Real estate SEO and inbound marketing tips

Google Reader demise makes a case for real estate social media

Mike Scotty — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 19:33:00 GMT

The pending demise of Google Reader has uncovered some interesting realities regarding marketing and real estate blogs, and the way people are consuming news over the last couple of years.

I was admittedly bewildered when Google announced that Google Reader was underutilized and being phased out. In our content development business, we use Google Reader pretty extensively to comb relevant news sites, then parse and deliver information to various pages on our sites. One of our most popular pages on YoChicago.com is managed this way. Google Reader is a powerful facilitator as well as an easy way for an individual to get news specific to his tastes. But the individuals, it seems, are drifting away.

Personally, I visit my Google Reader at least once, if not more often each day. I have a mixed bag of incoming content spanning both personal and business interests. Hundreds of articles a day come into my feed and I read it like a magazine or newspaper – go to each section (I’ve categorized the folders), scan, read a handful of articles that interest me, browse the images, watch a video or two.

After listening to all the ‘Reader is dead’ analysis about social media overtaking RSS, it occurs to me that I do the same thing on Google+, Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter – each is a mix of business and personal interests – each is a daily (or more) scan. My connections on these sites were gleaned in the same way I built my Google Reader feed – people and businesses that interest me. And yes, I visit these social sites much more than I did in years past. And yes, there is a LOT of duplicated content between my news feeds.

Apparently, more and more consumers are getting their news from their social feeds, reducing the need for conventional RSS. The increasing sophistication of social feed delivery has enhanced users’ ability to zero in on the content that is relevant to them, even within their own feed choices. It’s made social media less of a pastime and more of a daily routine. And if you want to reach this group, as a business, you can’t ignore these popular social sites – because they may not be picking you up in their feed readers anymore.

As I prepare to find an alternative for Google Reader, I began to purge my current collection of feeds before porting them to a new reader. And as I went through each of the hundreds of entries that I had accumulated over 5 or more years, I was surprised at how many of the bloggers and businesses that I once followed have completely fallen off the web – most during 2011 and 2012. What wouldn’t surprise me is that many of the ‘retired’ bloggers have taken to making a bigger effort on social media.

There is a lot of talk that RSS and feeds are dead technologies. It seems clear the Google is trying to make people use RSS less and perhaps Google+ more. And it’s likely that casual users may take this opportunity to become more active on social sites and have one less place to check every day. All the more reason to work on your business presence on the core social media outlets.

Real estate’s SEO entitlement delusion

Mike Scotty — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 19:38:00 GMT

In all the rhetoric (just one example) that some Realtor-related interests are slinging at Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com, there’s something that the ‘Big 3’ critics seem to forget.

Google’s a business too. So is Bing. So are all the other search engines.

None of these search engine companies are interested in who thinks they’re entitled to have a piece of page one. A search engine's interest is solely with its customers’ user experience. A good experience is what keeps their audience coming back to their search site - the best possible information and experience around a given search term. Right now, the Big 3 pretty much own it in many real estate categories.

Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com are not at the top because they have stolen listings or bamboozled the real estate community. They are there because they provide the best content and user experience for a given search term. Users are disinterested in who ‘owns’ the listing. They just want to see them – with as little interference and as much information as possible.

The methods through which the search engines determine a site’s relevance are expansive, to say the least, but the methods are designed to measure real-life human interaction. Site visitors do the voting with their on-site interaction. Humans who link on their own sites to information on these larger sites provide the backlinks – because they feel the information in those links is valuable to their own readers.

Humans are the traffic – and the human’s behavior is what counts most when it comes to the SERPs. The people have spoken.

The reality of the Big 3

These companies are not on top because they have all the listings. Every regional broker has basically the same listing content through IDX. These companies are at the top because they are focused. Focused on traffic. Focused on user experience. Focused on creating a site whose real estate information is comprehensive at all levels and whose inbound traffic is garnered through optimization of the most real estate related search terms. They are not distracted by things like running a brokerage, or incorporating the whims of their agent constituency or management into their website.

Their mission is to create an audience – one that a host of industries will pay to access. They have the people, the resources, the focus and the brainpower to make it happen.

