Realespace

First of all I want to thanks all the guys that work on putting this conference together. IMO it was a huge success. We came away with some good relationships with vendor and I learned something from every panel. Good job!

REtechsouth website
The guys that put it all together
Brad Nix, Maxsell.net
Matt Fagioli, DiamondDwellings.com

There were actually a lot of people involved, but those two guys really did a great job and put most of the even together.

I was a speaker on “The Dreaded SEO” panel. There was some good information put out from that panel, although there were some differentiating ideas. When I was preparing for the panel, I focused on 3 concepts to achieve from the discussion. Those being, it’s all about relationships, SEO can be to much to handle, and keywords are the key.

It’s all about relationships
Every business is a lead business, whether you are a dentist, real estate agents, software developer, your business will not succeed with out leads. If you are focusing on getting all your leads from google search results you will not be in business for very long. Even on the internet you have to be pro-active and go get your business. The internet should not change your business plan, but rather enhance your lead generating plans. IMO you should focus on building relationships, just like you do in real life.

If you are just starting a blog, you should optimize it for search, but you really won’t see results for many months. In that same amount of time, if you make a friend a day on the internet from commenting on blog posts, citing other blogs, using Facebook and linkedin, etc… you will be much better off then if you spent that time focusing on SEO.

Do the math, 1 friend a day X 6 months = 180 friends, that you are interacting with, building trust and credibility. Remember your search results will improve with more and more traffic, so it will naturally improve your results.

SEO is too much to handle for most of us
The really cool thing about the internet is that information we put out there will stay for a long time, even if we (the authors) long forget about it. Again, this is for people just starting to blog, but imagine 5 years from now, how much information you will have out there. One thing to remember is that even though the information is out you should still make sure you have control of it. New standards of data portability and pushing that all sites lets you (the author) to take your work with you. So if you are blogging on a site that does not let you export and move your articles, get a new provider, FAST. I love Wordpress and I hope it will be around for a long time. I can take my posts to any other Wordpress site, or most other blogging packages, but we don’t know what will happen in the future…5 years from now who knows how we will be putting out information on the internet… you have to be ready for anything.

So, my point is, don’t fret about SEO, your website/blog will naturally get better and better search results it gets older, gets more traffic, and grows. Write interesting articles, with catchy titles, and engage the public’s interest. I know you are thinking, “But won’t SEO help it grow faster?” Yes, but in the time it is taking you to read this post, Google has probably changed their algorithms…they seem to do that a lot, and what worked yesterday is not working anymore, or worse yet will hinder your search engine status. Don’t let it stress you out, have fun blogging, it is a great outlet… Not your second job. Also, many SEO companies are expensive, and most will not guarantee results, so weigh your options for other marketing material that you can put that money towards.

Keywords are the Key
Sit down for an hour and define 20-30 keywords that you want to get search results for. Focus on your niche. Then take that list to Google Keywords Tool. this tool will show you how much those terms are searched for and how much competition there is. It will also show similar keyword phrases. Define your list even more with the Google tool, now each of yours posts should target your keywords. I’m now talking about keyword density. Pick a keyword and make sure that in your next post you use that keyword enough to dominate all other keywords in the post.

For example, if I have a 400 word post and my keywords are “San Francisco Real Estate”. I should include “San Francisco Real Estate” at least 5 times in that post. The more words, the more often to use it. There are many keyword density tools on the internet that will make it easy to count your keywords

Keyword density is important because search engines use this information to categorize a site’s theme, and to determine which terms the site is relevant to. The perfect keyword density will help achieve higher search engine positions. Keyword density needs to be balanced correctly (too low and you will not get the optimum benefit, too high and your page might get flagged for “keyword spamming”).
Source: SEOchat.com