No text on your home page? You need to do something about that!

Glad to hear you are taking an active interest in your own website design from an SEO standpoint. As the SEO Director for InterCoastal Net Designs, I am available to answer all of your questions in this area.

First and foremost, yes it is very important to have at least some text on your home page for the search engines to analyze.
This is one of the pieces that they use to determine what your website is all about. Without this piece, you leave too much ambiguity that
could end up hurting your keyword focus down the road. Typically 1-2 paragraphs of text will be sufficient to target a specific local area and niche market with a
tight range of keywords. Of course, the more areas you cover, and the more specialties, services or product categories your business has, the more information you have available to discuss about your company.

You do also want to be sure that the text is visible to your website visitors. Many have tried in the past to hide text using various techniques but Google has taken a stand to penalize sites for displaying different content to search engines than to regular browsers... and you do not want to be at the receiving end of a penalty like that.

Be sure to include your top geographic market keywords in the text (Hilton Head real estate, Hilton Head homes, etc.) at least 2-3 times each in the home page text (more times may be necessary with greater amounts of body content) to be sure your website performs well for Google Local Search results in your area. Also feel free to bulk it up with some of your other related product or service-related keywords your company provides.

If you follow these general suggestions you will be on the right track for getting started with creating some quality home page text optimized for performance. Using this foundation, we also typically fine tune and tweak the page content here and there over time until we get the exact keyword densities correct as well but it always helps to have something for the search engines to start with like this so that we can see exactly which phrases need extra help in the code.

Good luck and feel free to contact me at InterCoastal Net Designs if you want to take your website content and SEO to the next level to really see the improvements in the search results that you were looking for.

Adam Hankey
SEO Director
InterCoastal Net Designs
www.icoastalnet.com
adam@icoastalnet.com
Toll Free: 866-249-6095

Is your business showing up in Google maps?

Is your business listed in Google maps yet? When people search Google for local phrases related to your business in your area, are they finding your website at the top of the search results?

If the answer is NO, then it should be obvious to you that there is something that you need to do to help get your name out there in as many places online as possible. Your competition is doing it...and you can too! With a little time, and minimal effort, you too can increase your company's exposure online and help capture more relevant leads, customers or clients through your website.

It is no mystery that Google holds the individual page titles of your website in high regard. Title tag text is one of the top indicators used by Google, Yahoo! and other search engines to determine the subject matter of a page. Therefore if you want to target one specific geographic area for your business listings, you want to be sure your home page title also includes words relating to your targeted city or area.

Combined with well-written content containing the same phrases along with your physical address and other local geographic terms, these will work together to give you a significant advantage for those local phrases in the search results.

Be sure to also register your business with Google Local Business Center, and take advantage of that opportunity to add your address, phone numbers, business hours, office photo, current specials, and more. You can even add coupons for your current specials for better tracking of your revenue sources.

If you follow these suggestions, in only a matter of minutes you will be creating an entire new line of traffic to bring visitors to your website and traffic through your doors. Don't let your competition beat you to the punch.

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Real estate and social media promotion

Hope the new year is treating you all well. It has been quite cold here at the beach
but that will hopefully be changing SOON! At least the sun is shining so that's a start.

I ran across another real estate video website with some great features that would benefit you if you had the same features on your own website too so I wanted to share my thoughts on those with you. You may have already seen this site before:
http://www.zipvo.com/

It might not jump right out at you but there are a few features on that site that really add a greater social element to, which creates more interactivity for the users and increased ability to get more people to
join. If you notice on their home page they have integrated their member comments
into their blogging system. Similar to the way AR does it, they give all of their members their own
profile pages and blogs, and use those entries to bulk up their own main blog.
It is a GREAT way to both inspire more people to want to join in and comment,
plus at the same time it helps to exponentially grow a big network of contacts and leads.

Second, if you take a look at their member profiles, like this one:
http://www.zipvo.com/NickVandekar
members get their own profile pages that can even include their Twitter updates
and links to their Facebook profile, LinkedIn, Trulia, etc.
They are really helping their members feel more like part of a bigger community there.

These are exactly the types of features that would greatly benefit many of your own personal and agent websites as well!
When my company works on Internet marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) for our clients, it is not only just to help with search engine visibility for the top keywords, but we also watch for all of the new or innovative ways we can integrate social media and community building features into our clients' sites.

With our many years of programming experience, combined with our extensive knowledge of Internet marketing and search engine optimization, we have the ability to build any type of feature you want into your website and tie in many different kinds of social media aspects into it in new and interesting ways.

The key to getting the most leads and members on your site is getting your site found out there
in as many places as possible, and social media word-of-mouth can be your greatest assistant toward that goal, if done correctly AND promoted properly.

Let me know if you are interested in adding any of these features to your site and I will work up a personalized quote for adding these features to your existing website, or for building a new website. Together we will get you the maximum amount of visibility and traffic you need.

Feel free to contact me directly for your customized quote today.
adam@icoastalnet.com