These sites aren’t doing anything clandestine. They’re using broker data that was made available to them by the brokers. Brokers who knew what they were doing – and for the most part are still enjoying the spoils of the relationship. Having access to the listing data is only part of the equation. How they display them, how they make subgroups of those listings available to online searchers through multiple channels and the supplemental data they consistently provide are what makes users stay. And come back.

The reality of brokerage participation

Kudos to RealGeeks for this article I saw in AGBeat which attempts to educate brokers on what they are giving up when they use Big 3-sponsored widgets. But I think that calling it ‘predatory backlinking’ is a pretty severe assessment given that there is a clear exchange of benefits to each party. Any broker or brokerage that takes a free ‘sponsored’ widget and puts it on their site has a responsibility to understand all of the implications.

And when they do understand the implications – it’s likely that they will still choose to use the widget, despite the trade off of backlinks that strengthen the widget’s host. To that point, one of the blog commenters on the above-referenced article, who appears to be a broker-manager says “The other reality may be that most agents don't have the time/resources to have their personal sites rank high on the engines therefore these widgets may enhance their site functionality and the fact they are helping "RTZ" [Realtor.com, Trulia, Zillow] is of no consequence”.

And so it goes with most brokerages, even the larger ones. They are willing to buy into the sites because the sites deliver. This is not a cop-out. This is delivering value to sellers using the best available resources. This is an acknowledgment that most brokerages' ability to deliver equivalent eyeballs to their own sites is a challenge to say the least.

The challenge to brokers

Building a competitive website is anything but easy.

Consider the challenge of writing and supporting the number of pages (try hundreds, more like thousands) needed to gain SEO traction in the larger real estate space – with diverse content that still holds user interest.

To make any inroads in search, a site must acquire backlinks. And effective link building is a drawn-out, time-consuming process using many channels, an enormous effort and a lot of resources. And alas, Panda, Penguin and other algorithm changes have put a serious damper on the short cuts.

Even trickier than the SEO pieces of this puzzle is creating a website that ‘flows’. You can get users to your site – but you need to keep them there, and lead them to your contact goals. Easy to navigate, clear paths of information are essential to keeping users engaged.

And there’s so much more that can get in the way of a full-out website that successfully competes.

The tradeoff

How much time and money do you need to invest to effectively usurp a national site, even if the Big 3 no longer existed? It’s a huge number. Because you don’t get there just because you’re big. Or just because your SEO is perfect. Or just because your website has the newest designs and functionality. A perfect combination and integration of those factors and so many more are required. And then let’s not forget that SEO influencers are changing at a pace that requires constant monitoring to keep you at the top if you get there.

Consider that real cost of creating a competitive site against the cost of buying into a marketing effort on one or all of these sites that gives you coverage in all the areas you serve – above and beyond the listing exposure you’re getting at no cost.

For the smaller brokerages it will be a no-brainer. For the larger entities a more complex decision. But the bulk of the national agent population belongs to small or mid-size brokerages, or to successful agent teams that have their own niche carved out in a larger brokerage and see the value of the Big 3 to their personal business.

This is why these sites will survive, if not thrive. As I noted in this article about alleged estate listing syndication abuse, the demise of one of these sites would only result in the creation of another.

A little history

If you’ve been in the residential real estate business more than 10 years, you may remember when print media ruled real estate marketing and your local or regional newspaper ruled the audience. Despite the premium cost, brokerages participated. There were other options, just not very good ones. “Let’s create our own publication and get out of the [insert local scourge here]” was a familiar mantra of the regional brokerages. The problem was that to be effective they needed “distribution optimization” which turned out to be a lot more expensive as a separate entity. You can surely see the correlation here.

And that notion is surely driving some of the fear regarding the Big 3. No one wants to be beholden to a third party or required to participate – and that notion is valid.

No brokerage should throw in the towel on SEO and ownership of their marketplace through their own website. SEO and marketing efforts at every level should be directed at bringing traffic to the broker website. Traffic equals SEO relevance to the search engines more than any other SEO effort.

The real questions here in the digital age are ‘Can an individual brokerage, even the biggest, compete effectively in the search engines on their own?’ and ‘Could a brokerage be better off working with a venue(s) that affords them top of the SERPs exposure, can drive additional traffic to their own site and ultimately additional business – at a manageable cost?'

