Archive for Link Building
Using Images to Optimize Your Website
· CommentsThis guest post was written by Sam Chapman who markets Austin Real Estate
If you have a real estate website and want to attract buyers, you will probably have visitors from outside your area. I have attracted many buyers to my Austin Real Estate website and I have yet to sell a home to a local who found me on the internet. Most visitors are from outside of Austin and most of these are actually from outside Texas.
So one thing I have done in order for people understand Austin was to create several photo albums on my site. If you want to do this, take your own photos – respect intellectual property rights and never use anyone else’s photos without permission.
When you load photos, make sure to add appropriate alt image text. This is the text that shows up when you hover a mouse over a photo on a web page (if the alt text exists). Search engines can recognize that an image is on a web page, but can’t tell what it is. Alt text gives the search engines an idea of what the image is showing. The other important thing about alt image text is that it gets your keywords on the page.
Another thing you can do is upload photos to Flickr.com. When you upload a photo, create a good title using appropriate keywords. Write a good description using keywords and use appropriate tags. If you do this well, you can optimize the images to be found for your search terms. You can even point to a page on your website using html with the link embedded in appropriate anchor text.
The links from Flickr are nofollow now, but that’s not a problem. I doubt there would have been much link juice. However, if your images are good and get found, you may get clickthroughs to your site and that drives traffic. Click to see one of the Lake Travis photos I just posted. You will see the title, tag, description and embedded link back to my website. By the way, if you click on my Lake Travis Photos link, look around a while. The Lake Travis area doesn’t look anything like what people expect Texas to be like.
One thing I noticed is that if you use html to embed an address in anchor text, Flickr sometimes does something strange when you save the description. It replaces the http with a #. You need to go in and edit that and save again in order for the link to work. Otherwise, anyone clicking the link just stays on that photo on Flickr.
After your images have been on your website and Flickr for a while, some should be picked up by Google Images. The pages the images are on will show your web address, but it won’t be a live link. However, if someone clicks on an image, it sends the visitor to your website – more traffic.
So get out and take some photographs and get to work!
You may have noticed that there’s a new category showing on this blog – Link Building. That category has been updated to identify the posts that relate to building incoming links to your website. I didn’t go all the way back to the very beginning of this blog, but tagged the posts that talk most specifically about how to get incoming links. Older posts would be under the SEO category.
And, here’s another tip. RealEstateABC.com just updated their agent directory to provide more features for the $25/year “Official Member” listing. Here’s what you get for your money:
- A do-follow link under your name, linking to your home page
- No-follow links to your listings page and home search page
- Your address and phone will be displayed; adding a photo is optional at $50/year
- Up to 250 characters of “Area Text” – describing the area you work in.
Visit RealEstateABC.com to learn more about getting listed in the real estate Agent Directory. I was surprised to see that the chart on that page doesn’t list all the things that are now included in the “Official Member” listings. But, I contacted them and was assured that the features listed above are in effect.
The directory pages don’t have high PR, but they are cached by Google. And, the site gets a lot of traffic, so you may end up with people clicking through to your real estate website, too.
Thanks to Bill Gassett, who consults on Hopkinton MA real estate, I found some good ideas for increasing your exposure in your local market and getting quality incoming links to your blog.
Check out the site www.YourStreet.com. Once you join, you will be able to: “post articles, voice your opinion, join a discussion forum, and display your user profile” according to the website.
Bill has found the site helpful because he can send his blog posts to YourStreet and they are posted on the the site’s community page for his market area. I’m not sure how much juice the incoming links have because there are so many pages on the site, but I think it’s a great opportunity to check out.
YourStreet will also syndicate your blog if they think the content is appropriate. That will eliminate the need to manually add the post to the site. Just use one of the feedback forms to request syndiating your blog.
The other site Bill mentioned is www.Topix.com. Bill says that articles are cached pretty quickly on this site by Google, and Yahoo is showing some of Bill’s articles on Topix as incoming links.
Make the most of your blogging effort – get the word out electronically!
Software to Help You Build Links by Posting on Blogs
If you haven’t heard anything about software that helps you find blogs where you can leave a comment and get a one-way incoming link to your website, here’s some information you’ll find useful.
