Archive for October, 2007
More Ways to Get Good Incoming Links
· CommentsYou Need Incoming Links
You really can’t have too many links pointing at your website, so I’m always on the lookout for new places to get good incoming links.
If you’ve been following SEO for a while, you’re probably aware that many search engines have downgraded the importance of reciprocal links (you link to my site and I link to yours). When that happened, some webmasters stopped doing reciprocal links altogether, and as usual with the lack of consistency in SEO, some webmasters still swear by them.
But, in any event, you still need good one-way incoming links to your website. The main reason you need those links is because search engines use them as a way to gauge the importance of your website for particular keyword phrases. One way to look at it is that the search engines see links coming to your website as a “vote” for your site.
Basic Linking Rules
Of course, there are some rules – some that are even pretty widely-accepted:
- Your incoming links should be from related websites – strong real estate websites are ideal, but at a minimum, make sure that you’re not depending on links from your cousin’s personal blog to increase your authority on the web.
- The words that are used to link to your site are important. Since the search engines use incoming links as a vote, make sure they know what people are voting for! If someone is going to link to your website, make sure they use one of your targeted keywords, not something like “Click Here”. Real keyword phrases help the search engines figure out that you are being referenced as an authority on “City Real Estate”, for example.
- Vary the keyword phrases that are used to link to your site. If every link coming to your site uses exactly the same words (called anchor text), the search engines will figure out that something nefarious is afoot. Try to obtain natural sounding links that use variations of your keyword phrases.
- Find ways to get links to all the key pages of your real estate website. Don’t always link to your home page. For example, make sure you have links to content pages that are optimized for specific city or neighborhood keyword phrases.
- If you have a blog or a second website, use the rules above when linking to your own site(s).
- Be careful about paying for links. I haven’t seen this as a problem with the major directories that charge a fee for displaying a link. But, there are a lot of websites out there who would be glad to take your money, and the odds are they aren’t very particular about the links they display.
- Don’t build links too quickly. Search engines are looking for a natural progression in the build up of incoming links to your site. So, even if you could take a week and concentrate on getting as many good incoming links as possible, don’t do it.
Finally, check out this article by Michael Russer – he lists a number of opportunities for obtaining incoming links from some unique sources.
Happy campaigning!
How to Monitor Your Real Estate Website
· CommentsIf you have a real estate website, there are a number of things you might want to track in order to make it the best it can be.
Analyze Your Site’s Traffic
One of the most important things to track is the traffic on the site. Your web host should provide a way for you to do that. Or, you can always use Google Analytics.
The Google offering is free, and has fairly recently been updated. You will need to add a bit of code to the header or footer of your website or blog in order for the Analytics to track your traffic.
Analyzing your traffic will tell you a lot about how people find your website, how long they stay, how often people return, and which pages are most popular and the type of monitor most of your users have, among other things.
It gives you a great opportunity to fine-tune your content, design and navigation. For example, if you’ve designed for a large-size monitor (high resolution), it will tell you how many of your visitors have to use the horizontal scroll bar to see your pages. The vast majority of my visitors use a 1024×768 resolution screen, so I make sure there is no horizontal scroll needed at that size.
But Wait, There’s More!
After reviewing traffic, there are a number of things you might want to know about your website:
- Checking which search engines have indexed various pages on your website
- Checking on the incoming links (or backlinks) the search engines show for your site
- Checking where your site ranks in the search engines for the keywords you are targeting
- Checking what information a search engine can see on your website
And, there are all kinds of other types of information that may be helpful, or that you may just be curious about.
The best collection of tools I’ve seen all in one place reside at SEOmoz. You’ll find a lot of free analysis tools on that site, although some are reserved for their Premium Members. Don’t worry – you can create a free account at that site that will give you access to lots of information that you may not be able to easily get elsewhere.
Take some time to review the tools available at SEOmoz – you’ll undoubtedly find something you like. And, if anyone knows how the site came to be called SEOmoz, please let me know!
Don’t Forget the Long Tail!
· CommentsAnother SEO Myth
Recently I was talking to a real estate agent who was at a loss wondering how to drive traffic to his website. He knew about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but he had heard or read that you can only get ranked for one or two terms.
In case anyone else has heard that, rest assured that it is not true. There are a couple ways that I could understand that idea being passed along.
- Each page on your website can only be effectively optimized for one or two, and maybe three related keyword phrases.
- So, for example, you might want to optimize a page for Atlanta real estate and Atlanta real estate listings. But, you wouldn’t want to try to optimize it for Atlanta real estate, New York real estate, Chicago real estate and Boston real estate. There are two many phrases in that second example, and they are too unrelated to one another.
- Regardless of whether you are doing your own SEO or you’re hiring someone else to do it for you, limitations in time and budget often dictate that you would only try to rank for a couple keywords at one time. That doesn’t mean you can’t, it just means it may not be feasible.
Remember the Long Tail
Either way, the important thing to keep in mind is the long-tail search result phenomenon. There are a lot of definitions of the term long-tail, I’ve discovered. It is actually a term defining a statistical distribution. For example, Wikipedia defines it this way: ”The long tail is the colloquial name for a long-known feature of some statistical distributions. In these distributions a high-frequency or high-amplitude population is followed by a low-frequency or low-amplitude population which gradually ‘tails off’.”
