by: Debbie Morris, Director of Online Services

Driving traffic to your communities and model homes is important, but since over 80% of new home searches begin on the Web, make sure you are doing everything you can to drive traffic to your online communities and model homes.

Search engine marketing (SEM) comprises of two methods of online marketing: paid search (pay-per-click - PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) which is search engine submission where your site shows up in the non-paid areas of search engines.

Paid search is powerful if done correctly and I will cover PPC in my next article, but SEO is extremely crucial for a successful, long-term online marketing strategy since it requires the most diligence and won't cost you nearly as much as paid search in the long run and you will get better results overall - up to 30% and 40% better!

Something you should know about SEO is that nearly all search engines base their search results on "search relevancy" (thank you, Google) - that is matching a person's search keywords and phrases with the most appropriate websites.

So how do search engines determine search relevancy, and more importantly, how can your site be seen as appropriate by search engines? Well, here are several items that make the lineup. Think of the guideline below as a checklist to follow where each answer gets you a relevancy point which when totaled gets your website higher on the list than a competitor.

1.)  Domain Name - do the searched keywords appear in the company's domain name? If so, those keywords will bolster the company's position.

2.)  Title Tag - almost the most important feature, title tags should include your product (new homes), your location(s), and your company's name within 10-12 words.

3.)  Description Meta Tag - Probably the second most important feature, it can mimic your Title Tag, but you can have about 20-25 words.

4.)  Meta Keywords - the importance of keywords is a hot debate among SEO experts, primarily because Alta Vista and Inktomi are the only two search engines believed to still rely on keywords. Google has abandoned using keywords as part of their relevancy algorithm about 3-4 years ago due to keyword stuffing (cramming more or duplicating keywords).

5.)  Site Content - Your first text on your home page needs to match your Title and Description tags; as part of your site's content, be sure to include image and link alt tags (instead of naming a logo image something like logo.jpg).

6.)  Site Popularity - It never fails, popularity rules...the more links you have pointing back to your website (the home page and specific pages) the better, and the more FREE links you have coming back to your site, the best results will be had. How do you make your site popular? Contribute to blogs, submit your press releases to online newspapers, or upload your taped training session or commercial outtakes to YouTube, FaceBook and MySpace with links back to your site to see more outtakes.

So how many of the above items do you do on your website? Want to know your site's rankings? Google offers a free way to find this out. Go to http://www.googlerankings.com.

Not happy with your results, give these guidelines a try and revisit Google Rankings to check your site's improvement. It's not all you can do to move up in the search engine rankings, but you will get better results when you follow the guidelines consistently - with every new page you upload to your site, and with every image you add to a page. And doing all of these will net you higher positions than you've ever had before, and better traffic to your online communities and model homes.