Real Estate Marketing SEO Blog

SEO and Google Alerts

Have you tried Google Alerts?

It is a great way to monitor reputation management. In other words you can see if anyone is smack talking about you or you business.

By typing into Google your name or your business name you can monitor sites that come up into Google's index with your name or your business name.

So as you see here I type Tim O'Keefe and I get these results into Google:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the bottom of the results click "create an email alert for xyz"

And you will come to this page:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Make sure to pick everything. Now everything that comes up on Tim O'Keefe in Google will eventually be sent to you.

Google Alerts and SEO

So how do you use this for SEO? Honestly, you don't. It doesn't tell you anything useful other than a new site that may or may not be new in the Google index has been found. It doesn't really tell you if the site is new. It is just new for your alerts. Therefore, not very useful.

As far as reputation management, it saves you from having to troll the SERPs for your names all day long. But again you are at the mercy of Google and when they decide to send you the links. So if you are interested in reputation management. Then troll the SERPS. Use Google alerts as a convenient backup.

What They Are Not Telling You About Hyperlocality

Today is Take My Gloves of Thursday!

part 1:

+How did hyperlocal emerge?
+Two types of hyperlocal as it is sold and why it is wrong
+And why that benefits you
+Why it is nearly impossible to get content feeds for the hyperlocal area and why it is your opportunity
+Four ways to create hyperlocal content
+The only way to sell in the new economy

part 2:

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Get a course on building content: http://www.spiderjuicetechnologies.com/content

Yahoo+Bing=BingHoo!

Image via Wikipedia

Yahoo Organic is now powered by Bing. I feel the earth shifting on its axis and hell freezing over. Actually it is more like Yahoo getting to its roots having been powered by Inktomi,Alta Vista (they bought these first two companies) and Google in the past.

This last part of 2010 is shaping up to be the war of the giants.

Earlier this week Facebook launched thier own Places as an attempt to go after Google marketshare.

Ladies and Gentlemen. 3 Giants. Who will be left standing!?

How to be an "Internet Guru" for a Day

Image by Dan Patterson via Flickr

As an avid reader of books and biographies I have learned that very few people can describe the reason for their success with an a to z plan that anyone can follow. Instead you the reader must dig deep and read the lines behind the story.

Having read several "road to riches" type books on social media of late I am reminded of this rule. A great case in point is the recent Gary V book. Crush It!

He shares his road to fame. And if you read it, then I hope you get that he is not easy to duplicate. Not unless you plan on being outrageous, uncensored, and think wildly big. His personality is what drove his success and it worked like gangbusters on the social net as his personality was a natural on the digital social scene.

He is PT Barnum. He is a promoter such that he created the perception that he was THE wine guy online. The biggest lesson is that the point of anything in the digital media is to get it offline. And Gary Vaynerchuk. As in the picture above is offline more than on.

This is not everyone's path to take.  But if you follow his, get ready to let that personality of yours explode!

Are You the 80 or the 20?

Image by Coneee via Flickr

"In God we trust; all others bring data"  ~W. Edwards Deming, renowned quality control expert who gets much credit for the quality of modern Japanese products

Facebook's users are the size of a Country. So as the logic goes, that is where the business is. Get on Facebook or lose. Well, that thinking isn't really thinking. 

But let's not pick on only Facebook for this demonstration. The evolution of the Internet has been led by more hype than substance.

Snake Oil

Often times selling the hype has been more profitable than the mediums themselves.

"…most people want to believe rather than to know, to take for granted rather than to find out"    James Thurber

We all want to believe that the vitamin will make our bulging belly miraculously melt away. We want to believe that this NEW pink pill will give us the virility and stamina of a 24 year old. And that cream will make the cellulite go poof! in an instant.  And oh how belief works when vanity is involved.  

What makes our decisions even more difficult is that these supplements and routines do have some truth to them. Today's world has produced some miraculous stuff for us.

So its Monday night. A big presentation is due the next day and you can't sleep.

You turn on the dumb box and holy smokes. Girls are Going Wild! Better turn that in case the wife wakes up. ;-)  So you flip the channel and there is this slick dude in a suit talking about all these health secrets that THEY do not want anyone to know.

And oh my Lord would you look at the hotties he is explaining this to?   This sales pitch has all the great elements. It Us Vs Them (creating and defending against a common enemy). The Implication of Sex. Those girls are from Playboy and not your librarian for a reason boys. Therefore we males just lost a bit of our cognitive resistance .

And thus we are playing with fuzzy deductions in logic that only work because we want to believe. And the logical conclusion is derived from illogical stretches of poor logic.

At the end we are left with Who are THEY? And what is it they don't want us to know. None of it is explicit. At best it is all inference tugging at emotional triggers.

Buying on Emotion and the 80/20 Rule*

But what about the argument that you need to work Facebook because it is growing at such rapid rates?

This isn't new by the way. This was the argument with Twitter, Blogging, SEO, and Even Websites.

The logic is the same that many of us have used to join MLM's, Religions, and even our careers. Without logic.

I have seen this in sales presentation after presentation. Set up a premise that you can never prove, by proving smaller conclusions that pretend to prove the original premise. Each step getting further and further away from any proof at all while somewhat proving the previous conclusion.  Enough steps make "sense" without ever really proving anything. But the buyers head is going up and down over and over again.

Don't worry. That is how the world buys and sells. It is called being human.But in order to buy anything we have to want to believe.

It's why the newly single 40 year old Male buys a Porche and the 40 year old Divorcee hits the plastic surgeon within weeks of her final divorce papers. Emotion always drives us.

Of course we all have to make decisions without all the facts. Even in court a prosecutor never has all the facts. He or She merely builds a case and the jury makes an emotional decision backed up by the logic of the case.

In fact, even if you could get all the facts by that time the opportunity has passed ( a line used in getting buyers off the fence in high pressure selling by the way).

There is Gold In Them That Hills -for some

So I am not saying to abandon Twitter or Facebook. I am saying that you should learn to ask, "show me the money" more often. Don't blog because everyone is doing it. Don't Facebook because everyone is doing it. Do it because there is money to be made. And don't start until you have a pretty good idea how that money will come to you.

Our team takes our clients down the path of proven SEO and Social Media that converts.

*The 80/20 rule is Pareto's principle that states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.