I take on board all that you say, and I take my hat off to you. It seems to me that the key to SEO success requires a dogged determination and persistence that it could replace your life. You sound to me, and this is a compliment, that you are so focused on tweaking the system that you take it as a challenge. A little like those who happily plod on for hours to get the better of crossword puzzles, anagrams, etc.
Being a subscriber of an EU funded business group back in my old city, which keeps in touch, I have on this bag of tricks on board here; a step-by-step idiot proof system to do what you’re suggesting we do. They say that the by four months we’ll be right up there with the gods!
I am nervously contemplating it, much as one would the dismantling and putting together of a car engine. Er, Excuse me! I am not being lazy but living here in Spain, should I really be sitting here in my apple bags each night, trying to cool off, while I tweak me SEOs. Should I be cutting back on the few little pleasures of life so I can pay an optimiser to do it for me? Hey! Hope you don’t mind me being open and honest? You are appreciated.

Well, I wouldn’t say I spend endless hours tweaking my SEO’s 😊

Most time I spent was when I was initially building the website. Since then, it’s just been a case of adding what I think will help boost the site’s search engine rankings for other keywords I might think of, or that potential clients might be using.

I probably spend no more than an hour or so a week updating the site in general, because that’s all it reallt needs.

Understandably though, with a property website, you’re looking at a great deal more work potentially, so what you’ve done or do from the offset is highly important. From then on, I suppose it’s just a case of how much time you want to devote to managing it yourself, or if you prefer to delegate it to a third party.

Congrats on your SEO efforts, heath! For the people who are finding your site when they are actually searching for properties, you might want to consider putting up a link to an online form for people to fill out. Then you can sell the leads to local real estate agents or refer them over to people like mike for a commission. Just a thought.

Mike, it’s definitely worth it to SEO your site, whether you hire someone or do it yourself. After the initial SEO overhaul of your site, you need to maintain it as you add content and new properties like heath said.

You won’t ever regret doing it…

Okay! Will do but right now I have editors (no kidding) kicking my door down for articles; most of which I subliminally slip a lead genewrator in :o)

toneloc - 03 July 2009 12:13 AM

Congrats on your SEO efforts, heath! For the people who are finding your site when they are actually searching for properties, you might want to consider putting up a link to an online form for people to fill out. Then you can sell the leads to local real estate agents or refer them over to people like mike for a commission. Just a thought.

Rather than looking at my ranking in that respect as a potential source of income, I’m just looking at it as a potential source for further clients relating to the services we offer. As for any potential link exchanges, it makes sense SEO wise to target organisations with websites that rank higher than my own. That avenue in itself can be very time consuming and not always successful if the organisations don’t want to exchange links.

There is another avenue that can be followed to boost rankings for the “Granada Property” keywords I now rank #10 for with Google. If I wished to improve this ranking, I could make posts on a number of high ranking forums, or publish on any number of the various article sites, which seem to produce good search returns. Last time I looked at that approach for a string of keywords, it took me a couple of hours work and within a couple of days, my site ranked #1 for the keywords I had used.

At the moment, I only link back to third party companies or individuals that I know personally or trust, having had dealings with them. In some respects, previously I was very wary of linking or affiliating to any estate agents, as clients experiences can vary greatly. Since the economic bubble burst though, the great majority of the rotten apples are gone, leaving only the more honest and reliable. I’m not having a pop at estate agents there, as my own particular range of services can suffer the negative PR of being tarred with the same brush when people experience a negative service. One should always be careful of who they affiliate themselves with though.

I like the approach Mike has taken on his website with the customer testimonials though. Something that I have considered adding to my own website. At the moment though, when clients ask for references, I can send them a list of all my previous clients. They’re all happy to correspond with anyone who’s after assurance regarding our reputation. It’s nice to have such great support from past clients and anyone who’s asked for references, has always ended up contracting us.

toneloc - 03 July 2009 12:13 AM

Mike, it’s definitely worth it to SEO your site, whether you hire someone or do it yourself. After the initial SEO overhaul of your site, you need to maintain it as you add content and new properties like heath said.