Image optimization matters to real estate SEO

Mike Scotty — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 12:22:00 GMT

Images are so important – in any media. Too often bloggers, writers and SEOs get too wrapped up in the content, and often select images as an afterthought.

Good image optimization can be critical to SEO and site performance, but most of all to readership.

Drawing the reader in

The old ‘picture speaks a thousand words’ adage is as true as it ever was. The right image(s) on your article / blog / web page / property detail page could very well be the catalyst that draws the reader in – and gets him/her to look further into the content you’ve worked so hard on.

Part of SEO significance includes ‘time-on-site’ and clicking through the links on the page. Sites with more engagement receive more SEO relevance. Engagement starts with the right visuals.

And don’t rule out creating a graphic image to illustrate your point. It the image engages your readers, it’s well worth the time it takes to create it.

Image SEO

There are basic SEO tactics that should become a part of your image routine – so that you would never consider skipping the steps to save time.

Alt text – An attribute within the image HTML tag. [alt=”image description”], the alt text describes the image. Alt text was originally created to describe the image to visually-impaired users using adaptive technologies to understand the content of a web page.

The alt text will appear on a web page before the image loads if you’re on a slow connection, but most times the user will not see the text. But the search engines do see it – that’s all they see – and for that reason, you should name it aptly, using keywords where appropriate.

Refrain from giving your image alt text like [keyword A, keyword B, etc]. It’s an annoyance to the user who uses the alt text to understand your page and an SEO penalty waiting to happen.

Captions – Captions also have SEO value in that the search engines will examine text blocks in close proximity to an image. Captions also give your human readers a quick synopsis of your article that could help draw them in.

File name – use the filename to describe the image – it will reinforce your alt text. If your image is a screenshot of video analytics, name the image appropriately – Property-tour-video-analytics.jpg. Search engines don’t learn much from an image named IMG_000734.

Links – somewhere in your post or article you can link to your image and use appropriate anchor text. It’s even better if you can link to that image from another page on your site – even better from a page outside your website.

Consistency – don’t get distracted from the goal of your web post or page when naming your images. Make sure there’s a topical relationship between the article and your image’s SEO attributes.

Images’ effect on site performance

Web images should be the exact size they will appear on the web or very close (larger, never smaller). Who hasn’t experienced the pain of watching an image slowly render and/or the spinning ‘load’ icon? Eliminate the wait. Humans, by the way, are much more tolerant than search engines. Page load time is a definite factor in search engine rankings.

As you evaluate an image you’ve selected, re-size it to the size it will appear on your page. Then link the image to a larger image for those who want a closer look.

My own firm, Data Based Ads, Inc., which processes hundreds of photos each day, makes multiple sizes of each image, identifiable by slight alterations in the URL path. This enables our sites to render as quickly as possible in all situations. Take for instance this sample HTML web display generated through our AdMaster system – note how the images that load initially are exact size (right-click and copy the URL to test), but each photo links to a larger version. The larger version is not necessarily the full-size (this original photo is 3872 pixels wide), but a larger size that optimizes to a typical browser (1024 wide) – a balance between a good presentation and rendering speed.

Many image sources create multiple sizes of each image. Save yourself some re-sizing time by becoming familiar with their availability. Photos uploaded to Flickr.com are stored in up to 12 sizes (Click Actions > View all sizes). YouTube even offers its thumbnail image in multiple sizes/resolutions.

And don’t make the mistake of making a judgment call on photo sizing based on how it works in your browser. Remember, just because it renders instantly in your browser, doesn’t mean that it will render that way on your readers’ connections.

Fight real estate listing syndication abuse with better data

Mike Scotty — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 13:53:00 GMT

With the announcement of NAREP and their effort to combat ‘listing syndication abuse’, one thing comes to mind – the futility and history of the brokerage community attempting to manipulate market forces.

When opponents of the Big Three (Trulia, Zillow, Realtor.com) talk about listing syndication abuse, they’re referencing the placement of the contact information of Realtors who pay to advertise on these sites on the same listing detail page as a non-advertising Realtor’s listings. The group also references a recent study that compares the accuracy of broker sites vs. Trulia and Zillow, but anyone familiar with the dispute knows that the real issue is the absence and/or poor placement of the listing broker’s contact information on non-advertiser listings.

