Archive for Real Estate Blogs
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This guest post was written by Adam Vradenburg,
an Internet marketing guru
In Part III of this series on backlink strategies, the question was asked: What If Your Link Building Doesn’t Work as Well as You Think It Should? Here are the rest of the suggestions on what to do to improve the ranking of your real estate website.
Publish or Perish
This idiom from academia is applicable to your website as well. While the situation is perhaps not as dire as the phrase would imply, if you publish new content on a regular basis, you’ll often find yourself ahead of other sites.
Make a point of writing new content consistently. It doesn’t have to be every day, but make a point of writing a few articles a week, and updating existing content.
In addition to being a plus for users, it also lets Google know that your site is relevant and up to date. This can take an hour a week – if you can write a real estate blog post in 20 minutes, you can use the rest of the time to freshen up content and do some surfing yourself.
If you need inspiration as to what to write about, be topical, write commentary on events happening in your real estate market or on national real estate issues, and you’ll pick up higher search volume. It’s easier to jump in at a higher ranking for news than it is for “established” search queries. For example, I wrote early about a topic I knew would be trending in the future (in my case an annual event), and search finally became my biggest traffic source.
Just Keep on Linking
If you’ve been acquiring backlinks like mad and your rankings don’t seem to budge, don’t despair. Fresh links will score you points in Google’s algorithm in the same way that fresh content will.
If you can, get links to new articles on your website or blog. This practice is called “deep linking”. It is helpful if you can avoid having all of your incoming links point to your home page. Deep linking shows a more natural linking process. Stick to your strategy and it will pay off in the end.
Google puts a lot of emphasis on age – the age of your website is taken into consideration, and so is the age of your links. Let the links you’ve acquired ripen, and in the meantime go out and get new ones. Time is on your side.
Besides, link building is an ongoing process, it’s not a task that you check off once as completed. Rather it’s continuous, and even once you’ve reached your goals and you rank for your search terms, that’s no reason to sit back.
Get Creative
If you think you’ve exhausted all possible sources of links, it’s time to start thinking outside of the box.
- Explore offline alternatives to find linking opportunities: business associates, friends and your entire sphere of influence. Even if a site isn’t related to yours, get a link.
- Join the local chamber of commerce; get a link from the local REALTOR® organization. Sponsor a pinball machine for the youth center and get a link from their site. The point is: Think outside the box and get creative.
Most importantly make sure your site is linkworthy. In other words your site should be pleasing to the eye, look professional and have great content so that links can come naturally and so that potential partners will be willing to link to you.
Keep a Record
It’s important to keep a record to know what works, and what doesn’t. In order to build links effectively, you need to stay organized, and keep a record of who you’ve written to, where you have links, and a list of where you’d like get links from.
In addition to that, when you get a confirmation, or change something on your site, keep a note of it. It’s best to track your positions on dates when links are placed or something else of note happens – mark it and see if it influences your rankings down the line.
Don’t change too many things at once, because you’ll never know exactly which action helped or hurt.
And, finally. . . be patient and remember: ranking changes are part of the algorithm!
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At the start of May, the BRER Blog published two articles of mine covering real estate backlink strategies to dominate Google. It’s almost been three months since then, so if you’ve been working on your link profile you should see your efforts start to bear fruit, right? Well, that depends.
This article is a follow-up, but it will also help anyone who has been frustrated in their attempts to grow their link profile or anyone who hasn’t had as much success as they’d hoped to.
What If Your Link Building Doesn’t Work
as Well as You Think It Should?
You may be thinking: “I’ve followed all the steps, I invested a great deal of time and went out and got links from sites ranking for my search term, and I picked up the freebies you mentioned, and I’m still kicking around on page three of the Google search engine results page.”
There could be any number of reasons why you can’t crack the top 10, if you have a strong link profile and still aren’t getting anywhere it’s time to think outside of links and take a look at how your site stacks up against the competition. If you’ve done everything right so far you may have underestimated them.
Do a Competitive Analysis
While backlinks are an important factor in determining the relevance of your site to a specific key phrase, it isn’t the only criterion. Take a good hard look at the sites performing well to see if there are any points where you are lacking.
- It could be that other sites are stronger in that they are larger and have more pages indexed.
- Look for usability issues on your real estate site. Look at your analytics data and see how many visitors bounce (leave without visiting any other pages on your site). You can also check the internal searches on your site to see what they are looking for.
- Look at your competitors’ link profile, specifically the quantity and quality of links they have containing your keywords and see how you compare. At this point you might need a more powerful SEO Tool like Open Site Explorer – we’ll all have to find an alternative, since Yahoo! is shutting down Site Explorer at the end of this year.
