South Florida Rentals And Home Sales

I was asked about picking a picking a website host and would like to share my comments. 
A small part of it is who you use for your website. It is what you do with your site once you have it. The majority of websites these companies provide are all the same, so there is nothing to differentiate yours from the thousands of others they host.
I have three sites. The first is hosted by ihouse. It is http://www.lakeworthproperties.net. It is a framed site. I took their basic template, optimized it for my keywords, changed all the meta tags and receive about 10 leads a day. If you search South Florida Rentals on google, I fluctuate between #4 and #9, South Florida homes #9 and #19. I am also on the first page of Google for many other search phrases, such as South Florida Real Estate and Palm Beach Real Estate.
For http://www.southfloridarentals-homesales.com I rank #1 on MSN, Google Yahoo for many of my keywords. This is a site built from scratch.
Lastly, for http://www.palm-beach-real-estate-homes.com/ a Point2 homes site, I am ranked on the search engines also. It is a good site if you customize it and you can change each page.
The point is whatever you choose, you have to put work into it in order for it to be successfull. The majority of SEO companies are a waste of money. Also the pay per click. I get a lot of calls by them solicited me for a top 10 ranking on Google. While they are talking to me, I am checking out their site. I’ll check their Google page rank and their Alexa ranking. When I question why their ranking is so poor and why they promise to make my site appear on the first page when they can not make their site highly ranked, I get hung up on a lot.
Sorry to be long winded, but I hate to see people waste their money. Before you choose a host take the following steps.
Be prepared to put work into it or hire someone to do it.
Check the providers site and their Google page rank and placement.
Make sure that you can edit the meta tags and pages
Avoid flash sites. Pretty, but the search engine spiders do not read them.
Get a domain name that applies to the area you are servicing. Bobsmith.com means nothing and will hurt you.
Build one way links to your site from real estate related sites with a Google page rank of 2 or better.
These things don’t happen overnight. They do take a lot of work. I did optimized one site and they went from no where to page one on Google for their keywords. It is all in the optimization.

According to WebProNews link exchanges are not the only factor to raise your rankings. The search engines are shifting their focus on determining rankings. They stated “recently Google seems to have placed more weight on buzzy, timely resources, which comes from news sites, social bookmarking, and often social networks and blogs. Google definitely weights Wikipedia, Digg and YouTube pretty heavily.

So what we have here, in a controversial example, is a lesson in buzz creation and SEO. This campaign was highly targeted and highly specific. From the SEO standpoint we can confirm:

Links are crazy important for higher rankings
Anchor text matters
Content matters
Keyword density matters
Link authority matters
Timeliness matters
Generating buzz via social media matters”

Since I stated incorporating these principles I have seen my rankings soar.

Blog Directory

I have not had much success with Internet Leads. The vast majority are people who register so they can use the services on my site. I have made it not mandatory to use the MLS search, to see if that increases the percentage of real leads.