Consumer advocacy?

If NAREP supporters were really concerned about consumers’ access to accurate information, they wouldn’t be advocating the dismantling of the largest and most comprehensive housing websites, they would be working to improve them. Specifically, they would be working to improve their own listings’ presence on the Big Three sites on behalf of their sellers.

Broker enhancement opportunities

Every brokerage has the opportunity to feed listings from their most comprehensive source (not necessarily the MLS) to these sites at no charge. Their best photography, branded virtual tours, extended copy – all things that can make your listings stand out these sites and entice consumers to spend more time viewing your listing. And although there are indeed limited (if any) followed links back to the broker’s website or agent contacts for non-advertisers, the data you feed to these sites can contain those links.

Traffic

One of my firm’s real estate data management software solutions creates virtual tours and distributes (syndicates) these tours and other listing data to our clients’ online marketing sites, including the Big Three. Just this past weekend (Sat & Sun), more than 30% of the traffic from one client’s tours alone (with broker site links) came from the Big Three – the top 3 referral sources. Only 5% of the traffic came from the broker site.

We also provide individual listing and agent reporting on the web activity on the sites we syndicate for our clients. The numbers are consistently and overwhelmingly in favor of the Big Three.

I’d be curious as to how one would explain to a seller, as their listing agent, why you would omit these sites from your marketing plan.

Marketing opportunity, not menace

The Big Three are consumer-oriented businesses with a clear focus – to deliver housing information and to make money in the process. Their business models are indeed predicated on procuring broker listings, but they are delivering value to those listing brokers – eyeballs and traffic. Enough value, it seems, that 90+% of Realtor listings currently for sale are on all three portals - and they only get there with the listing brokers' permission.

These sites have invested millions in technology, marketing, SEO and critical mass that most broker sites, even the very large ones, cannot duplicate.

Can you imagine if Realtor.com were the only comprehensive real estate site as was its original intention? It doesn’t happen in a free market because there is always an independent venture – enter Trulia and Zillow – that has capital and an idea that they can do it better. Kill any of these three sites, and another would take its place.

Enter NAREP. Every group has a right to rally in their own defense. And short of success, which is a long shot at best, the pressure on the Big Three may lead to continued improvements in site/broker relations and policies.

_{Disclosure: Neither myself or my firm has any relationship with Trulia, Zillow or Realtor.com, short of delivering data on behalf of select clients.}

Google authorship rewards real estate content relevance

Mike Scotty — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 11:01:00 GMT

If you are a blogger, a videographer, or provider of interesting online real estate content on a regular basis, you should know about Google authorship markup.

In a nutshell, you can link your content from your own website, or even content you create on other sites to your Google+ profile, and have your author image appear in the search results.

With the integration of Google+ into all things Google, you may have already seen that some of your search engine results are showing up with your image. Here’s why – When you have a Google+ profile completed with links to “contributed to,” “links” and “other profiles,” Google will pick up that linkage and sometimes show the author’s Google+ profile picture in the search results, as they would with the authorship markup.

If you want to ensure (and you do) that your authorship displays where it should – there’s a pretty simple process to follow. Or dig a little deeper with this authorship guide.

New benefit of authorship

In its quest to improve the search experience, Google is capitalizing on authorship to provide additional links to a reader who spends substantial time reading your content from a search engine result listing. Google makes the assumption that the reader would be interested in seeing more of your content.

Here’s how it works:

A reader clicks on a search engine result with an authorship icon.
S/he spends at least 2 minutes reading the web page (reading assumed).
S/he clicks the ‘back’ button.
Google provides the reader with three additional related links from the author.

Again, Google rewards informative, relevant content, your best SEO strategy.

After ‘back’ button:

Flickr.com boosts real estate SEO

Mike Scotty — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 12:38:00 GMT

Do you know Flickr? Photographers do. And so do the search engines.

Flickr was born as a photo sharing site in 2004 and quickly gained a following. So much of a following that Yahoo! (a bigger deal back then) purchased the site the very next year and Flickr has continued to grow since. In August 2011, Flickr was hosting 6 billion images and had 80 million unique monthly visitors. Comments, favorites, friending (contacts) and groups are all part of the Flickr social community.

