Comments on: Get your site ranked #1 on Google, guaranteed

By: Michelle Minch, Moving Mountains Design

Michelle Minch, Moving Mountains Design — Sat, 23 May 2009 18:11:17 +0000

A lot of SEO gems here. One that I have found particularly useful, and that I will now start doing is describing your images with ALT tags and the best way to name images. I’m using ALT tags, but didn’t name the photos in an SEO friendly way. Thanks for the tips!

By: Sharleen Kutrumbis

Sharleen Kutrumbis — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 02:21:27 +0000

Thank you for this helpful article. I have been battling this with my site and this gives me very easy information to follow-up on.

By: Mike Mueller Sucks | Are We Connected.com

Mike Mueller Sucks | Are We Connected.com — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 14:10:29 +0000

[...] day of total suckage started with an excellent post over at Agent Genius. Mike Mueller [...]

By: Jack Leblond

Jack Leblond — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:35:50 +0000

Update: In the original article I used the following sentence: “Do not ever have words in your title that are not used somewhere on that page – most search engines look upon this as spam and will likely drop you.”

A more accurate wording would be: “Do not ever have words in your title that do not support the ideas and concept of the page.” For example, do not have a page about a home listing with a title of “Brittany Spears Does It Again!” – That would be bad (Unless it’s her home you have listed). However, if you title was “Jack Leblond is NOT a Realtor”, and the page explained why Jack is not a Realtor, without actually using that exact phrase – that would be OK.

By: Fierce Competition | national real estate opinion column - agentgenius.com

Fierce Competition | national real estate opinion column - agentgenius.com — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:27:49 +0000

[...] then a light bulb went off when reading Jack Leblond’s post on SEO and Mark Eckenrode’s post on Marketing – our goal is to attract people that want to do [...]

By: it's all about social media

it's all about social media — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:02:42 +0000

[...] My day of total suckage started with an excellent post over at Agent Genius. [...]

By: Mike Mueller

Mike Mueller — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:29:12 +0000

Jack-
in all seriousness, wonderful stuff.
Headlines, smaller bylines, photo names, alt tags, captions and text.
Writing for the reader not the search engine.

(I just didn’t want the serious comments to get lost in our silliness) (and I still suck)

By: Lisa Sanderson

Lisa Sanderson — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:07:41 +0000

Wow, thanks for the tips! And thanks for making them seem fairly easy to implement, and for not blowing my mind with jargon. Now, if you could just wait a few weeks to post the next set , I’d be grateful to have the time to absorb these and put them in to practice. ~Lisa

By: James Bridges

James Bridges — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:45:30 +0000

Jack,
Awesome fundamentals. If every real estate professional followed these tips they would have their website soaring. It just takes an attention to detail that truly is possible by each agent.

BTW, the tip on “Optimize your site for your audience, not for the search engines.” is one that I think takes alot of pressure off of writing your content for both real estate websites and blogs. Once you write your pages (and posts) for your audience, you can always go back and do some mild optimization, but just keeping in mind that search engines don’t buy homes makes life a whole lot easier

By: Nick Bostic

Nick Bostic — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:44:44 +0000

Welcome Jack, I’m glad you joined the team.

These are all excellent points that I’m glad I don’t have to preach about anymore, instead I’ll just send out links to your article (and anything upcoming).

I “gamed” Google very successfully a couple of years back – got high (5) page rank and #1 SERPS – all within a couple of weeks. Yes, I got a lot of traffic. But because I had created the site with the sole purpose of testing some theories against Google and not to help customers, it generated an abysmal amount of actual business. So your point of writing for the audience is dead on. Like I tell people, if you write to beat the search engines, your job now turns into a full time SEO expert because the search engines are always trying to reward content, not people who are gaming the system.

One point I’d like to add regarding ALT tags is that they are also necessary for web site accessibility. Technically, accessibility covers people with disabilities, in this case blindness using a screen reader. But I personally disable images when I’m browsing any time I’m on a slow connection. If you correctly ALT tag your image, I may read that and decide to actually open the image. If you have nothing, there’s no chance of that. Plus, a few years back Target was sued for not using ALT tags which was thought to be discriminatory.

My $0.02 on Page Rank is it used to mean more than it does now. It usually correlates to SERPs, but not always. Where I am, there is a self-hosted WordPress real estate blog and a WordPress hosted one. The self-hosted one has a better design, has a more tech savvy operator, has been around over a year longer and has more well-written content. But for some reason, the WordPress hosted one has PR 5 while the self-hosted has PR4. But do a search for their most hotly contested keywords and the self-hosted one shows up on page one, the WordPress hosted one (with a higher PR) doesn’t show in the first 5 pages.