Case Study Naples Florida Condos and Real Estate www.michelledenomme.com
I. Background
A. The Basics
Mike Lanford and Michelle DeNomme are real estate agents in Naples Florida. As you might have guessed, real estate in the Naples Florida area is a very competitive market. When I was contacted by Mike in May of 2006, their website was nowhere to be found in ANY search engine. Their competition has some very solid rankings including plenty of top ten slots in Google. The challenge that was presented to RedIron Marketing was, without a doubt, a very tall order.
B. Site Age
Of the ten websites that are in the Google top 10, the youngest domain name is at almost 3 years old with the oldest being around almost 10 years. Mike and Michelle’s domain is just over one year old. Because nothing can be done to change the age of a domain, the battle will have to be waged with keyword placement and a high number quality back-links.
C. Back-Links
None of Mike and Michelle’s competitors had fewer than 20 back links. Several had more than 100 while 2 had more than 1000. Mike and Michelle had zero.
II. The Challenge
A. Identify Keywords
Mike and Michelle have an advantage in the fact that their market is clear, Real Estate, specifically condos in the Naples Florida, area. The task of identifying the right keywords was simple.
B. Optimize Website Pages
This task was one of the more challenging tasks. Typically for optimization the site owner has complete access to all of their pages. But, as is the case for a lot of realtors, Mike and Michelle’s site was built using a site building tool. The major challenge initially was in the fact that the sub-pages had no true page name. All of the pages were built dynamically and ultimately had the same URL. The real problem was that there was no way to reference any page outside of the home page. For example, in exchanging links there was not a way to tell potential link partners where their link would be placed because there was no www.sitename.com/links.html page. The site builder software now generates a name for a direct link to a custom page but the URL is very odd. Even the index page is a non-standard page.
C. Exchange Links
As you can imagine, getting a site to trade links with you when you have a zero PageRank and no proof of a link page is next to impossible. Fortunately we host many websites with strong PageRanks. We were able to place links to Mike and Michelle’s site on each of those already established site. On top of that we have purchased links on other already established high ranking websites. These two moves allowed for the main search engines to begin to take our site seriously.
III. Current Status
We are now only three months into the optimization process and have already started seeing very positive results. Here is some of what has happened. Keep in mind when reading these results that this project started this website being non-existent to any search engine. All samples are found WITHOUT USING QUOTES
MSN has Mike and Michelle at number 13 for “Naples Florida Real Estate.”
Google lists Mike and Michelle at 31 for “Naples Florida Condos” and 94 for “Naples Condos.” We are also seeing results with “Naples Homes for Sale”
IV. Goals
An optimistic outlook has Mike and Michelle with top 30 ranking in half of their target keywords with 6 months. Top 10 results are expected by the end of the first year.