Flickr is a search engine darling, especially for image searches, and when possible, should be a part of your social media strategy. Our real estate media site, YoChicago, has a Flickr account that continues to send a high volume of visitors to our main site – consistently in the top 20 traffic sources. YoChicago has a wide expanse of neighborhood, development and project photo sets on Flickr, relative to our media focus, which is Chicago and suburban real estate development.

Good SEO tactics on Flickr include being very specific about the subject of a photo in the title (think keywords used by searchers). The description should support that title in prose and SEO and most definitely should include a link to a relevant page on your website. The link will be ‘nofollow’ but don’t underestimate the live traffic it can generate. Your tags should be specific to the subject matter.

If you’re a real estate developer or home builder, you want to have a quality photo set of your own development or new home community, so that when web users do searches on your community, your images come up in the mix, if not at the top.

If you’re a real estate brokerage, Flickr probably isn’t the right place for your listing photos, due to privacy issues, but it is certainly a place to promote your brokerage or agency with community streetscapes, business districts and neighborhood highlights.

One of Flickr’s little known features is an embeddable slideshow (that's one of them below) of a specific photo set, as seen in this broker’s community page or in YoChicago’s neighborhood guide pages. These slideshows have a full-screen functionality that really shows off great photography.

And here's a real life example of Flickr’s power to generate traffic. YoChicago’s photographers took an aerial tour of downtown Chicago last week by helicopter and have uploaded about 60 of those photos in the last 10 days on Flickr. Images on YoChicago’s Flickr account average about 1,000 views on any given day, but the activity in the 10 days since posting has been closer to 4,000 views per day. Most significantly the traffic from Flickr to YoChicago.com has tripled.

If you've got a photo buff at your company, put them to work!

Check out the slideshow of the Chicago aerial tour below. Click on the full screen icon for larger display.

Improve your real estate video with YouTube Analytics

Mike Scotty — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 12:10:00 GMT

There’s no shortage of opinion on the optimal real estate video format.

But there are two overriding factors in determining effectiveness. Does it get watched and are the viewers engaged? And earlier this year, YouTube expanded its video analytics, making those factors easier to gauge.

If you’re a channel administrator, i.e., posting your own video on your own channel, you’ll have access to these analytics. Just log in to your channel and click on Analytics.

Among the tools featured are:

Views reports

Views reports give you the numbers. One of the great things about YouTube is that it the viewer counts include views from YouTube itself and all the places that video may be embedded. Analytics will even tell you what site it was watched on.

Demographics

Male or female, age group, country of origin. If you’re not hitting your target market, time to make adjustments to your message and/or your SEO strategy (title, description, tags).

Playback locations

It’s very interesting to see what channels your audience is viewing from. If you’ve made an effort to embed your video in other sites, you can see not only the additional effect of those views, but what other sites those views came from. Remember that anyone can embed your video on their website when they find your video worthwhile and informative. This is the video SEO equivalent of a good inbound link.

Traffic sources

This section answers the question – ‘How was this video found by its viewers?’ And it answers it in minute detail. Google search, YouTube search and embedded video on another site are among the categories. And each is a link that goes into deeper detail including keywords used, position of link on page and other specifics. It can almost be overkill, but it’s quite revealing.

Audience retention

Audience retention really speaks to the quality of your viewers. How long did they watch? Regardless of the length of the video, you are clearly able to see what percentage of viewers have watched the video for how long.

If you’ve got 300 views on a video, and 60% of your audience watch the video in its entirety – you’ve got at least 200 engaged viewers, probably more. Just because someone abandons a video halfway through doesn’t mean they didn’t get the intended message.

Engagement reports

Much of your video and channel SEO relevance is based on social signals that come from viewers in the form of interactions and comments.

The second section of YouTube Analytics is the engagement reports, which measure

Subscriptions to a channel driven by a specific video

Likes / dislikes

Number of viewers who marked a video as a favorite

Number of comments on a video

Number of times the video was shared

Both viewership and engagement reports can be viewed for the entire channel, which has a strong impact of your individual videos’ SEO relevance. A strong channel with videos that perform well in viewership and engagement will be treated by YouTube and by the search engines as authoritative and relevant, which translates to better search position.