I looked at a software program called Comment Kahuna. I think that software and others like it are good tools to use if, like everything else related to SEO, you make a commitment to wear a White Hat when you use it.
Things to Keep in Mind
1. Leaving generic comments on a blog isn’t a White Hat strategy. If someone leaves a comment on this blog that is something like “I really love this blog. The information is very useful.”, I will delete it and I think anyone else would do the same. The purpose of commenting on a blog is to establish or continue a dialog on the topic of the blog post. Generic comments aren’t helpful.
- The commenting software allows you to store “profiles” that consist of an author name, email address, URL and comment. The software will automatically insert the information in the profile into a blog’s comment fields.
- But, if you aren’t going to actually read a post and come up with a valid comment, then you’re abusing the system. I’d suggest using the first three fields, but writing a valid original comment for each blog post.
2. Building backlinks by posting blog comments only works if the search engines put a value on the links. There are two places where the search engines could be instructed to ignore an outgoing link.
First, there could be a tag in the header on a blog page that looks something like this: rel=”nofollow”. Second, there could be an argument added to a specific link: rel=”external nofollow” or rel=”nofollow”. The bottom line is that if there is any type of a nofollow tag on a page, the odds are that outgoing links will not be acknowledged by the search engines.
- Comment software can be used to find sites that use the nofollow tag on their home page. But, you’ll really need to evaluate each website yourself to determine whether links are set up as nofollow. Here’s why:
- The software can spot a nofollow on the home page of the blog. However, most blogs don’t display comments on the home page. So, if there are no comments, the software can’t tell if the links are set up as nofollow or not.
- The best thing to do is to use the comment software to identify blogs on a specific topic. Then, for each blog that is identified as being nofollow-less, you will need to:
- Find a post that has comments.
- Go to the page with the comments on it.
- Look at the source code for that page (View-Source or RightClick-View Source)
- Do a search for the characters nofollow (Edit-Find in a notepad file)
- If nofollow is discovered on the page, mark the blog accordingly
What Comment Software Can Do
Commenting software can be helpful in finding blogs on related topics and automating some of the tasks required to submit comments. But, you can’t just use the software in the hopes that all the work will be done for you.
If you’re going to use blog comments as part of your link building strategy, make sure you select the right blogs and that you put the effort into writing useful comments. Part of the result from commenting on other blogs is that real people might visit your website, as well as the search engines.
Thoughtful or insightful comments will go a long way toward encouraging other blog visitors to visit your site, too!
How Long Since You Wrote a Press Release?
· CommentsWriting a press release is a great way to get incoming links to your website and exposure for your business.
If you haven’t written a press release lately, now would be a good time to get one put together. The biggest question when it comes to press releases centers around finding something that you think merits a press release.
What is Press Release Worthy?
An online press release can provide two benefits. One is to get one-way incoming links to your website – that’s good for SEO. Another benefit is that other websites will pick up on the press release, and your information will get published on several or many websites.
To get the second benefit, you need to write about something truly newsworthy. And, I don’t think something newsworthy comes along all that often. However, to get incoming links to your website all you really need to do is write a well-optimized press release that is about something that you are doing.
Press Release Topics Don’t Have to be Newsworthy
I have a Google Alert set for the term “real estate marketing”. So, new pages that Google thinks is important for that term are sent to me in an email every day. Last week Google included a press release in one of those emails that announced ”Real Estate Website Offers New Way to Search For Properties”.
And, what was the new way to search? Using a Google map to display where homes for sale are located. Hmm… sounds like a map search that is available on lots of real estate websites. But the point is, who cares? If a consumer comes across that press release, they will know that the agent is Internet-savvy and has an easy way to search for homes available.
I’m not sure that lots of other websites will pick up that press release. Maybe a small newspaper in the agent’s hometown? But, the search engines will notice the links going from the press release to the agent’s website.
So, don’t wait until you have something to write about that is earth-shattering news. Have you updated your website lately? added a new team member? published a new market report? started a blog? The possibilities are endless.
And, you just never know who might find your site from seeing the press release, or from seeing your site as it climbs higher on the search result pages.
