My site has been live for around 2 months now, and I have done well with positioning on msn (currently #5 for boulder colorado real estate), yet I have not been able to get into yahoo or google. I've been doing a lot of work lately on SEO, and think a solid move would be to head towards a CSS based site (mainly around the navigation of my site) so that it will be more search engine friendly.

I've been taking tips from frobn, various web design magazines, and some other sites. What would you recommend on this direction, as it relates to quickly getting into a solid position in yahoo and google serps?

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There is no such thing as getting into Yahoo and Google quickly regardless of CSS or not. CSS is definitly the way to go as far as design and search engine friendliness, but you will still be sandboxed and need quite a lot of links and time before your rankings improve in the big 2
Best of luck with the CSS implementation.

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CSS has not change the rankings on any of my pages that I have placed it on. My site was already in the top ten for all my main keywords and top 5 for most. I was hoping that cleaning up the code and cutting the file size in half (thats how bad the code was) that I might get a boost of one or two spots, but no luck. As Morgan said CSS will not get into Y or G.

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My thoughts on the Sarasota Association of REALTORS actions.

Thanks for mentioning my work. Most webmasters and SEOs do not have an understanding of CSS even though they use it for design and sing its benefits. CSS is both a design tool and a tool that can lead SEs to the "semantic meaning" of your web site and pages. Will it help you get a higher rating in Yahoo or Google. Yes it will, think of it as a catalyst, on its own a catalyst is inert but when combined with other SEO elements it has the potential to improve your ratings. Google and other search engines do a good job of finding a site's semantic meaning, regardless of the site's structure, but when a site use bloated html and/or incorrect markup it can foil or misdirect the search engine's efforts. Css/xhtml design technology will cut down on html bloat and that is a good thing. Assuming that you have good content pages and a good linking strategy, using css properly to direct the search engines to its (your content) "semantic meaning" will get you indexed correctly and faster. Will Google find semantic meaning without css? Yes, sometimes they will and sometimes they won't. Why take a chance?

Navigation is a good place to start. Here is a tip. Put your navigation in a unordered list and in a separate file that can be included in the web page with a php or asp include command. Use css to style the presentation. A good place to start is with aSiteAbove's Taming lists.

Why put a navigation menu in a list?

1) you will be able to use search engine friendly text for your navigation items.
2) putting them in a list let's the search engine know they are a group of related items. Remember css helps with "semantic meaning."
3) easy to add/edit/delete items and maintain.

There are more reasons but those come to mind first.

Here are some new pages on css/xhtml templates that I am working on and that may interest you. They are still in draft form but it is possible to build an entire site from the examples I provide.

As already mentioned css will not get you out of the sandbox any quicker, but you will have a better site now and perhaps a better position when you do get out.

The quickest way I've found (no more than a few days) is to create the new site you want ranked highly so that it's PEOPLE-friendly (no SEO tricks for SEO's sake) and then link to it from another site with PR6+. So far it's worked everytime. Maybe luck, though ... who really understands search engines?

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

wheatworks, it is not possible to rank a site in Google or Yahoo from scratch within a few days no matter what method you use. At least not for our coveted terms such as "area real estate" "area homes" etc the search engines just arent set up that way.

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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.

Hi, Webmaster!

I may be talking about something different than the rest of the group. If so, I'm probably going to learn something

Prior to this past Saturday afternoon, the phrase "loan comparison analysis" was no where on LoanSpread.com.

Saturday afternoon I made the following changes to the home page of LoanSpread.com:

H1 text: "Multiple Loan Comparison Analysis of 135 Loans at Once"

New first sentence: "Loan Spread Calculator Pro, 29.95 US, is a loan calculator with a powerful difference: Multiple Loan Comparison Analysis." I also added the phrase to the second paragraph and in the second paragraph from the last.

I just searched Google for loan comparison analysis and LoanSpread.com is #3 of about 4,010,000 listings for loan comparison analysis. It's #4 of 7,300 if the search phrase is in quotes.

I may have missed the intent of the original post, but I do find Google to be very responsive to changes if they're done on a person-friendly that has incoming links from a PR5/6 site. Maybe luck?

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

Briefly, you did two things, you directed the search engine to the main theme of your page "Loan Comparison" by giving semantic meaning in the h1 tag. Secondly you backed it up in the following paragraph (correct use of p tags also provide meaning). Inbound links with similar text will provide even more meaning for search engines. Search engines do not need markup to find content but by using the markup in the way you did you provided semantic meaning to your content. Most SEO vendors praise h1 tags for keywords but fail to understand how they give meaning to content and as a result will use them indiscriminately, incorrectly or both. It is a subtle point but one I frequently find overlooked by webmasters and SEO vendors.

I see from http://www.whois.sc/djtrealestate.com that you created your site on 20 July 2005. It's just too new to 'dig' itself out of the G sandbox. As mentioned, links and content are the keys to success.

My recommendations are

1. build a blog (Wordpress) and post to it everyday,

2. change some of the Colorado to CO (I check my customers' server logs everyday and don't see the state names spelled out),

3. use http://www.myriadsearch.com/ to check positions of different keyword combinations.

Oh yeah, hoping that your Organization Address listed at whois is not your home address. Not a good idea, get yourself a PO Box.

Good Luck.

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