Local link building fosters real estate SEO

Mike Scotty — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 17:01:00 GMT

‘Local’ has always been a buzzword and a somewhat elusive objective in web marketing. GPS, check-ins and social media have improved a real estate business’ ability to master the local market, but nothing outshines good old networking and relationship building as the core to getting online exposure.

Becoming a stalwart in your local web community can transcend many of today’s search uncertainties and challenges surrounding unnatural SEO practices. As the search engines become able to detect the ‘easy solutions’ to SEO, businesses need to retrench and consider the legitimate communication that it takes to make a difference – to your target audience and to the search engines.

If you’re truly a local real estate business, or a branch office of a larger company where your primary business gets done in a local community and its fringes, your presence in a community is more likely to surface on the web when you can associate your business with various organizations in your community.

Research your local opportunities

Marketing has always been centered on the reach and frequency of your marketing message in different venues. Consider your local audience, and their impace on web search in terms of your local community.

Chamber of Commerce

Business organizations and networking groups

City websites and business directories

Local news publication sites

Local charities

Local bloggers – real estate and otherwise

Schools, sports clubs

Focus on the influential

You know, typically, who the influential organizations are in your community. But do a little extra research. See who surfaces in community based searches, like ‘YourTown restaurants’, ‘YourTown community organizations’, or ‘YourTown tours’.

Make personal connections

Offer your expertise on the housing market.

Offer to talk to an organization or group. Given that a speaking engagement usually guarantees coverage on their website, ask for the coverage. It’s a fair exchange.

Interview local business people for a write-up in your own blog. That person or business is likely to link to your blog on their site. Again – ask for the link.

Offer a guest blog post on the current state of the local housing market. A post is easy to write using your company’s local market stats combined with your own recent experience. Include links to your blog and reference market stats on your site.

Offer an exchange of links if the organization has a local directory on their site. Note: lately Google characterizes mass link exchanges as ‘paid’ (unnatural) links – but in reality, we’re talking about a handful of links at best at a local level.

Include influential local businesses in any community videos you make for your website

Use your social media

Reference your local business network on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Call them out for activities they support that may interest your own local followers. Let your fellow businesses know you support them and typically you’ll get that support back. This is a viable exchange of support between local merchants that pays off for both sides and gives additional exposure to both sides to an engaged audience.

The more you show up in local searches as the real estate go-to expert, the more search engine exposure you’ll get, as you’ll be a part of non-real estate searches – searches that are made where the majority of your potential clients live and work – your local market.

5 penalties that can affect your real estate SEO efforts

Mike Scotty — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 12:15:00 GMT

We’ve all heard about Google cracking down on websites trying to get an unfair advantage through ‘black hat’ SEO practices. And your site may have been affected too.

SEO is a moving target, guided by a single tenet – if your content is not relevant to a particular search term – you won’t stay at the top of the search page for long. You may get there temporarily using questionable tactics, but sooner or later, the search engine algorithms catch on. And the users catch on too. When users bounce off a bad page repeatedly, the search engines know it and devalue the page.

Which are the sites that stay relevant? The sites that deliver the information the searcher is looking for. Not the site that has skillfully crafted an SEO façade.

Here are some of the tactics that worked at one time, and still may work in the short term, but put you at risk of incurring Google penalties.

Paid links

Inbound links drive SEO, but if you’re paying for them, it is likely that your links are not being placed in content that anyone is actually reading. Very often, paid links have identical anchor text and all direct to the same page on your site – that’s a Google red flag. Prior to 2012, this tactic typically worked. Not anymore. Many large link farm companies have been wiped out of existence by this algorithm upgrade.

Purchasing links for the sole purpose of passing Page Rank violates Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Exchanging links at any volume with another site is another way of ‘buying’ links and also creates an identifiable pattern that is subject to penalties.

And if you’ve typically acquired a handful of links a month and all of a sudden gain 500, it won’t exactly look natural. Nor will excessive links from sites in other countries in a different language.

Hidden links

Links hidden in scripts and other file types used to be common, but the search engine robots are much more sophisticated these days at identifying links that are out of their element.

The same goes for links that are the same color as your background, or too small to actually read. These won’t help you.

