How important is the size of your website? My site is pretty lean right now and I am wondering if I should start adding more pages. The only problem is that I would be adding pages to just add pages. How much information do you really need on a Realtor's website anyways? I see these website with tons of pages and wonder if anyone is reading the excess crap.

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Marc Rasmussen
Michael Saunders and Company

Sarasota Real Estate

nope. noone reads the excess crap.
I think saturation is not as important as quality links.
I am sure the engines are different regarding that and the amounts, but I have an example where I have a framed page that is #9 in yahoo.... (I framed my IDX on another domain name and geared it towards a lower KW and it's working good)
So really, I have a few links pages for saturation and I'm on the front page of yahoo...

Results 1 - 10 of about 2,610,000 My page is Number 9!

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Search Homes for Sale in SAN DIEGO and other San Diego Real Estate via the San Diego MLS.

From an individual page standpoint there is not much weight at all to the overall site having lots of pages, however you can only optimize for a finite # of keywords per page, thus if you have 300 keywords that were worth their own efforts in SEO you would have at least 100 pages. This being said, we overcome this obstacle with your blog, hence why we set up your system the way we did. Informative, not spammy and a good excuse to unlease kw targeting pages to the net.

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Want to save up to 50% off Real estate webmasters product websites & common upgrades? Check out my latest blog post regarding our end of the year sale.

Then where does "content" come in? I always hear add more content - content is king - add a page a week - etc. I'm not adding pages just for the sake of adding pages but for the SE's that like content, doesn't the site have to have a lot of content rich pages?

On the other hand, a couple of my lesser page Point2 agent template sites are in top positions in MSN & Yahoo & my oldest one got out of the Google sandbox at position #2 with my important kw's, although it dropped to 11 & seems to be working it's way up again.

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Southwest Chicago Suburbs Real Estate is an affordable area with close access to downtown Chicago. Money Magazine says that Orland Park real estate is one of the best places to live in the U.S. Next door you can find Tinley Park homes for sale and get Orland Park amenities at a more affordable price.

On a side note....I think you are confusing the term search engine saturation. Saturation pertains to the amount of pages in the index vs the amount of pages in your site. IE...if I have a site with 100 pages and I have 100 pages in the index, I have 100% saturation....if only 80 of the 100 pages are in the index then I would only have 80% sat.

The size of the site and the number of keywords desired is highly related...keep in mind that a single page has limits on how many terms it will effectively rank for...if you want lots of terms you need lots of optimized pages. Also don't under estimate the power of internal link text...if you have a 1000 vs 100 pages and you use keyword rich text menus on your pages you are going to get better rankings for those pages who's terms you use, due to the internal links pointing to those pages.....this is very evident in yahoo especially...not so much in google....and is more evident for weaker terms..ie "my town condos".

I have also observed the effectiveness of targeting only a small amount of terms vs covering to whole gamut. I see alot of posts recommending a variety of variations of your keyphrases....and I do that too...but...I have a competitor that ranks great (#2) for "Our Town Real Estate" and his parent company site is #1...I'm #3. Reason being is that I have used many variations of my keyphrases when pointing to my home page. He uses far less varations. I compare it to using a dart vs a net....me having the net. He never updates his content...in over 4 years. But since I used other terms in my anchor text I hold top 3 rankings for "Our Town" >Homes, Condos, Rentals, Land.....he's not even in the top ten. But the big traffic term is the "Our Town Real Estate"...more than 20 to 1 versus the other terms.

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Ranch Real Estate | Real Estate Web Design | Add your link here

From what I understand, if you have 1000 pages, Yahoo in particular will take the visitors to your sub pages instead and not necessarily your home page. Is that right?

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Portland Oregon Real Estate Portland Real Estate
Lake Oswego Real Estate

Depends on how well you optimize you subpages and what the visitor's are searching for....but any good search engine should do that not just yahoo.

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Ranch Real Estate | Real Estate Web Design | Add your link here

Content is the king. Currently, while I am still in the sandbox, majority of my leads are coming from minor keywords. Most of these are related to my extra content in side pages with additional unintended keywords.

I'll share a link to the best information I've found regarding preparing a site for good search engine placement:

http://www.searchengineworld.com/misc/guide.htm

It's information that has served me well.

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Rick Wheat, Wheatworks Software, LLC
CustomCalcs.com : Marketing Software with Your Brand

Thanks, Wheatworks. It's very helpful. Hate to know that I've been doing everything wrong.

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Portland Oregon Real Estate Portland Real Estate
Lake Oswego Real Estate