Colleen, Haven't worried about this stuff too much but to maximise time and effort I guess I better start.  I will check in to see if you have found the right answer to indexing, etc.  BTW, like the look of your site..

Thanks Kim, I've gotten really good feeback and my "time on site" has increased by about 1000 percent!

Wow, that's a huge increase in on site time... I haven't flipped switch on ours yet... but I'm working on it. 

Hi Colleen, Matt Cutts is an expert for Google on SEO. Here is a link to an indexing article. If it helps you would you please do me the favor of reading an article about Susan Hanshaw? She is the author I represent and the article is her first book review of her latest book "Inner Architect: How To Build The Life You Were Designed To Live"? Thanks so much!

dean

Hi Colleen, here is a great basics article that USA Today picked up written by Matt Cutts "Google's Cutts: Good Directions Drive Traffic To Your Website."

dean

Thanks for the post. I will bookmark this and look into it.

I add tags to my blog for Technorati, plus I sprinkle keywords throughout. It needs to be conversational and flow. But here's a tip: just choose one set of keywords per blog. Don't overdo it. If your blog is about blue widgets, then you should use the term blue widgets in the metatitle and your keywords. Maybe even link to something else about blue widgets.

I would take at look at your site through Googles webmaster tools to make sure it is being indexed. I would also second Elizabeths suggestion on Technorati. Lastly, I would add some social media tools like Blog Catalog and Bumpzee.

Mybloglog, blogflux, and topofblogs are 3 directories I would consider listing your site with asap. If you want validation, go to the most powerful Realtor blogs that you can find and look at the directories they utilize. A great example is Tom's http://therealestatebloggers.com.

dean

I think I heard Google stopped or drastically reduced using blogs for rankings.  So if I understand it correctly, blogging might help some, but probably almost none these days.

Colleen, go to Google webamaster and claim your blog and then insert the code in your blog. This will help. Also how old is your blog?

Sometimes it can take up to 6 months to get out of the google sandbox. http://is.gd/JgV

Hey all you comment posters... Thanks for the info!  I'm bookmarking for later.

Thanks for the help everyone. For those who are visiting and catching up, I had previously installed a site map and have been using Google Webmaster tools. I installed the All in One SEO plugin and things seem to be a little better. Overall I can't complain, I move between #3 and #5 on page 1 of google for an organic search. Hang in there, it will happen!

It looks like there have been a lot of good suggestions and articles to read on this.  I will bookmark it so I can spend more time understandign when I'm more awake.

Ronald, Unless you heard it from Google execs it is hard to imagine your statement is anything but misguided. How do you think Active Rain makes it's fortune? User generated content which includes blog posts, internal commenting, and all of the written communication within the site. This is a giant blog!

Google's business model is advertising revenue through their ad's placed on sites or on search pages. The biggest key element to Google's success is readership. Readership comes with fresh daily written content.

Website are "static" rarely changing entities. Blogs are constantly updated fresh informational entities.

There is absolutely no way blogs would be discounted in Google's search algorthym since it is the written content refreshed daily that drives Google revenue.

dean

I didn't say it has no bearing, but it has changed, and blogging does not have the impact it used to have for website rankings.  Dean, you misunderstood - no need to be so harsh.

Ronald:

"Dean, you misunderstood - no need to be so harsh."

I guess Dean was reacting to the wealth of misguided advice being cast about the web concerning findability and getting visibility with blogs. The real estate industry is rife with quasi-real estate professionals turned SEO'ist, so I can sympathize with Dean. In fact, I was about to write something equally (if not more) scathing. ;-)

In this thread alone I count 11 things that I have found to be completely innacurate about search optimization and building content for better findability. I am severely biased, but I know from years of testing platforms, approaches, rendering rules, optimization strategies, and reading all of the books that engineers read over at Goog, that you must start with a content management foundation that helps you avoid making big SEO mistakes. Typical blog tools are better than CMS tools at doing this, but the performance is largely based on refined tuning which few people get right, and most get wrong.

"... but it has changed, and blogging does not have the impact it used to have for website rankings."

