Icicle Creek Real Estate SEO Review
I first met Geordie Romer at RE BarCamp Seattle a few months ago. During our SEO session, he volunteered his Icicle Creek site as a website to critique during the session, but we got a bit off topic and we didn’t really get to looking at the specifics of his domain. I again asked for volunteers (this time on Twitter) while at RE BarCamp LA and he again volunteered to be the guinea pig. To me, this shows he’s serious about improving his site’s SEO, so I spent some time reviewing the site and here are a few suggestions/observations:
- To start, I should say I think this site is fairly well optimized for the search engines already. Of course it’s not perfect (no website ever is), but the basics are definitely covered; title tags, URL structure, keywords. Geordie’s blog is a Tomato Blog, so it’s no surprise the basics are covered — I’d actually be very disappointed if they didn’t have all these covered since they are a paid solution.
- Create your own landing pages for your “popular searches” on this page. Right now, the “Leavenworth Condo Search” takes you to a page on your IDX site (seen here) and is iFramed in (click one of the links and notice the URL in your browser window does not change). I’d recommend creating a page like iciclecreekrealestate.com/leavenworthcondosforsale/ and framing that search result inside that page. Here is an example landing page for Emerald Bay on LagunaSeaside.com. Hopefully your IDX solution, IDXPro, can support this functionality. Your main search for homes for sale page should then link to every home search landing page you end up creating — and each of those landing pages should cross link to all the other landing pages.
- Create a page on your site for your Leavenworth Information links and remove them from the sidebar. For a blog really geared toward attracting SEO traffic, I wouldn’t recommend having those external links in your sidebar because it means every single page on your blog has an additional 14 external links out. Instead, make sure the link to your “Leavenworth Information” page is prominent in your sidebar. Doing this will mean you’ll only have 1 page on your site linking out to those 14 resources rather than every page on your blog (194 pages according to Google).
- Further optimize your “How much is my home worth?” page for “How much is my Leavenworth home worth?” by tweaking your title tag and H1 on the page. Additionally, add a short paragraph with some keywords that will help Google understand what the page is about. Then create a separate page for every market you cover. The chances of getting any long tail traffic for the term “How much is my home worth?” is fairly slim given the sites in the top 10 right now, but I highly doubt there are many people focused on localized searches for those keywords. Granted, you already rank number 1 for “how much is my leavenworth home worth?” — so this shouldn’t be at the top of your list of changes to make.
Hope this helps – if anyone else has any suggestions or observations, please leave them in the comments below.
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Geordie Romer | Leavenworth WA
Posted at 15:51h, 02 JulyDrew – thanks a bunch. I appreciate you taking the time to offer me your thoughts and advice.
(And would welcome any and all other comments from other readers of Geekestate)
Some thoughts:
2. I actually do have landing pages for each of the searches but I’m not sure if you can get to them through the framed IDX. Instead they are from links within neighborhood pages like those for Cashmere and Kahler Glen. (You have a great point, I just wonder if IDX Pro has that capability.)
3. Some guy named Rand 😉 has a counter-argument. (yes,I read SEOmoz regularly.. doesn’t every real estate agent?)
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/5-reasons-you-should-link-out-to-others-from-your-website
I did pair down my list to the best links in the bunch, but I do think from a UI aspect it is important for visitors to be able to use me as a local resource and go straight from the home page off to reliable authoritative site. (also seems like a good way to get keywords on all 194 pages without being too spammy.)
4. A quick peek on the Google Adwords keyword tool shows that not many folks are looking for any terms even related to “Leavenworth home worth, home values or home prices”. I also seem to do pretty well for those search terms when you look at all the neighborhoods.
A better question (one that I will address in an upcoming post) : How do I get more visitors to my site to visit that page? I recently trimmed down the number of boxes to fill out on the form, but honestly it seems like more people pick up the phone and call me.
So here’s my big question for Drew or anyone else who wants to tackle it? Why is my site getting beat on the SERPS?
Keyword spamming by my competitors? Age of site?
It doesn’t seem like it’s the number of links or the amount of content…
Once again thanks for doing this… and feel free to pick on my site or use it as an example at any presentation you choose to.
Jim Marks
Posted at 10:15h, 03 JulyGeordy, your site is great and obviously you have invested tons of time into it. Good on you!
