Archive for SEO
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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!!
Finish This Sentence: Google +1 Is…..
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I don’t have an answer to that question. I could say it’s interesting, because that’s the adjective I often use to indicate indifference without being offensive. For me, I think the jury is still out on a few issues.
Is Google +1 a Social Network?
That’s the issue I’m really wondering about. I wonder if Google can outdo Facebook. I wonder if people will add Google +1 to the top social network list. Right now, my list includes Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.
Or, will people decide that three major networks is enough, and the networking side of +1 will fade away. I must admit, that would be my choice. I’m not a big social media maven, and I don’t really want to maintain another site.
Besides that, and I hope Google isn’t lurking around here somewhere, I am beginning to feel like Google is Big Brother. In order to use the +1, you must have a Google profile, and you must be logged into Google, too.
Between Google knowing everything I search for, controlling the ads I see to correspond to my interests, controlling the search results I get based on geography and so on…. I feel like I’ve been Googlized. And, I’m not sure I like it.
When you sign up for a Profile, they make your age required so they can customize your online experience consistent with your age! How can they presume to know me so well just based on my age?? It’s silly.
What about 11-year-old Jackie Evancho? Would they customize her experience to normal 11 year old interests? They’d be missing the mark if they didn’t include opera! And, just because I’m uh.. over 40 doesn’t mean I don’t still enjoy dancing around the living room to a Foreigner song!
There are three things that can happen to +1. Google could give up on the networking portion of it if it doesn’t take off. But, if it does get popular, whether it makes people move from Facebook, or just manage +1 as another network, I will be very impressed. Either of those outcomes would go a long way toward establishing/reinforcing Google dominance.
Is Google +1 An SEO Tool?
One thing I don’t doubt is that the +1 will have an impact on SEO. Google can very easily consider it another “vote” for a site, just like an incoming link. Of course, the Google party line avoids answering that question. They only say that “+1 helps people discover relevant content”, but don’t address the question of whether there will be an impact on search results.
Given that I think the SEO is real, I suggest that everyone get on the band wagon. You’ll notice that there is a +1 on this blog. I’d be ever so appreciative if you’d click the +1 button on any blog posts that you like.
I’m using a WordPress plugin called WordPress Google +1 Button – Advanced Plugin, Includes Redirection. Quite a name, huh? It installed very easily, has some good options and works without a hitch so far.
Of course, if you want to put the +1 button on other websites, you’re looking at a do-it-yourself project. Here’s what to do:
- Create A Google Profile (of course!)
- Install the code provided in Google’s instructions
From that Google link, you will get code with options for the size of the button. And, if you click on the “Advanced Options” link, you can control whether the number of +1s shows.
If you poke around long enough, you’ll also come across information about whether to identify the URL to be +1d or not. I’m not the world’s best coder, but the conclusion I came to is that most of us should let the code figure out the URL. Google says:
- “Google will use the URL of the page as found in the DOM. This can sometimes cause incorrect behavior as the URL in the address bar can contain session IDs or other parameters which are not part of the canonical URL.”
If you need more information, you’ll need to find someone who knows whether your site URLs contain session IDs and so forth.
In summary, the +1 button requires 2 pieces of code. One should be placed in the head section of your website, or it can be placed near the </body> tag. The other piece of code goes where you want the button to appear.
For example, if you have a Point2 Agent website, you’d put the first part of the code in the Footer on the TEMPLATE page. You’d put the second part where you want the button to appear. If you put it somewhere on the TEMPLATE page, it will appear on every page. Based on my test, that works fine. Be aware that Point2 websites are regular HTML pages, so I haven’t seen a problem letting the URL be identified by the code.
I started this post as commentary, but guess I got a bit carried away. Hope the additional information about implementing the +1 is helpful!
.This guest post was written by Adam Vradenburg, an Internet marketing guru
who also promotes 1000 Islands Real Estate.
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A Little Link Power Goes a Long Way
While having a wide range of websites linking to yours increases your domain popularity and hopefully your ranking, it’s not all about quantity. You might look at the competition and notice they have a ton of links, and you don’t have the time, resources or patience to do the same. No problem. A few, well-placed links from strong domains will do more for your ranking than a whole bunch of irrelevant ones.
