Hello All,

We used to the 4th search result on MSN for the phrase "Nashville Real Estate" but dropped to #21 this week. Can anyone give me any clues as to why this may have happened. It had always been my belief that once you got on the first page of a searhc engine that it was hard to move up or down.

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Thanks,
Grant

Read about Nashville Homes and Nashville Condos on my Nashville Real Estate Blog.

MSN's search engine is very new and also very unstable. The results will continue to change radically as they continue to adjust their algorithm.

When the MSN Beta was first released I had spots 1-13 for one of my keywords. That's obviously not a good set of results.

It is also not safe to assume that once you get first page results on Yahoo or Google that you will become anchored there. These too can change dramatically with shifts in the algorithm and or, in the case of Google, pages being released from the sandbox.

If you get to the top 10 and then fall asleep at the wheel it might take a top government spook to find your site.

Tell Cindy I said hi and if she ever wants to pick my brain she is always welcome to call. I'll be glad to share whatever knowlege I have.

P.S. Do you work for Agent Image or Cindy?

From what I see is that your page is not SEO'd well. You are not using any header tags <h1> <h2> and so on. Where your cursive text image is "images/hummer.jpg", that should be your <h1> tag instead of an image. None of your images have "alt" tags. I see lots of other things wrong, but you are gonna have to figure out some stuff on your own. Read this
http://www.seo-guy.com/tutorial.html

Hi Guys,

I work for Cindy as a buyer's agent. I began working with her a little over 4 months ago and she has been great!

Thanks Kyle,

I will try to muddle through the tutorial!

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Thanks,
Grant

Read about Nashville Homes and Nashville Condos on my Nashville Real Estate Blog.

You will learn a lot from that tutorial. I didn't mean to sound harsh about working it out on your own, but I could have gone on and on about how to optimize your page.
Best of luck.

Ok, I went through the entire tutorial and indeed it appears that our images do need alt tags and that we are not using header tags at all.

Content wise, we appear to be just fine. I'm not sure what our keyword density is, but we did use our main phrase at least 100 times on the site in some form or fashion.

It appears as though our link exchange pages need some original content, so I will either write something or get permission from someone else to use their words there.

Do you happen to have any other suggestions? Thanks!

__________________
Thanks,
Grant

Read about Nashville Homes and Nashville Condos on my Nashville Real Estate Blog.

That should help you rank a lot better.

You want about 7% of your text on each page to state your keywords (mix up the order and make it sound natural so that it is human friendly).

Don't alter anyone's link text, just write a little blurb on each page your link partners are located about their particular area.

I did not realize that each page needed that much density, I just had the overall site loaded. Ok, I need to re-write some pages then. Thanks for your help!

__________________
Thanks,
Grant

Read about Nashville Homes and Nashville Condos on my Nashville Real Estate Blog.

Whoops, I forgot to say that you need to target different keywords on each page. Don't make a bunch of pages targeting "Nashville Real Estate". Each page should target 2 or three different keyword phrases. Try to keep the total phrases under 50 characters (that includes spaces or | other serperation devices).


EDIT: 50 Characters!!!!!! not 30

That's putting it mildly. MSN has been all over the place lately. They still like sites that use black hat techniques and have been very slow removing them. Definitely add the <h > tags and alt tags. Make sure your on page text has your keywords but don't overload them. As far as a magic number for kw density, you will get a lot of different answers. You will just have to experiment a bit. With MSN, get used to seeing their results bounce around quite a bit.