It has been some time since I have had time to write an article. Unfortunately, today is not one of those times. However, I felt that it was time to shed some light on some SEO (search engine optimization) stumbling blocks. Our real estate network webmasters believe that SEO should be gained through organic means. With that said, many webmasters do not agree and decide to take their clients down the road of black hat tactics as opposed to white hat tactics. Others choose to skirt the issue and use grey hat tactics (gray hat tactics). So let’s take a look at what black hat and grey hat tactics are as well as some of the stumbling blocks to SEO.

Before we dive into this, let’s discuss something very important to all of you site owners. Whether you know it or not, your webmaster’s tactics ultimately effect your site. If the webmaster chooses to use these tactics to get your site to the top of the rankings, things could be good for some time. Mark my words however, eventually your site will get caught. When that day comes, you will lose all that you have worked so hard for. You can say goodbye to your PageRank (PR), your site being indexed, and most importantly, all the hard work that you thought that you were putting in to get your site indexed organically to begin with.  As you will notice in the picture to the left, Positive Real Estate Professionals has 3,100 pages index in their 16 months of existence. With that said, many of our real estate professionals are also indexed right along with us. There is really no rhyme or reason to our members’ placement in this index list however. So, without further adieu, let’s get to the meat of this post.

Black hat tactics can be easily spotted by the trained eye most of the time. With that said, many search engines can also spot these tactics and will soon kill off these sites. Being banned from Google indexing your site might as well be equivalent to cutting off your nose to spite your face. However, just like black magic, black hat and grey hat tactics are evolving daily, if not hourly. One of the easiest is redirection. A week or so ago, I was reading an article on As I was getting completely immersed in this article I came across a “Read More” link. While I was salivating to read more of this great article, I clicked the link. To my surprise, and disappointment, it took me to a splash page where they wanted me to buy a product that was in no way related to the article that got my attention. That, my friends, is black hat tactics. Redirections should be just what they are intended for. When a link that you worked hard to create is dead or rebuilt with a new URL, that is the time to use redirection. When you are building a page and the page that it is going to refer to is not able to be placed in the navigation, that is when you use redirection. In the cases where redirection is used correctly, this is white hat tactics.

Another instance of a black hat trick is where a web master takes any page on a site and list many keywords using the same text color as their background. To the eye, the keywords are not visible. However, the search engines do see them. To the trained webmaster’s eye, you only need to see the extra spacing there. In some cases, this is hard to do. However, you can also right click on a page in FireFox and chose “View Selection Source”. In Internet Explorer, you would choose “Selection Source”. When you do this, you can actually locate keywords that are used employing this black hat tactic.

Now, for the sake of not making this article longer than it needs to be, let’s talk about one that I frankly consider grey hat. This would be hiding links. Now, this is one of the more difficult things to follow. However, not completely impossible. Methods that are used to do this is hiding the link in “Alt Text” or PHP coding (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. courtesy of Wikipedia). Many times I have been reviewing PHP code and come across these hidden links. I will either remove them or just remove the PHP program completely.

In closing, none of these tactics are necessary. You and your webmaster need to sit down and discuss whether or not they are employing these tactics on your behalf. Ultimately, it is your site that they are playing with.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Stumbling Blocks is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

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One of the daunting feats that we all want to do is to keep people on our page. One of the newest ways to do that is to embed Google SERPs (search engine results pages) in your site. This way, when someone comes to your site looking for your informative post and want to do research, they can with the click of the button and never have to leave your site. Now, before you all say that this is old news, let me go into it deeper. The picture to the right is actually OLD news. However, that is not quite what I am talking about here.

For those of you that do not know, Google now has a feature through Adsense that allows for you to have the Google search engine results pages show up inside your website. This way, a reader or consumer can stick around on your site for some extra time. The one thing that I am not keen on with this product is the fact that it has to be at least 800 pixels wide. For most people, this is a majority of your content display. For people that employ the 1200 pixel themes, this really would not be a problem if you have a single sidebar or two that are less than 400 pixels total.

