North Georgia Web Design

The first blog is always a sweet moment.  For me it is usually in conjunction with starting a new web based venture, and this is partly true in this case as well.  For several years now, I have been involved with real estate in the North Georgia mountains - specifically the community of Big Canoe.  My wife, Karin Elliott, is an active agent in the Big Canoe area, and if you’re interested in Big Canoe real estate, feel free to check out her listings.

So what’s the deal with the North Georgia Web Development website?  Here’s the story.  Several years ago, when my wife was first getting into the real estate business, we had a local company create a website for us.  The site looked nice, but it was poorly optimized.  It was also difficult to update.  Anytime I needed to make a change or add some content to the site, I had to contact our web hosting company and pay them to do it for me!  So I had two problems to solve:

1. How could I get my website under the noses of prospective clients and customers without shelling out money for Google PPC ads? (At the time we were spending 20K-30K a year on Google ads.)
2. How could I create a site that was easy to manage and update?

The second question was the easiest to solve.  My background in computer programming allowed for an easy transition into web development.   I created my first CMS (Content Management System) to handle our real estate site in Big Canoe.  What was once a chore to update (or worse if I had to call the web dev team to do it for me) became a breeze.  Dynamic web sites are the way to go if you have any sort of data that changes or needs to be updated.

The first question was quite a bit tougher to answer.  As I mentioned above, our real estate company was spending a pretty healthy sum every year using Google’s Pay Per Click ad campaigns.  My daytime job became figuring out how to achieve great placement on the search engine results pages (SERPs) to help decrease the costs of our pay per click ads.

In general there are two parts to SEO (Search Engine Optimization):

1. Passive SEO - This involves setting up your web site from the beginning.  As my father always said, if you do the small things right, the big things are a lot easier to accomplish.   For example, every page on your site should have a unique title and description.   Keywords in the meta data should be used sparingly as should the words in the title and the description.  Also, using a domain name that describes your business is helpful.  The goal is to provide a good user experience and to keep it concise.
2. Active SEO - Also known as off page SEO, this is an ongoing process so whatever I list may very well change 6 months from now.  Regardless, here are a few examples of off page SEO:  submission to select directories, active link building campaigns, good blogging techniques, and social networking.

Providing solutions to the technical problems I have encountered in the real estate business has been both challenging and rewarding.  Hopefully this blog  will provide a place for my thoughts on the ongoing evolution of SEM and SEO, and I hope that any readers will share their thougths as well.