Since you definitely said this, I'll say that the first part of the sentence is correct - Google changed 421 times last year - but the second part is bullshit. ;-) The ability of a blogsite to rank better or worse has nothing to do with the blog and everything to do with about 700 ways that Google attempts to understand whose content should rank high and whose content should rank low.

Competitive pressures alone could account for a ranking drop in any given blog. To suggest that it is something Google did to alter the trust factors of domains that use blog tools as CMS infrastructure, is complete silliness.

Here's a fun SEO fact that everyone overlooks - in this thread, every member has keyword-stuffed their signature. This is more bullshit because it actually has a negative impact on your findability. Read this carefully...

It's a common (but controversial) belief among SEO'ists that the length of a link (i.e., the anchor text) can produce negative SEO value. Here are some excerpts from GoogleRankings.com that identify the problem:

If the anchor text is irrelevant to the source and/or the target page, the link will most likely be ignored altogether, or only pass a single vote for the exact phrase. If a page does not rank at all for phrases that are otherwise relevant to its topic, even though the web site is well referenced from other sources, either the incoming links or the internal navigation anchor text is flawed in its attempt to carry the theme throughout the web site and will rank significantly lower than other URLs.

Receiving links, or requesting others to reference pages with always the same anchor text will raise the question on how much control the web site had over the wording of its own "votes". If the profile shows a pattern that is the same as of sites trying to manipulate their rankings, this may raise a penalty once the same-anchor text link instances pass the natural threshold. Repeated misuse or overuse of such methods would lead to page-based penalties as opposed to phrase based, or even being banned from the Google index. Years of studies have shown a highly predictable pattern of "natural" linking in regards of anchor link texts used. Sometimes however, a page would accumulate a lot of references with the exact same anchor text by chance, enough to outweigh anything else in its linking profile.

Keyword stuffing (in anchors), while an unofficial term, clearly describes a past spamming method of which now has a proper counter measure in the system of Google. Using improper length or irrelevant phrases in anchor text when pointing to an internal page may trigger the applying of a filter, and lower the rankings of the URL for searches that include the used words. Continued misuse of anchor text may also lead to the excluding of the URL(s) from the Index, including the source and target pages as well. Recent additions to spam filtering now examine the relevancy of the target page closely, and in certain cases highly competitive commercial terms included in the anchor text, but to a page that is not relevant to them, may be seen as manipulative.

It's impossible for real estate agents to know all this stuff, but it's not impossible to buy and use services that prevent or help you avoid making mistakes like this.

"So if I understand it correctly, blogging might help some, but probably almost none these days."

Probably almost none, is interpreted by me as "near zero" - a complete mischaracterization. If this were true, why has Pfizer dominated the search rankings in the subject of health care commentary? They did it with a blogsite. I have 300 clients that each report the same outcome - dominance over all other content publishing approaches.

Typical blogging tools help business people avoid many SEO-related mistakes that would otherwise be made with FrontPage or some other CMS. Likewise, my own service helps marketing groups avoid many more SEO mistakes and even allows them to focus more on marketing and less on "blogging". My reaction is that you don't understand it correctly, and few people (including Google engineers) actually do understand it. And that's ok - you're not supposed to. ;-)

In any case, this sort of stuff underscores why folks like me and Dean get a little feisty when absurd ideas are cast about. We're here to cast a little reason into the pot.

There are some great tips here, thanks.  I am always looking for ways to improve my SEO.  I am going to try them out and see if it helps.

Colleen:

                       Here is an article I found very interesting. http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/05/a-bulletproof-seo-strategy-for-real-estate-professionals.htm

Jeffrey Cerra

www.desertquarters.com

My personal real estate blog on WordPress was put up on December 30, 2007.  It currently has a pagerank of 4, with first page position for my most competitive area key phrase.  Google loves my blog, with my posts indexed in less than an hour.

Two plugins that help to make that happen are All In One SEO and Google XML Sitemap.  It is, and always will be primarily about content (527 posts in 7 months), but these two plugins make sure that the meta is custom to each post and that Google has a map to crawl.  Lots more on WordPress here.

Jim Kimmons
http://realestate.about.com
Real Estate Business Guide