You won’t ever regret doing it…

Definately agree. I would say that especially for property searches, it’s important to be within the top five search returns on the major search engines.

The beauty of SEO and the search engines, is that you don’t have to be one of the big companies to be top of the pile. The “big boys” usually pay for sponsored links anyway. There’s much bigger companies than mine out there, with much flashier looking websites than mine, but I rank much higher with the search engines.

Certainly in your field of work though, it’s definately worth investing the time (or the money), to optimize your website with the search engines.

Hey, how is everyone doing? Just an update on my end. In addition to focusing hardcore on adding more content and optimizing my own sites, I built a couple of websites for new clients on the side.

One of those clients spent more and wanted full optimization on her site. This particular client is so busy today from clients finding her on Google that she ceased all of her paid advertising in english speaking newspapers and websites. We targeted very competitive keywords/keyword phrases and it took about 4-6 months for her to land in the top position of the most important keyword. I can’t reveal the keyword/keyword phrases, but f I did, you would completely understand why it is and will always be very highly competitive.

Obviously, I can’t guarantee that she will always be on top of Googles search results, but she’s been there since the beginning of the year and she has not only made a lot of money with these new clients (since most clients are put on programs where they must return), but also saved money from not having to pay to advertise (which she has done for over 5yrs).

As for me, I last posted that my Google Adsense income was starting to make about $1,000 a month. Since then, my highest month has been $2,800 in one month.

This is in addition to income that I generate promoting affiliate products (where I build sites promoting products and services of well known companies and they pay me a commission per lead or per sale). This income generates more each month than my Google Adsense income, but together, I am doing quite well and haven’t ever needed to depend on finding clients to build site for.

My main goal has and always will be to create and build up my passive income and never to rely on having to look for new clients. This is the true essence of working smarter and not harder.

I hope business is great for everyone!

What an interesting thread. Presumably the OP got what he needed in the end.

I just want to throw my tuppence worth onto the table and say that there are so many options available out there that it is not necessary to spend a lot of money on getting a nice looking site and you can do most of the work yourself.

Dreamhost do an incredible deal on hosting wordpress sites but I think that it is only available if you click through on a link from the Wordpress hosting info page which you can find here: Wordpress Hosting.

Both Dreamhost and Hostgator (also very cheap) offer one click installation of Wordpress plus all sorts of other goodies via the control panel. Forums, galleries, blog, statistics - whatever it is you want you will not need to be a rocket scientist to get it working - just point and click!

Wordpress has thousands of themes to choose from so you do not need to be a designer either. One of the free themes that is endlessly customisable is the Suffusion theme. You can see a showcase of sites made using Suffusion. Even the new standard theme comes with a set of customisable child templates.

Of course, the headers and graphics used in these blogs that make them looks so special may have been outsourced but if you have a bit of spare time, the open source GIMP does just about everything that Photoshop does. (I am not quite over that learning curve).

If you have no interest in doing your own graphics, you can pick up a freelance designer (graphic not web) on elance, freelance or odesk and pay for just those bts of work you need.

So, while I agree with the poster who said that it was important to consider the overall look and professionalism of a company site or blog, I can promise you that anyone with the time to do so can get a half decent looking site up in no time at all using low cost or free resources that are all on the intenet just waiting to be used.

Now what you do with your content, SEo, social branding and internet marketing is another story. 😉

I agree about the wordpress sites. They can be very sharp looking if you know what to do and know how to customize it in a way that will give yo a professional look and feel.

You have to remember that most people wont have the time and or patience to learn how to install/customize/tweak a CMS site like wordpress/joomla/drupal (or the countless other platforms) in order to get it looking professional.

