Emerald Isle Rentals and SEO

Living along the Crystal Coast in Carteret County and being active in the IT, networking, and search optimization fields I keep pretty close tabs on local rental companies and their various search engine optimization vendors. I know...I'm a nerd and really need a life, but its just comical to me because I have some basic knowledge of SEO practices and see some big money wasted all too often. So I'm committed to offering free tips and advice through this blog. If anyone finds it and uses it, good on them. I hope they see some positive results. 

So today as I was perusing the Emerald Isle vacation rental listings I stumbled on the Shorewood Real Estate website. I noticed a couple things they could do to help improve their Google search engine rankings. We'll start with the first page. 

First thing I look at when evaluating SEO is the on-page items we can control and make them work FOR us. Shorewood's title tag is good. But I would make one minor adjustment, I would change the part "Emerald Isle Vacation Rentals | Real Estate |" to "Emerald Isle | Rentals | Real Estate |" or something to that effect. I'm a firm believer that Google is really keen (and getting keener) on locations and delivering results that are most relevant to the area the user is searching for. So first establish your location, then the product you are offering. 

Another thing I noticed, is their incoming link profile looks a bit weak. They need more incoming links in a bad way. The Emerald Isle market is extremely competitive, and in order to compete with the big boys effectively for traffic they need about 20 (or more) QUALITY links. Links from the local bicycle shop, restaurants, etc. will do them a lot of justice. Especially if those links were crafted using the terms "Emerald Isle rentals" as anchor text. 

One of the easiest, cheapest ways to generate quality links is to start blogging. Or if you don't have time to blog, pay a local blogger to write articles for you on his blog and link to you from them. I see one of their sales agents is on the ball and has a blog over at Active Rain, but I know they have more agents than that. Plus she's slacking, her last post was from July....of 2007! Who knows maybe she doesn't even work there anymore. Either way, someone at Shorewood should have a blog on Active Rain, and another person should have one on blogger.com. Then while writing articles they need to be incorporating their keywords, and linking to their site from the blogs. So easy, it's funny. 

My last recommendation for them is to generate a custom 404 error page that if nothing else contains a link back to their home page. Just in case they have a broken link somewhere on the site, not to mention in case someone is linking to one of their pages that no longer exists. This will prevent search engine spiders and potential guests from getting the default 404 error and possibly spending their time elsewhere, like a competitor's site.