If none of the above applies then it could be that your competitor’s site is older and has had good links for a longer period of time. A long track record with Google is often an indicator of trustworthiness.
So if your competition’s site is old and established, and you have a shiny new domain – game over, right? Wrong!
There are a number of things you can do to gain an advantage over old “evergreen” content. Stay tuned for Part IV!!
Free Source for Online and Print Content
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I was just introduced to a free service offered by US Inspect. It’s definitely worth taking a look. They have Print Content that you can use as a flyer or online content and Video Content.
The third offering is Web Content. You may find some of the web pages interesting, but that does take people off of your website. The widgets that are offered as Web Content can be used to good advantage. You’ll see an example of one below. The links in the widget open in new windows, so you can safely assume that your visitors can easily return to your website.
I looked at several of the offerings on the US Inspect website, and I found the information to be current, interesting and well-presented. Of course, US Inspect also gets links back to their website. But, that only makes sense since the content is free.
Give it a try – let me know what you think!
U.S. Inspect Home Inspections
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You want your website to be sticky, right? You know what sticky is – it means that the tools and information you have on your website is so good that visitors are encouraged to stay on the site once they land there, and they’re encouraged to return. Hopefully often!
I’ve talked to a lot of clients who have told the same story. At least one of their clients mentioned that they’d been visiting the agent’s website for months before making contact.
That type of thing only happens if you give visitors reasons to come back to your website. And, using maps could just be one of those ways. How could you use a map? Here are two ways to consider.
Map Your Military Town
If you live in a military town, you know that there are lots of military folks who are transferring in and out. For those who are coming to your town, it’s a pretty safe bet that they don’t know much, if anything, about the area. Here’s an example of a map used in San Antonio. There are more than a few locations where a soldier could be stationed in San Antonio. This map is a big help for soldiers who are going to do a military relocation to San Antonio.
The map identifies where the military locations are in the area. It also shows the medical facilities where many of the military transferees work. Using that map, a soldier can familiarize themselves with how the town is laid out, they can visit the websites for the various locations, and if they are considering a particular home for sale, they can get directions and gauge commute time.
For Lesser Known Locations
If you live in an area that doesn’t have a big city close by, visitors to your website won’t know how the location of towns relate to one another. But, with an interactive map, people looking for Marianna FL or Chipley FL Real Estate, for example, will find their way easily on this website.
For Niche Markets
If you are marketing to luxury buyers, you might want to provide a map that shows where the luxury neighborhoods are. You could also help visitors figure out where the neighborhoods are in relation to local attractions – like the symphony or the best country clubs.
Actually, regardless of your niche, there is probably some type of an interactive map that would be applicable. If you’re near a lake that is a big draw, for example, your visitors could determine what area they might want to consider to be close enough to work and to lake activities. I think you get the idea.
There are many alternatives for providing maps. We can custom-design maps for you, and they’d be very pretty. But, as far as usefulness and stickiness, I don’t think you can beat an interactive map.
What has been your experience?
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Is Flash Obsolete in the Mobile World?
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Flash – you love it, but you hate it. How can you get into such a pickle? Lots of real estate website owners like flash headers. Those headers do a great job of showing multiple views of a geographic area, or illustrating various services. But, with the advent of so many mobile devices, do you need to avoid using flash?
First, just so we’re all on the same page, I need to point out that when I’m talking about flash, I don’t mean an entire page or website created using flash. Hopefully, designers and website owners stopped doing that type of design a long time ago. The big issue, of course, is SEO. The search engines don’t read flash, so an entire page of flash images is just a blank page where the search engines are concerned.
The other thing that needs to be pointed out is that a flash element on a page, like a flash header, doesn’t stop a website from being crawled by the search engines or from obtaining a good ranking on search engine result pages. You will hear people disagree with that statement, but that’s been my experience.
Getting back to the flash and mobile device issue. . . One of my more clever clients has come up with a way to have his flash and see it, too. He wrote a script that does the following: it identifies the type of browser that is being used to view the site, then it either displays the flash header, or a static header.
The static header is nothing more than a JPG file that contains one of the flash “slides”. It isn’t a flash file, so devices such as the iPad can display it easily.
Here’s an example. If you are curious, follow the link below to view the website with your iPad. You should see the website displayed with a non-flash header. If you look at it with a browser such as Internet Explorer, you’ll see the flash.
We installed the script on this website. Please! Do not contact the owner of the site! They won’t be able to tell you anything about how it was done!
If you are interested in knowing more about the script, please contact me using the form below. Thank you for your cooperation.