In closing, it is still a great tool to add to your site if you want to keep people hanging around. If you click on the picture to the left, you will be able to view a site that has this in action. If you notice, the header is still active. If you want to see it in action for yourself, visit SEO Info Now. For any PREP member that would like to add this feature to your PREP site, contact our office at 865-951-0522 and we will help you walk through it.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

Embed Google SERPs In Your Site is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

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Over the last month I have discussed mastering search engine optimization with many of our members of this online real estate network as well as clients of R & D Art. In those conversations, it always seems to end with me telling them that to master SEO it is not all about the meta keywords that are in your site. Actually, that might be the weakest link to mastering SEO and getting the search engines to recognize you. With that said, I think the biggest problem is that people think they need to master Google and forget about Alexa, Yahoo, and Bing. Regardless what my personal feelings are on the search engines, I still have to pay homage to them.

If you notice, I have linked to several keywords in my first paragraph. However, only one of those keywords is something that I really key on for our real estate based site to show up in. That is: real estate network. Over and over, when we blog, we want to make sure that we are keying on this phrase. With that said, it is not certain that phrase that will drive readers to our site. We make sure that our articles are packed with keyword enriched content. I have said it many times before and I will say it again; CONTENT IS KING. No matter where you go on the net, anyone that knows anything about SEO will tell you this. Great content will win every time.

One of the things that I see that people do is have a very short post on their site or even worse, a recipe, and they hope that it pushes them up because they wrote a blog. Unfortunately, writing a recipe on a real estate site really is not going to carry much weight with the search engines. People might think you are more down to earth and come looking for more recipes, but frankly, the search engines won’t. It is the same with many topics that do not pertain to your main topic. The great thing about the main blog for PREP is that we can discuss SEO, SERP, blogs, social media, social media marketing, financing, the housing industry, and a world of other topics and still be point on. The great thing with a Realtor® is that they can discuss local events, neighborhoods, dining, schools, shopping, and much more and still be right on target. However, if your blog is about USDA or FHA, home staging, or home inspections, appraisals or home repair, then most readers are going to want the articles to be about that. They do not want to sort through all the fluff to get to the meat.

Here is one thing that I also see that people have a tendency to do; they write on a level that not many can understand. So many times I have had to tell bloggers to “dumb it down”. For those that do not understand that, it just means that you are probably writing on a college or doctoral level. I do not really know many people that understand that. The key element in this is to write on a secondary or grade school level. It means leave the 6 syllable words at home. With that said, don’t sacrifice your article for the sake of this procedure.

I would have to say the next thing that I see in bloggers that ask me why their sites are not showing up at the top of search engines has to be the lack of consistency. In the last month I have talk to two different bloggers in reference to this fact. One had 8 articles published and the other had 6. Both wondered why they could not be found on the first 3 pages in the search engines. Well, frankly, if I were only writing 8 articles over a 6 month period, I would not be found either. Blogging is not something that you can do just when you feel like it and magically appear. You have to work at it. And by working at it, I am not referring to 20 hours a week. However, being able to sit down and post 5 or 7 post during your downtime and have them automatically publish is a great feature. Not many platforms can supply that fact. But, even if you do not have that opportunity, 2 to 5 hours a week can still net you the front page of keyword searches where as neglect cannot.

Another thing that I notice that people have a knack for forgetting about has to be linking. Rich wrote an article about linking the other day and in it he talked about linking to some of your older articles. If you have not read that post, I recommend that you do. I have caught myself forgetting to use links in post, so it happens and I can understand that. However, if we want to get pushed up in the search engines, we need to link like crazy and I am not just talking about in our articles on this site. We do it to all of our sites. Use links to your other sites through your signature and then you can make sure that you have it covered all the time.

Now, this is where most people stop when it comes to SEO. PREP does not. This is where the power of WordPress extends to help push your SEO even further. This real estate network has a feature that allows for you to send trackbacks to other links that you have used in your post. This is a great way to get internal links built for your site, or maybe external links built using another site you own. Regardless, it takes linking to another level.

The last thing that I will talk about is the added feature of the All In One SEO Pack. For those of you that do not understand what this provides, let me state it like this. The All In One SEO pack gives you the added ability to optimize pages, post, and your site individually. Here are some features:

• Advanced Canonical URLs

• Fine tune Page Navigational Links

• Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality

• ONLY plugin to provide SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites

• Nonce Security

• Support for CMS-style WordPress installations

• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines

• Generates META tags automatically

• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs

• For beginners, you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.

• For advanced users, you can fine-tune everything

• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.

• Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

In closing, mastering SEO is not something that will happen over night. I have seen Black hat tricks and grey hat tricks in SEO and I have seen both cost site owners their place in search engines when they are caught. In the long run, it is so much better to just do it the right way.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

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Mastering Search Engine Optimization is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

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