Jason Tupper

Yes it's hard to believe, but the snow is coming down like crazy right now. The weatherman said earlier today it would stop by 6pm. But it's 8:30pm now and it's snowing and blowing like crazy right here in Emerald Isle. When I was coming home from work tonight it was kind of fun driving in the snow. Since moving here about 5 years ago I think its only snowed one real good time for me. I grew up in the snow and used to love it, I even loved driving in it. These days I really could do without it, even though once in a great while I'll admit its pretty cool.

It is funny to see how some people here on the Crystal Coast react to the snow. It brings the little kid out in some, whereas others get a bit nervous.

Being the dead of winter and the snow is falling like mad, it's a really good time to stay in and blog. I definitely don't want my AR blog getting stale.

The Emerald Isle rental terms are a competitive niche to aim for. It's definitely a dog eat dog world competing for these terms, but I think there's plenty of scraps even for the little guy. Those of you who keep up with the SEO posts here know that you can apply basic principles, and at the very least pick up a fair amount of scrap traffic from any popular search term.

One fellow AR blogger has actually reinforced some of the basics I learned but nearly forgot. Mr. Bobby Carroll is a real estate marketing, and SEO genius. His Crystal Coast Blog ranks quite well and surely generates him some great traffic. Anyone could learn a few tricks, or remember some they forgot from following his many informative posts.

If you're competing for some tough local terms, I wish you the best of luck. But I can assure you only a lot of hard work, long nights, and many hours of homework will even you get you to the crumbs. But the persistent bird gets the worm...or something like that right?

Hats off to the webmasters of those Emerald Isle rentals sites that rank so well. But I know I'll get mine up there too, it sure won't be easy though.

Many of my SEO clients look at me like I'm crazy when I suggest they enter the You Tube arena for SEO purposes. However, when you're targeting a very competitive set of keywords, any little bit can help. Here's how.

If you don't have a YouTube account go get one. Then since most of you are real estate agents, go make videos of real estate for sale in your area. Post them to You Tube using the proper keywords or tags, whatever YouTube calls them. Then just hang tight. It may take a few months, but more likely than not, your videos will start showing up in the Google SERPS (the results page after performing a search).

Not only will your videos start showing up in the results, but you can then embed the videos on your site's pages. Which to me seems like a great deal, because you do not have to store the videos, or use your precious bandwidth to host them. Also You Tube then links to the pages you embed the video on. So you get free incoming links. Anytime you can do that, you're ahead of the curve. For example I did an Emerald Isle fishing report back in January of 2008, and included a You Tube video. Now when you Google "Emerald Isle Fishing" my videos usually show up somewhere on the first page. Even though my site doesn't rank for these terms, my videos and the You Tube page with a link to me does rank, and to me that's better than not having any representation in the search results.

If you really want to take advantage of this, you can purchase a simple video editing program to add text like your website address or phone number to the videos. I'm convinced that You Tube can be yet another powerful, free, and easy to use trick in my SEO toolbox.

I am always blown away by the number of sites I see, owned by local, legitimate businesses, in dire need of just a little SEO work on their sites. Once again I am here showing another Crystal Coast business how to improve search rankings and increase traffic. I am a fisherman when Im not blogging, fixing computers, or writing database queries. Well when I first moved to Carteret County I didn't know where to find a good tackle shop, or find out more information on fishing local waters. So naturally where I did start looking? On Google of course!

Much to my surprise when I did my search for "Emerald Isle Fishing" the only tackle shop I had seen around was nowhere to be found. They do show up now, but in the maps section which is definitely a great start. But I usually go right past the maps anyway, and you would think they should rank in the top 10 for fishing or at least "Emerald Isle Fishing Tackle" But you'll notice this other site under the maps has both the number one and number two slots. Well that guy is me, and I know a lot of people visiting the Crystal Coast are looking for fishihing information. Man the traffic metrics on my site nearly triple once summer gets here and it's mostly searches for fishing info, restaurant info, etc.

See once the people buy, or rent from you doesn't mean you should quit targeting them online. They will still be there looking for things related to your area. Why not remind them you are there for them as much as you can, even when the last thing on their mind is real estate, or finding a place to rent. Hope this helps some of you get some new ideas on how to stay competitive in the ever changing SEO landscape.

There is a multitude of Vacation Rental websites targeted towards the Crystal Coast. So I figured, why not join in? I've decided to let the kind folks here at AR have a little sneak peek into my thought process. Firstly there are literally thousands of vacation homes here on the coast. Each of these are owned by regular ordinary people. They have to get their rental income or else that vacation property becomes a drain on their everyday finances. You know what else? They all hate their rental management companies. Even if they will not admit it, they hate giving ANY of that rental income away in the form of commission, maintenance fees, etc. But what can they do? Not much considering many of them live out of state or do not have the time to deal with making reservations, housekeeping, etc.

So I thought about putting a Crystal Coast blog up as a way to kind of break into the Crystal Coast website arena and experiment. Well it has done pretty well, considering I haven't had to work too hard, until lately. There has been an astounding number of excellent bloggers joining the ranks. But now its time to take it a step further. My first blog is hosted on a server that I no longer have ANY control over aside from my wordpress blog. I don't know who's maintaining, and updating it, and if it dies, I don't know that it will be replaced. So I decided to start fresh from scratch, using different keywords, and targetting a differnet audience...the ever-growing vacation rental market. Yes real estate sales are in the toilet, but the rentals never seem to faulter. My new rentals site will still be targeted towards the Crystal Coast, and it will have a blog to kind of keep fresh content coming, and generate good traffic. But its going to have a brand new totally original vacation rental inventory.

But all this fun comes at a price. Lots and lots of coding. I'm not a programmer by trade, so its been very trying at times. Especially since the SQL book I have is from about 2 minor versions ago and some of the syntax has changed. But I will let you guys know when it is finished. I'll be looking for some feedback.

I'll start off by saying that whenever you purchase a new domain name, it will help you to have some or all of your desired keywords in the domain name, that should be pretty obvious. Preferably with no hyphens, but if you need one or two hyphens that's no biggie. More than two dashes and your domain name looks spammy to me. Okay so lets say that your targeting "keyword real estate".

Well then the obvious domain name choice should be keywordrealestate.com or keywordrealestate.net. However, most likely those two domain names are taken and you'll have to start looking for keyword-realestate.com, keyword-realestate.net, or keywordreal-estate.com etc.

Now lets say that your competition has already locked in all of the reasonable domain names with your keywords in them. Damn I hate when that happens too. Or lets say whoever was in charge of the company's website before you bought companyname.com and that's the company domain name.

Can you still beat out your competition? If their webmaster is completely incompetent, then no problem. But most likely they paid some "experts" big dollars and they rank number one for your key search terms. Now can you still beat them? Well, it will be tough, but you can do it. Living in Emerald Isle, NC I keep pretty close tabs on the google ranks of local real estate companies. So do a Google search for "Emerald Isle Real Estate" and see what you get. Whoa, look at that, a domain name with ZERO keywords in it outranks another site with two of the four keywords in its domain name.

How can this be? Well I know Bluewater's webmaster and he kicks butt at SEO and programming. He also spent a lot of time and hard work to accomplish this. So I would have to say that you can beat any domain name for your key terms if you really work at it, and provide something useful for your visitors. But it is definitely easier having keywords in your domain name.

I think some search engines like Yahoo still put a lot of weight on domain names with keywords in them so you may be able to generate a lot of traffic just from a good domain name.