I need to start swimming

[Trish676]

Hi there,
I'm relatively new to the marketing game and have been given the task of getting our name out there, we are a commercial, residential and industrial property listing company. My new target market would be international investors wanting to start a business in SA and looking for property....... where and how do I begin????

bizpremises.co.za

[duncan drennan]

How about joining some of the international property forums and see how you can add some value to the users there?

[Trish676]

Thank you Duncan that sure is going to be a start for me.

[IanF]

Hi there,
My new target market would be international investors wanting to start a business in SA and looking for property....... where and how do I begin????

bizpremises.co.za

Trish
Get an SEO expert like chatmaster (Roelof) to help you optimise your website. I just got an enquiry today for 2.25 million 230 page catalog from the US. I have no chance of printing this as I could never handle it, and I doubt if there is that capacity in SA. So I declined but the message is getting out there.

[Trish676]

Thanks Ian I will do that, and you right I need to at least get the interest generated out there.

[Chatmaster]

Hi Trish

I had a look at your website and would suggest that you join the Real Estate Webmaster Forum it is owned by SEOGuy (Morgan Carey) He is one of the old SEO specialists from SEOChat's old days (When it was still worth something) and specialises in SEO for real estate websites. Besides that, you will start moving around in the inner circles of the most competitive real estate websites in the world. If you need backlinks there are plenty, just be respectful and friendly as they are a close knit community with rules.

I also suggest that you publish articles about business opportunities in South Africa or something relevant. You can use Article submitter software to get them out. I seriously recommend the purchased versions instead of the free versions they are much more effective. Further I suggest that you also add RSS Feed to your own site and publish original (not copies) news and articles. You can also use rss feed submission software to ensure that you get the feed out.

Think about it in this way. Estate agents always say location, location, location. Where a shop has a busy street your website has none. You now have to make roads so it too can have the location.

[Vincent]

You can use Article submitter software to get them out.

Roelof what are these programs and what do they do? Secondly, where can I find a free package just to check out.

[Chatmaster]

Hi Vincent

You can go to www.submitsuite.com and download their software and use the trail version, but there are several article submission software available. Just do a search on Google. Article submission software simply submits your article to many sites. Although the SEO benefits are very limited the article sites itself provides you with mountains of traffic. At the moment SA Marketing is getting between 1,500 and 2,000 unique visitors a day. I did a test last year for the term "internet marketing" My traffic went up to more than 9,000 uniques and over a period of 1 week my traffic was at least double normal. Since then my traffic went up on average 20%. That is a large jump. On my gambling sites I have been doing the same and it does provide those sites with steady streams of traffic.

The first time I used article submissions was in 2004/5 and then we did it manually. We used sites like article city and the impact was in the region of 2-3% on sites that had uniques in excess of 100k a day. Article submission certainly does have an impact on traffic and are especially helpful when your SEO and other marketing techniques are still in the pipeline. I also received several natural backlinks this way, but article submissions aren't that important for my personal SEO strategy.

[Trish676]

Hi Roelof,
Thank you very much for the useful info & tips I'm most certainly going to try them out and let you know what the outcomes is.

[Chatmaster]

Trish if you do not mind i would just like to make a few comments on your site's onpage SEO factors.

• Remove onpage styles and rather use an external style sheet.
• Considder using H1-H3 for main keywords.
• Think about using bold or strong for important keywords, this is also related to usability
• Think about using alt tags on your images main keywords.
• Your internal pages are not optimized and even lack page tiltes, seriously think about adding page titles for them and apply some SEO as with the home page. This causes a problem to target the appropriate keywords.

There are several more issues that should be addressed but one that I really find serious is the fact that each page are different and the original page template gets lost once you start click through to deeper pages. This will effect your conversion ratio.

[Dave A]

One of my thoughts was keyword optimised landing pages. But I guess that's where articles come in.

[Chatmaster]

Yes one of the major issues I have is site theming. Especially in real estate site theming is essential as it is one of the top 5 most competitive online industries. (In my experience anyway) So in terms of doing proper keyword research and having keyword specific pages within the theme of that level is essential.

[Trish676]

Hi Roelof
Thanks for all the tips, I have passed it on to the relevant people and they will be making use of it.

[caramia]

One thing I want to add for you:
1, Backlinks are (aren't) everything. Building link wisely is more recommended.
2, You should invest in writing content. Believe me, a good piece of content is likely to be shared 100 times.