Real Estate SEO and Online Marketing Blog by Jerry Mosher

What is page rank? and, what is page reputation?

Page rank is an assigned value to a particular web page that is determined by how many votes the page has and the value of each vote. A vote is a link pointing to a web page. It doesn’t matter if the link is coming from the same site or from an entirely different site. These votes or links are not created equal. The value of a link is determined by the page rank of the web page that the link is on and how many other links are on that page. In most cases page rank flows equally through all links on the page.

It is important to remember that page rank is about a page not an entire site. And, you don’t want to worry about your page rank all day. The google page rank display isn’t updated very often and page rank is not that important of a factor for ranking in most cases anyway.

Page Reputation is basically what the search engines think your site is about. It is determined by many factors but most importantly by the anchor text of that pages incoming links. The same reason the homepage of this site is currently ranking in the top 10 of Google for “—– real estate” the blank being the city I live in.

There are other factors at play here as well. On page factors such as title tags, meta tags, content, etc. all paly an important roll in ranking in the search engines for a particular keyword. For instance: if I were trying to rank better for the keyword i mentioned before I would play around and change my title tags to contain that keyword and probably gain a position or 2 just from that.

Page reputation is powerful. Even though my homepage has very little to do with the above mentioned keyword, it still ranks well for it because of the anchor text in the links pointing to it. Also, I am pretty sure the topic of the page linking has an influence on the value of the anchor text reputation being passed.

Well my site has climbed the rankings for my old keywords and I am again on page 1 of Google at position 3 the last time i checked. Although the CTR(click through rate) is horrible as expected. Why? Because my Title Tag has nothing to do with my target keyword except that it does say real estate.

And there is a lesson in this. When you are targeting a specific keyword the Title Tag should reflect that keyword. Also the same reason you don’t want to target to many keywords on one page. If you do you might end up loosing potential purchasers or “leads” as your title tag should not only be about SEO it should also help searchers to know they want to click through to your site.

I’ll get more into these topics some other time, I just noticed I was getting search traffic from old keywords and decided to check it out and make a post. Now to see if we can get a double listing before I start ranking this page for other keywords and diluting it’s relevance on the topic.

Hemet Real Estate

And by the way, I am going to Arizona this weekend and I don’t think I will be online at all.

My google PR has returned.

When I canceled my site with Advanced Access (my real estate website provider), I let it sit with nothing on it for about 3 weeks and it wasn’t delisted from google but it dropped way down in the SERPs for my targeted real estate keywords and the page rank bar was greyed out. I did expect this to happen and was not very conserned.

So last week I put the site up on my hosting account installed wordpress, some WP plugins that I just can’t live without, and made my first post to this blog. I decided to see if I could still rank for my old targeted keyword phrase, and I made the first post about that particular subject.

It’s been about a week and my site has had the Page Rank returned and my homepage jumped 100’s of positions in the rankings for that keyword.

The goal now… is to get the actual post page ranking instead of the homepage. As this site isn’t about that particular subject anymore I don’t think searchers would find it useful. But if the post page ranks it won’t be as bad because at least it’s about the subject somewhat and I threw some Adsense in there so they can get somewhere of more use. Maybe I should throw in a link to my old offices site with some anchor text.

Real Estate websites tend to have a lot of limitations when it comes to SEO. Some real estate website services may have more or less limitations than others but unless you are hosting your website on your own domain you will run into limitations.

These limitations can make Optimizing your site a little or maybe even a lot more difficult. But, in most cases you can still achieve high search engine ranking by doing the things you can do.

Luckily most real estate website providers are starting to jump on the bandwagon and are doing a great deal of work to make their systems more SEO friendly. Most of them, now allow you to edit the Title Tags of the pages on your site. This is what I would consider the most important On-Page SEO factor.

I don’t want to totally confuse you so I’m just going to jot down some things you should have under your control.

Title Tags - On all pages(not just the Homepage)
Meta Descriptions - same as above.
Content of the pages - You should be able to edit the pages in both a visual and html view.

A big problem that I have noticed is the site will link to the homepage with different URLs. Your homepage should only be linked to with one URL. It doesn’t matter which one. If your not sure what I’m talking about the homepage can be linked to many different ways. http://www.homepage.com , http://homepage.com and http://homepage.com/index.html are all considered different URLs by the search engines. At the same time they are all on the same site and all display the same content. Now if your site is like this you are probably being hit with a duplicate content penalty.

You can fix this easily by having them change the links to the homepage to all be the same and/or getting a redirect setup so they will all point to the URL of your choice.

I could probably go on forever so this is going to have to be a multi-part session. This topic might actually deserve it’s own category.

This is my first post and since my site was previously a Hemet real estate site I thought I would put up the first post with the title Hemet Real Estate and see if this blog can still rank for it.

This site is no longer about Hemet real estate, but is now my personal blog. Considering I let the site die off for a few weeks and have gotten almost completely delisted in Google I really don’t think there is much of a chance that this page will show up for the term Hemet real estate or Hemet homes but this post might help.

I have been thinking about working on a Hemet real estate website project for a local agent. Who this agent is? I don’t know… If anyone in there are any real estate agents in the Hemet area who are interested in getting some search engine rankings you might want to let me know. If you are a real estate agent in Hemet and have payed any attention to the search engine results pages for the term Hemet real estate or any of the other highly searched terms like hemet homes, hemet homes for sale, etc. You would have no doubt watched www.jerrymosher.com climb to the top of the SERP’s for such terms.

I still have my swipe file for Hemet real estate and my SEO skills have improved greatly over the years.

If you are interested in me SEOing your site to rank in Google for hemet real estate and other highly searched terms I have some criteria.

Preferably i would like to work with an existing site that doesnt have good rankings for the competitive terms like hemet real estate and hemet homes for sale. The content management system needs to have certain functions. If it doesnt have these it will be alot more difficult to get rankings and you should probably switch to a new provider anyway.

If I decide to work on your Hemet real estate site I will want to know all leads you get that were related to the site. That is all contact form submissions, direct calls if they say they found you through the website, etc.
I will also want to know what happened with the leads: did you get a sale, a listing, buyer, seller, etc. Why they contacted you. Pretty much all the details.

I am willing to do this for free if you are willing to do all the extra work and keep me informed of everything. You also have to be willing to put your cell number prominantly on the website. As people will call the office number if it’s available and sometimes not ask for you specifically and your lead gets put into rotation and now don’t know the hemet real estate site generated lead. And I don’t care if you want to refer some of these leads away in your office but I would still like you to keep track of whats going on and if a transaction occured.

I am not offering to pay for your site or any other expenses that may occur. If there is anything I would like ot test that will have a cost it will be discussed with you first unless I feel like paying for it.

Hemet Real Estate SEO