A lot of factors determine the value of a link: the trust associated with the domain, the location of the link on the site and position on the page, etc. Often you won’t have much influence on this; the important thing is to get what you pay for. Okay, so technically you’re not supposed to buy links, but directories, advertising, etc. costs money, and time. So how do you determine which sites are trustworthy and worthwhile? Ask Google.
Your Shopping List
This is going to sound very obvious but if you’re looking for good, relevant backlinks, look at the first 100 results for the phrase you want to rank for. You’re almost guaranteed topic relevance and they’re sites Google has already judged to be of some value.
I can say from personal experience that a few links from aged domains already ranking for your search terms will do wonders. It makes sense too. Google is trying to get their users to the information they want as fast as possible.
If the site they judged to be most relevant for a certain search term links to you, then you’re the ultimate target, so to speak. This isn’t automatic, and there are exceptions, but I guarantee that if you can lock up a few links from the domains ranking ahead of you, you’re golden.
It might be difficult to get one from the actual page that’s ranking, but even from the same site is good too. The good news is, that for regional real estate search terms, the sites ranking are often older, community oriented, and happy to receive new content and advertising money (and usually not asking exorbitant sums). I almost forgot, the beauty of getting a link on a page ranking for your search terms is that it also drives the traffic you’re ultimately looking for!
Some Real Estate Freebies
To get you started, here is a list of sites offering free directory entries and links from profiles.
- RealTown.com
- Zillow.com
- WannaNetwork.com
- HomeSalez.com
Through participation on these sites, and interaction with other real estate webmasters, you can get a lot of backlinks as well. Being socially engaged online is a more time consuming way to gather links, but also serves to establish a good reputation online, which is just as important as good rankings.
Regardless, link building requires a time investment, and some professionals might be skeptical as to the benefit. But be patient, get links, and your position with Google will surely improve, increasing the traffic that you can turn into business, and taking your real estate marketing to the next level.
This guest post was written by Adam Vradenburg, an Internet marketing guru
who also promotes 1000 Islands Real Estate.
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It All Begins Online
In case you didn’t know, 90% of buyers in the real estate market use the internet. It’s where the journey to a new home or piece of property usually begins, which makes it an opportunity you should not pass up.
If you can establish a professional and visible web presence, your real estate marketing plan will be miles ahead of the competition. For real estate websites, search engines play a pivotal role in almost all online marketing strategies, and there are some simple but very effective methods to increase your visibility with search engines.
Strategies to Dominate Google
Backlinks, other websites linking to yours, are the key to good rankings with search engines like Google. Once you have a strong website and know what phrases you want to rank for, strong backlinks will be the driving force in ranking your site.
Before you go out and start to acquire links, make sure the links you have, and can easily influence, are optimized. The actual text linking to your site should contain the keywords you want to rank for, but don’t be overzealous, make sure to vary the text from time to time and a link, even if it’s just your domain name or something general, is often still worthwhile. Ultimately, you want as many links as you get, and then some.
Links, Links and More Links
Generally speaking, the more domains that link to yours, the better. This is obviously a generalization, but I don’t think anyone will dispute the fact that the number and variety of domains linking to yours, your domain popularity, plays a major role in determining the position of your site in the search engine results.
So links from a variety of websites are crucial to getting good rankings, but I’ve exhausted all my personal and business contacts, where am I going to get all these links? There are plenty of possibilities, but if you can reproduce the link profiles of your competitors and get even more relevant links above and beyond them, you should and likely will outrank them.
If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em
Well, sort of. You can find a lot of sources for links by scoping the competition. Using Yahoo! Site Explorer you can see (usually) the best links your competition has managed to acquire. Unless they have unlimited resources and connections, you should be able to reproduce their link profile to a certain extent.
Some will be unattainable – links can often come from personal contacts or other arrangements, but I guarantee there will be a few in there you can grab as well. It also serves for inspiration, while you may not be able to get the same link, you’ll have an idea of how to get a similar one. Some links won’t be worth the time or money, either. Not all links are worth having and some can do more harm than good.
………Don’t Miss Part II!……….
