North Georgia Web Design

From the time I was 8 years old, I was hooked on computers and their capacity to be programmed. I remember having a TRS 80 in our clinic in grade school, and I would fake being sick so I could go down to the clinic and play with it.  Programming computers and making them do something useful has been a hobby for me for a long time now.  Now, many many generations of machines later, I still love them. 

So fast forward to a few years ago.  When my wife got into real estate, static real estate sites were the norm.  In other words, you created a web page for everything you wanted to talk about on your site.  There was no centralized way to do this, you just made a new page if you got a new listing.  Not only was this time consuming, but we often found that the pages were not optimized for search engines - more specifically Google, which is what I want to elaborate on first.

When we first advertised our real estate web site online, the only way to get any exposure at all was via Google PPC or Yahoo PPC (pay per click).  My new job became learning about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing).  To this day, it is an ongoing learning experience.  That being said, the learning experience has proven very useful to us.  Where we used to spend well over $24,000 a year on PPC (pay per click) advertising, we now spend around $150 per month.

Optimizing our site and working on a  strictly non-black hat  approach has worked very well for us.  Black hat essentially applies to people that are looking for a shortcut to have their site rank better in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).  My experience has been sort of interesting regarding this.

When we first created our real estate site, I tried and did everything I could to promote it and to make it rank better on Google.  I kept looking for shortcuts, links farms, tons of directory submissions, etc.  I would move ahead one notch in the SERPS, then about a week later, I would get knocked down a couple pegs.  The whole time I kept reading Google’s Webmaster blog and related sites, and the message was pretty much the same:  create unique and compelling content, and the traffic and the search engines will generally follow.

So that’s exatly what we have done…and we’ve gone from being on page….100? of Google for key terms to page 1..to often number one for many keywords.  This holds true for many other search keywords as well that are the odd keyword phrases that people tend to type into a search engine that are related to your site, but may now use the exact phrase for which you have optimized.  These terms are often referred to as long tail keywords.

The long tail keywords are what I describe as creating a large footprint on the Internet. All those strange permutations and variations or phrases that have to do with your business BUT are not phrases you would ever think to optimize for are accounted for - most often in the context of a blog. At least, that has been our experience.

It still amazes me when I look at the amount of QUALITY traffic we get from long tail key words.  Many SEO experts believe that the leads and contacts derived from long tail searches are often more qualified.  It’s hard for me to say for sure, but I do believe there is some truth there.  For example, we often receive very strong leads from lifstyle type blogs about the community we live in, but we may receive only a few sort of half interested leads on a blog about a new listing.

It’s defintely food for thought, and if we can help you, please contact North Gerogia Web Development at (706) 579-0411 or email us at info@georgiamountainweb.com.