In more simple terms, in relation to SEO, the long-tail refers to all the keyword phrases that you never optimized for, but that your site ranks for in the search engines.
For example, using the stats for our site, BuildRealEstateResults.com, for the month of September, 2007, the site was found in the search engines for 869 different keyword phrases. We’ve only optimized and done SEO on a very, very small percentage of those phrases.
Some of those 869 phrases bring targeted traffic to our website. Some of them are silly things, like ranking for roaches and water bugs after a Whimsical Wednesday post on that topic. By the way, we’ve fallen off the charts for that term – it was just a fairly normal phenomenon where the search engines will rank a fairly strong site for a phrase, but then they figure out it’s rather silly, so the ranking disappears.
The bottom line is this: don’t despair if you only have the time or budget to do active on-going SEO on a couple terms. The long-tail phenomenon will ensure that you get ranked for a variety of other phrases once the search engines figure out what your site is all about!
Whimsical Wednesday: Here’s to the Mussels
· CommentsNOTE: Blog Action Day was a huge success. See the wrap up information at www.BlogActionDay.com
As a follow up to Monday’s post on the environment, I thought I’d share some of the issues we’re dealing with here in Atlanta and Georgia as a whole. Right now, the biggest problem we’ve got is a lack of water.
Lake Lanier, which is the source of much of the region’s water is at near record lows. In some places, there are 18′ wide stretches between where boat docks end and the lake water begins. Naturally, when we’re not in a severe drought, the water comes right up to the docks, which is really handy if you have a boat.
Is our drought due to global warming? I doubt there’s any agreement on that score, but when you put this together with all the other weird weather phenomenon worldwide, one must wonder.
This drought is not just affecting recreational boaters. We’re now in a Level 4 Drought, according to the EPA. We’ve already got outdoor water bans. The suggestions that are being made to keep outdoor plants alive are varied. One is to use rinse water from the clothes washer to water plants.
I’m not quite sure how that is supposed to work. You can’t just put the drain from the washer into a bucket because you can’t use water with detergent in it, just rinse water. So, are we supposed to stop the washer after the rinse cycle and bail the water out? Or, crawl behind the washer in the middle of each load to put the drain hose into a bucket?
And, there’s talk of putting limits on indoor water use. What does that mean? Go back to the concept of Saturday night baths?
As it turns out, one reason Lake Lanier is so low is that we’re sending water down to Florida to make sure endangered freshwater mussels in Florida have lots of water. Really – can you imagine a world without fat threeridge and purple bankclimbers?
But, I really don’t want to lose any endangered species, so I’ve got an idea. Rather than making the people in Georgia do without water, why don’t we just relocate the mussels?
There must be other places with enough fresh water rivers for these critical little mussels to live. And, I’d even volunteer to help. I mean, how hard could it be?
I don’t anticipate the relocation project ending up on Animal Planet with the host peering around a bunch of reeds explaining that “Joe is set with the tranquilizer gun to subdue the animals in preparation for their move”.
I think it would probably just be a matter of bending over to pick up the mussels. Although I must admit that I’ve never seen a purple bankclimber, so I’m not sure what kind of speed they can muster if they don’t want to be picked up.
In any event, before the state of Georgia is declared a disaster area due to the air being contaminated with excessive body odor, I think I’ll give the Governor a call and suggest that we organize a mussel round up.
Virtual Tours. . .
They’re great tools. And, there are lots of ways you can create one.
- You can use photos that you take yourself and create a tour that showcases each room of the house.
- You can get a professional photographer, and your tour will take on a new dimension with professional lighting and photo composition.
- You can hire a company to make a 360 degree video of each room.
- And, then there are tours you host yourself.
Have you ever wished that you could actually show your listings to people who visit your website? Who better to showcase the home than you as the listing agent? If you’re not camera-shy, working with a videographer that is tuned into the real estate industry will allow you to make a video tour like this one done by Kevin Boer of a Potrero Hill loft in San Francisco.
If you’re interested in creating a video like Kevin’s you should check out WellcomeMat.com website. WellcomeMat.com was one of the finalists for the Inman Most Innovative Web Service Award in 2007.
The Virtual Tour Leading Edge: Personally-Hosted Virtual Tours
WellcomeMat lets you host a video tour that you take yourself, or one that is made by a professional videographer. The site is unique, however, in that it will also help you get acquainted with videographers in your area, one of whom might be just the person to help you make a video of a personal tour – and make it look great.
When you visit the WellcomeMat site, take a look at the video in the left column of the home page. It chronicles the making of one of the videos where the listing agent does a walk-through of the home.
There are a number of other very creative videos on the site. One agent who is selling condominiums taped existing condo owners giving glowing testimonials about the building, the units and the neighborhood. Other videos included shots of local shopping or recreational areas.
Right now, WellcomeMat is a free site, but that can’t go on indefinitely or they’d have to close down. They will be monetizing the site, and they’ve written a blog post to explain what the current plans are.
Why Create a Personally-Hosted Virtual Tour?
- Visitors to your website get to know you on a much more personal basis than just gazing fondly at your photograph.
- You can showcase your marketing capabilities and give your visitors a feel for what it would be like having you represent their home as a listing agent.
- A personal tour will do a much better job of selling your listings.
- You can reinforce your credentials as a neighborhood expert.
So, what do you think? Ready to become famous?
