Have you ever wondered how top ranking sites are spending their advertising dollars? Do they advertise offline? Do they outsource their SE positioning work, or do they optimize their own sites in-house? What are they doing to increase the visibility and popularity of their sites?

For this article, I chose two highly competitive keyphrases and one moderately competitive keyword and then contacted three companies who are having success in getting their sites ranked at or near the top and asked them a series of questions.

The two competitive keyphrases:

homes for sale
used cars

The moderately competitive keyword:

shortwave -- (as in shortwave radios)

Of course, the examples used in this article reflect the positioning of these sites at the time of writing. Naturally they are bound to fluctuate up and down in the listings. Even so, you'll likely find them placed closely to where their positioning is described below. And, regardless of where they're positioned at the time you happen to read this article, the examples and the analysis remain strategically valid.

First Example . . .
Keyword phrase: homes for sale

Site: HarmonHomes.com (http://www.harmonhomes.com)

HarmonHomes.com boasts the following top 10 rankings for the keyword phrase, homes for sale:

#1 in AltaVista
#3 in Google
#4 in Fast/All the Web
#7 in Lycos
#3 in Yahoo! Web Pages
#4 in pure Inktomi results (http://169.207.238.189/search/)

It's important to note that HarmonHomes.com is owned by Trader Publishing Company out of Norfolk, Virginia, which also owns several other large Web sites, such as CareerWeb.com, ForRent.com, Parenthood.com, and Roomsaver.com. Erin Cullipher, Marketing Manager of HarmonHomes.com, gave a quick summary of the site:

"Headquartered in Virginia Beach, Va., HarmonHomes.com is a leading provider of online real estate classified ads. As a division of Trader Publishing Company and part of the family of Trader Web sites, HarmonHomes.com provides a comprehensive homes-for-sale database for home buyers while serving as a convenient and effective advertising forum for real estate professionals."

According to Erin, Trader has a complete Web development team that is responsible for each of their domains, with the exception of Roomsaver. It's also important to note that the main page of HarmonHomes.com is a straight HTML page. However, most of the interior pages, since they are a classified ad site, are database delivered.

Erin answered the following interview questions:

Question: Do you do anything special to boost your site's link popularity?

Erin: We are lucky to have a strong, built-in system of links due to our company's network of highly trafficked sites. We have links to HarmonHomes.com on all sites within the network and we, in return, link to all of them as well. In addition, we have agreements with two companies who provide Web sites for real estate agents.

To offer a national real estate listings database to the mostly local visitors to these agents' sites, our link is typically placed under a "Search Homes Nationally" button. In addition, we are pursuing a links page and reciprocal links program with businesses affiliated with residential real estate.

Question: How do you spend your advertising dollars for your Web site?

Erin: Our online business is somewhat unique in that we have two target markets: we sell our advertising products to real estate professionals in order to serve home buyers. So, while we market our products to agents, we also have to drive consumer traffic to the site to satisfy our agent clients and further build our business.

As far as our trade advertising efforts, we concentrate our dollars and efforts in the following areas: trade shows, email marketing, print ads, direct mail and online ads. To attract consumers to the site, we concentrate on the following areas: SEO, home show sponsorships and email marketing.

To reach both of these markets, we also place our URL on the front cover of every issue of Harmon Homes magazine (78 million issues annually) and advertise the site in the publication. We also conduct intensive media efforts nationally. Both of these initiatives are high impact and relatively low cost, if not free.

Question: Do you purchase keywords from the pay engines like Overture? If so, approximately how much do you spend each month on Overture advertising?

Erin: Yes, we feel that pay engines are integral to our SEO efforts, especially here in the beginning when we're trying to establish a strong Web presence. We do have an account with Overture. We spend less than $300 on Overture and other PFP engines.

Question: How much actual search engine optimization work do you do on the site?

Erin: Optimization is done on an almost daily basis. In order to serve our customers, the site changes daily. Being graphically heavy and with most of our pages being dynamically generated, we have worked to increase the amount of text on our pages. We have paid special attention to relevancy factors by maximizing keywords and phrases.

Question: Are you using cloaking technology on your site?

Erin: No, we do not use any cloaking technology. Our pages are submitted to search engines manually with no doorway pages, agent name or IP delivery.

Continued in Part 2. Contact Robin Nobles at robinn@acws.com for the complete article.