Real Estate Marketing SEO Blog

How to Ring Googles Bells

Blog and Ping. It is what the blogging myth was built upon. There was a day prior to 2004 that one could post a blog every 5 minutes and ping a number of web services and they would get almost instant Google love. The blog would get indexed along with tons of duplicate content (post page, archives, permalinks, etc) .

The madness had to end as SEO's pressed posts thru automation machines that spewed out utter junk just to get some juice. Well actually lots of juice. Then the hammer fell as these ping services would not play along anymore and the engines got smart enough to not respect the blog and ping thing.It still works but not as dramatically, and more reasonably. Meaning if you post like two or three times a day they will trust you more than if you "sping" every 5 minutes.

So what is it specifically? and why does it matter today?

When you post a blog you can list ping services into your blog set-up and your blog software will do the rest.

This picture below is actually this post and how I set up the ping services in TypePad. This screen is my editing screen for this very post.

Everyone Wants to Move!

It seems 1/2 of all Americans want to relocate. That's a start I guess in getting this housing market jump started. You gotta have a desire. Turns out Pew Research did a survey on where people would like to live. The grass is still greener on the other side as nearly half surveyed would rather live elsewhere.

So who likes what city?
Men like Vegas more than women.
Boston: you better have coin as mostly the affluent would rather live in Bean Town.
New York/ LA: Youth is it. 57% of urban dwellers younger than 30 say the city is where they want to live.
Denver/San Diego/Seattle: Youth!
Mickie D's or Starbucks: Gotta have the Golden Arches nearby.
Denver/Phoenix/Orlando/San Antonio:Republicans
San Francisco: Half of those who identified themselves as liberal would rather live here.

The top favored cities and the least favorite matched the nations migration habits. As Americans favor the South and West.

10 most popular big cities -- Denver, San Diego, Seattle, San Francisco, Phoenix, Portland and Sacramento -- are in the West, and the other three -- Orlando, Tampa and San Antonio -- are in the South.

Other interesting tidbits:

• The perfect community type?: 30% say they would most like to live in a small town, 25% in a suburb, 23% in a city and 21% in a rural area.
• By a ratio of more than three-to-one, Americans prefer living where the pace of life is slow, not fast. A similarly lopsided majority prefer a place where neighbors know each other well to one where neighbors don't generally know each other's business.
• By about two-to-one, they prefer to live in a hot-weather place over a cold-weather place. 
• When it comes to community involvement, there is no difference among those who live in cities, suburbs, small towns or rural areas. About half of the residents in each place say they are involved, and half say they aren't.

On Link Exchanges

One way to look at a link out of your site is to look at the value that you are receiving in return for your valuable link to them. The value may be direct or indirect as traffic or link juice (page rank), or indirect which is perception . Which I guess at best is an  endorsement type link say from an authority like the front page of a CNN news story.

The two are theoretically supposed to be one in the same but it often does not always work that way.

The most important aspect of a link is by far the traffic or link juice which helps to build the "worthiness" of your site for ranking in the eyes of the engines.

Why I do not like link exchanges:
1. It uglifies your site.
2. Algorithmically it has drastic diminishing returns when you stop trading.Almost rendering  months of work, worthless.
3. A link out is a leak of page rank. So it had better be a tremendous site that you link to. You will still bleed juice but perhaps the resource is worth it (I hardly ever find this to be true)
4. The chance of getting traffic from the other sites page which is usually buried and not of much interest to their visitors is extremely low.
5. It is very hard to monitor for cheaters. It is very easy to game you. No follow links & java script links look real to the human but do not pass any juice to your site.
6.When you are actively building your own 1 way inbound link juice, any links out are sure to help your partner more than you.

This is not to say I don't do exchanges but you will have to joining the http://realestateguerilla.com/  online coaching club to find out when I find it worthwhile. Notice that I did not mention that Google will penalize you for an exchange. That is an urban myth and I have seen too many sites rank well that still trade links.

How Many Back Links Do You Have?

Ever wonder how to figure out how many backlinks you have? It is not as easy as you may think because none of the engines actually will list them all. However, the best tool currently is Yahoo.

Profiting From Social Media: Advice I Gave to a Recruiter

This is from an email I wrote to a friend about how to effectively use social networks for gaining new clients. It is unedited other than making it more readable:

1. In Facebook and others join groups and then make friends.As a recruiter find groups where your potential clients are hanging out.
2. Do a search under groups for their business name, then their specialty. IT, Network Administrator, etc, keep searching
3. Join and lurk to see if it is vibrant
4. This is where you figure out what is the conversation and you figure out how to enter it.The old marketing advice comes to mind: Enter into the conversation going on in your customers head
5. Ask yourself "what problems need solving?"
6. Start participating, answer questions, solve problems
7. Add commentary that is of value, not salezy.Give your expertise, and your personality to the conversation
8. Do not be just another Indian, be the Chief
9. Soon you will have your own tribe
10. That is adding to the community.Now you are a "friend".Get known as the advisor for job hunting
11. you have just built a personal brand in this group.Now it is easy to ask for help in placing or getting job orders.

This really should not seem like anything new. It really is networking 101 only digitally. Hence the words "social networking".

Do you really want to blow it up to the next level? Add video and  audio and such to take your personal brand into the stratosphere.