Real Estate Marketing Blog

A Confession

Links forgive the sins of your website. Time to go to confession?

Engines and Websites

I was just reminded of an SEO rule today that I am not sure if most people understand. That is that search engines rank pages not websites.

Each page that you own is an opportunity at traffic. That is one reason a blog does well if it is updated. The main page changes and you are creating new pages with each new post.

Are You Number One in Google in Your Own Mind?

Is checking your Google positions your favorite time killer?

Come on be honest, doncha love just typing in "Your City" real estate and reveling in your ultra high position? Well, if that is true then make sure you sign out of your Google account because you are going to probably show higher than when you sign out of Google.

The reason is that Google is tracking your visits to your own site, and as part of its personalized search algo is positioning your site (that you visit all the time), a higher position than the regular results (which is where your prospects will come from). It does this by tracking your hits or clicks.

Page Rank Update & What It Means to You

Pat alerted us to a new Page Rank update. I really do not pay much attention to the PR bar anymore. At best it is a glimpse into the past about 4 or 5 months. And at worse it is a fabrication. (I tend to go with the latter).

Simply put in an ungeek way, Page Rank is the relative importance of your page. In the old days it was hugely responsible for big SERPS in Google.

Today, many believe it simply does not exist, or is not very important. I believe it is still important to a certain degree, its just that Google no longer hands us the odometer to see how to manipulate them. Go figure.

Page Rank is part of linking and linking is the single most important thing you can do for your website. Of course it goes without saying that you should be updating your site with new content.

More Page Rank Stuff

Page Rank is Dead
Coloring Your Google Bar Green
SEO Myths

Will They Forgive the Sins of your Website?

As an SEO professional specializing in the real estate and mortgage industry, I have refused to write much about Search Engine Optimization. Even though that is the bulk of our business. Because most of is being taught is about the WHAT of SEO & is a complete waste of time.

The HOW is much more interesting to me, and much more useful to you and your business. And when I say the how, I mean the strategy of SEO.

SEO defined: SEO is simply defining your marketplace, translating that marketplace into keywords, then representing those keywords onto pages throughout your website. Now, link to those pages.

There... now you do not have to spend the next 180 hours reading every SEO book out there. You see there is SEO, and there is traffic building. And then there is lead building!

Most of what is being taught out on the web is on page optimization tactics that at best are activities that you can obsess forever over. That at best will maybe help you move from a 6 to a 5 position.

Most people, even Realtors simply are not living (yet) in that competitive of a marketplace. The piece of the SEO that matters are links, link equity, off page optimization, Page Rank, etc. Whatever you want to call it.

Links are so important that you can say that links forgive the sins of the page. When you have links you will get traffic.

Universal Search and Real Estate

Real Estate SEO gets more complicated as the Natural Search results gets more crowded:

You may have missed it, but a few months back Google promised to start mixing their various other search results into their regular search. They call it....Drum Roll.........Universal Search.

Real Estate Video and You Tube, Blogs, News, Images, Local, and Google Base=Google Natural/Organic search results......

Google Adwords for Real Estate

The mystery around Google stems from it behaving like an evolving,  living breathing organism.

And this organism spins baby.

For years they have spun their positioning algo into a multitude of layers of complexity. Making it impossible for mere humans to get into a top search engine position.

Along comes AdWords (their money Enterprise) and the mystery has continued. They constantly keep their methods shrouded with their eye on profit:

"Automatic Matching automatically extends your campaign's reach by using surplus budget to serve your ads on relevant search queries that are not already triggered by your keyword lists," Google's email reads. "For example, if you sold Adidas shoes on your website, Automatic Matching would automatically crawl your landing page and target your campaigns to queries such as 'shoes,' 'adidas,' 'athletic,' etc., and less obvious ones such as 'slippers' that our system has determined will benefit you and likely lead to a conversion your site."

In other words, Google will automatically take the money an advertiser isn't spending and spend it on searches the advertiser hasn't explicitly approved. For the average advertiser, this is not a good idea....."They're offering you the exciting opportunity to bleed every penny of your budget every day, advertising against keywords that you didn't want to bid on," says Dan Thies an Adwords expert.

It makes sense for Google to keep the animal complex as the profiteers would easily game the system. As an example click arbitrage is a real problem as marketers buy ads on one engine for pennies and send the visitors over to a page with Google Adsense that pays several pennies or dollars more.

This tension between market and Engine,will no doubt stay with us a long time.

General and Specific Keywords

If you wanted to buy the book Influence, would you type "books" into the search engines? Or "Influence, by Robert Cialdini"

If you wanted to buy a Maytag Washer, would you type "Washing Machine" into the engine? Or  "Maytag 27" Top-Load Washer with SuperSize"?

The former will render larger volumes of visitors, the latter will render less visitors, more sales. So you are likely to get closer to a 1 to 1 conversion.

Real Estate and The Long Tail

Targeting general keywords is like a Billboard on the Highway while a specific or long tail word is akin to a targeted direct snail mail piece.

Homesah are Better Than Home

Hitwise says using the plurals in your keywords pull better than the singular.

I say why not at least test both?