The conversation earlier in this thread was in regards to a uniform store (or one the of oldest or best uniform stores in his area, I believe) that wanted to have an online presence. In that case, a professional looking site that equals or trumps his competitor was a viable solution (and still is in my opinion).

For the mom and pop shop selling a few products or services or for something like a product review site, personal blogs, affiliate marketing sites where you pitch products of well known companies, information sites, these don’t have to look super professional.

And like its been mentioned over and over, SEO, content creation, marketing, list building, back links, etc… are completely separate animals that must be done (and for some, must constantly be done) if you want to increase your revenue and perhaps start living off your sites.

One click installs, upload templates, add plugins/components/and modules, put up some decent graphics and you should be good.

If you outsource, just keep in mind your total cost and budget. You’ll get what you pay for, in the end, and don’t pay until you’ve got your goods delivered. You can end up paying more than you thought or you can come in way under what you thought. It all depends on the scope of the project.

I usually build out most of my sites, customize them, seo them, etc… I just follow my system. But, I have also outsourced a lot of my projects too. Mostly because of time. I now have American writers that write 300-500 word SEO articles on topics that I choose, for $1-$3 per article. That was their price and I am happy to pay it. Saves me so much time. I have also paid up to $40 per article too. It all depends on your budget and what you want accomplished.

Set your goals. Not just your design goals, but what exactly you want to accomplish with your site(s). What type of site is it? Are you selling a product/service? Are you setting up information sites like- “How to live in Spain for under 1,000 ? a month.” “How to get in shape,” “why eat organic,” etc….

How much traffic you want/need, how much you want to make each month (short term sand long term goals), etc…

If you’re selling a product, are you up-selling them on other related products (you should be. look at godaddy, for example), do people click the “buy now” button then don’t buy? How’s your checkout process? What’s the percentage of people going to the checkout and not completing the transaction and why? These are things you should look at.

Are you analyzing your analytics? How do people find your site? Are they typing in keywords for products that you are not even selling? If so, you should start selling that product (find affiliate products that you can promote in addition to your own products, etc…).

Just some things to think about.

nizzo - 13 August 2010 10:12 PM

We concur, a very interesting thread.

After reading it through it has occurred that the hardest part of some of what has been talked about is to stay subjective.

When one has built, tweaked and updated a website for so long, it is virtually impossible to critique it yourself from the perspective of it’s visitors. It is, after all ‘your baby’, and when watching it grow up you cannot readily see it as others might.

With this in mind, does anybody know of any websites that one could submit ‘their baby’ to, in order to receive free analysis and contructive feedback of content/construction/aesthetics etc?

There are a lot of webmaster forums that you can post a link to your site looking for feedback. I saw your site and I personally think that you can almost get rid of everything under your top nav bar all the way down to where your modules are (personal shopper service/our products). That’s what you’re selling and it should be right there “above the fold” when the page loads. That image .gif banner on top and the color buttons on the side look very outdated. It might be the way you do the images with the square corners and curved edges in addition to the images and font you’re using.

Plus, you’re using many different types/colors of the same times roman font on the body, but your modules are using arial font.

Anyways, those are just my thoughts. You may want to Google webmaster forums or something and post your link for some feedback.

Hi,

I thought I’d share info on low cost websites.

My daughter started an on-line vintage clothing shop using vistaprint. They give out free 250 business cards and other freebies and occasionally give free postage promos as well.

Her web site name cost her around ?7. (seven) and she chose the top web hosting package at approx ?10.50 per month with a free month included .

No problems at all apart from the constant free offers from vista (can’t grumble) by email

To view her site and see what can be achieved with little costs - http://www.quirkyvintage.co.uk

I help her with the layout and admittedly it can be limited to what can be achieved but she has had many positive comment about the sites appearance.

We did ask a professional web designer to give her some samples of their work but to be honest the cheaper version was much better.

I am not spamming for Vistaprint or my daughters web site for that matter I just feel it is worth mentioning what can be achieved with very low costs.

Hope this helps.

Ian.