I have not done an analysis on it and am simply providing some thoughts. If you feel I am wrong, cool. Just consider this some random musings from an overworked, slightly knowledgable FOGE. (Friend of Geek Estate)
Lets call this, “If this were my site, I MIGHT think about…
1) Domain. A keyword rich domain would have been better.
2)Domain Age. Nothing you can do here, but a big deal (for you) you are under 5 years old. Your competitors are 8-10. This may be a domain age issue. It may be a LINK AGE issue… didn’t check.
3)Domains Again. Because your URL is Icycle… and your titles dont include Leavenworth, your URLS dont either. FOrced with this problem, I MAY add Leavenworth real estate to my permalinks..
4)Titles. It appears (to me) that very few if any of your blog posts have yor keyword Leavenworth Real Estate in the title? A simple change of your blog name in Allinone would fix this.
5) Dupe Content. WP has a taxonomy problem. When you create a page, WP creates a category page, date page, author page,archive page, etc. It APPEARS as if all these except category are being indexed. Multiple URLS to the same content is dupe. Just check it.
6) Pagination. It looks as if, not only did you not increase your pagination, but you removed the default older.newer pagination… Plenty of plugins to fix this. Right now you have linked categories from your sidebar. This is a site-wide link to your category page. You then noindexed your category page? How are your pages getting crawled except sitemap.xml? This may be fine. I am prolly missing something, but the structure seems like it might create a crawler issue… this would take some work, but well worth it.
7) Drew is 100% correct on his external link statement. Rands article is 6 months old. The Google PR change was announced 1 month ago. In addition, Rand would NEVER suggest linking from your sidebar. Those are site-wide links. Heres a guideline. If the link is valuable to your readers, keep it. But get it out of the side bar.
7)Image Optimization… Didn’t understand the pattern here… may be okay. Just didn’t see the alt optimization…
8) Category Descriptions…Do you have them? Keyword rich Category descriptions?
9)URL Stopwords..You dont need to put every work in your title into the permalink… I would consider removing stopwords.
10) Did I say your blog was great? I meant it. Way better than most I have seen. Be Proud.
CAUTION: These are just musings from a bystander. I am not an SEO, (although I do stay at Holiday Inns)and EVERY SINGLE one of these points may be wrong. Some of this stuff is really nit-picky, but you seem like you care… so I thought I would mention.
Good Luck!
Geordie Romer | Leavenworth WA
Posted at 11:29h, 03 JulyJim- Thanks for the feedback. Much appreciated. (Lots to think about and investigate.)
Geordy Rostad
Posted at 19:29h, 03 JulyI don’t think you could pay for a better analysis than that! I need to take a second look at my site. Particularly with the dupe content problem of WordPress since I’m using categories and tags at the moment. Are you converting well off of your Icicle Creek site? When I posted my article on ABC link trades, I caught flak from a bunch of naysayers who argued that optimizing an individual site is a waste of effort. If you don’t have a niche, they may be correct but how are you doing since you do have a niche?
free real estate web 2.0 blogs
Posted at 02:05h, 04 JulyAccording to me for good marketing of real estate business clean up your website. I am constantly amazed by how unbelievably cluttered a lot of real estate websites are. What hope do you have of generating leads if people can’t find anything on your site? Start this process by determining your “action paths” (next item).
ravm
Posted at 12:10h, 14 JulyYes, the site is nicely done with pretty good onsite seo. They have a PR 4 which is impressive too. Their contact form is mis-aligned, a small but relevant detail. Thanks for your review.
ravm
Posted at 12:10h, 14 JulyYes, the site is nicely done with pretty good onsite seo. They have a PR 4 which is impressive too. Their contact form is mis-aligned, a small but relevant detail. Thanks for your review.
investinrealestate
Posted at 06:30h, 31 JulyWith investing in single family homes it is easy to achieve positive cash flow. Even if your rent income doesn’t cover your expenses 100%, With commercial real estate the rules are different.
john beck
Posted at 20:33h, 07 SeptemberWhen it comes to web real estate, you could say the same thing: location, location, location in search engines. Organic real estate on the web refers to the positioning your website has on the web landscape.
Tax Foreclosures
Posted at 01:39h, 16 SeptemberAccording to me for good marketing of real estate business clean up your website. I am constantly amazed by how unbelievably cluttered a lot of real estate websites are.
Tax Foreclosures
Posted at 08:39h, 16 SeptemberAccording to me for good marketing of real estate business clean up your website. I am constantly amazed by how unbelievably cluttered a lot of real estate websites are.