unique keyword universe, and it is a universe that is smaller than the one I'm trying to target. When you do that, Google will often play it safe and only rank you for the smaller universe.

On the other hand, if I add words/phrases to my homepage title like agent, broker, listings, etc. I am much better off because the potential keyword combinations the new words create are phrases that are higher up the food chain, not lower.

So what's in your title tags? Are you still using the same title across all the pages of your site? What about your meta description? Is that specific to each page? Now is the time to really focus your content and choose a target. Remember, if you try and optimize for everything, you may just end up optimizing for nothing.

Some important items to consider before you make changes to your site...

- Have you had your website for a long period of time? If so, you may be enjoying great placement with more than one location targeted in your title tag. If this is you, you probably don't need to make a change at this time. We recommend checking your ranking before you do anything. And chat with us on the forums before you make changes to a well-ranked, established site.

- Are you a Premium Marketing Package client? Remember to contact your Marketing Specialist before making changes to your title tags and meta tags. Not a Premium Marketing Package client but want expert advice geared toward your website? Come join us in the forums and also be sure to check out our Expert Assessment Marketing Service.

- Go back and read the Marketing Tips from the last two weeks to be sure you are getting this whole process. If you need help, just let us know!

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Office Closure - Sunday April 8th, 2007

Advanced Access will be closed on Sunday April 8, 2007 for the Easter holiday. This includes phone, email, and forum support. However, feel free to email, post in the forums, or leave a voicemail in our Support mailbox, and we will be sure to return your message promptly once we resume normal office hours. Thank you, and have a great holiday!

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