Keyword stuffing

Over-optimization is a more recent search engine consideration. If your site has every single relevant keyword on every page, or an unnatural proliferation of a single keyword phrase on a page – the search engines will notice it for what it is – unnatural.

Footer links are infamous for including everything under the sun. These groups of keyword-laden links rarely have much SEO effect, and if that same footer is on every page of your site, the search engines will look at it as a deliberate attempt to manipulate.

Meta tags have been generally proven not to matter much to the search engines. Yet websites continue to stuff them with keywords that don’t appear anywhere else on the page. Self-sabotage.

Website errors

Broken internal links, 404 errors, website downtime and excessive load times are all seen by the web crawlers. Take the time to check your links or to check your Webmaster tools for crawl errors.

Poor content

Thin content, illegible or unnaturally keyword-laden, is going to get penalized eventually. Automated article spinners that produce automated gobble-de-gook do not help a website. They may have at one time, but no longer.

All the search engines make it their business to prioritize high-value content whenever they can. Inevitably, the way to keep your site relevant is to post real content using natural links. That content should in turn create inbound links via its relevance and authority. That’s the way the search engines want it and will continue to morph its algorithms to that end.

Real estate video SEO doesn’t happen without engagement

Mike Scotty — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 18:19:00 GMT

Video is an SEO darling according to most real estate SEO writers and commentators. And they’re correct. Video has its own set of guidelines and placement in the search results is most often visual – with a thumbnail accompanying the listing. You can’t beat that for search engine visibility.

But a video itself needs more than just keyword optimization in the title, description and tags. A video has to be watched or interacted with to rank with any significance. Just putting up a video on YouTube – even putting up hundreds of videos – will not ensure you any results. To be relevant, someone has to watch them. In fact, many people need to watch them.

There’s a kind of catch-22 going on with YouTube. In order to rank better, you need views on your videos. In order to get more views, you need to rank better.

How do you get your videos to rank better?

The content must be interesting

Sorry, no way around this one. Google is looking at video engagement more than ever – and there are analytics available at your YouTube channel that allow you to see how viewers are interacting with your videos. You can see how long people watched a video and where they fell off. You may even have a lot of views, but if you have 10% of your audience left after 30 seconds, Google interprets this as poor engagement.

As in all things Google, the people rule. If they watch, Google likes your video. If they watch it longer, Google likes it even more. If they jump ship early, bad news.

Your channel must have authority

That means that most of the videos on a channel need to have consistent viewership and engagement. Typically this has to be built over time, but is certainly one of the keys to a successful video marketing effort. Once your channel has a level of authority, videos placed on the channel reap the benefit of that channel’s relevance immediately upon upload.

Off channel social promotion – inbound links

Like other SEO categories, links to your video from authoritative sources are vital. Once posted, blogging your video(s) AND your channel, or getting others to link to them, really increases visibility. Posting on social media is also very helpful. 6,200 viewers of our YouTube channel came from links outside the channel this month. Social shares and commenting are very significant to relevance. Good content begets both.

On the same note, embedding your video wherever you can also prompts views. The visual is much more enticing than a link. Embedding your video is very easy on almost all blogging platforms, Google+ and Facebook.

Speaking of engaging videos, this video on YouTube Ranking Factors certainly qualifies, if you’re interested a full-blown explanation and a robust commentary.

Blog post ideas – real estate edition

Mike Scotty — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 12:13:00 GMT

Blog posts, videos, images and other content need to be topical and be relevant to your audience, but they also need to be readable – even exciting. The real success is in your live traffic – reading, clicking, and commenting.

I, like anyone, occasionally suffer from writers’ block and need to go in search of topics that will not only interest you, and serve my objectives of providing simplified SEO and content advice that you can use. Not easy. I often need to scrape around for a topic, so I’m guessing that you have to as well when you’re creating content. Maybe some of these ideas will help.

Earlier this year I wrote several posts that gave ideas for real estate blogs, specific to agents and homebuilders – here are a few more general blog ideas…

Differentiate yourself by recapping a recent article about your industry with your own opinion – while all of your competitors post it verbatim.

Cite interesting comments on your previous blog posts.

Debunk a myth or misconception about your industry.

Talk about your customers’ successes – and how they were successful – ideally using your product or service.

Revisit hot topics from years (months) past and speak to the issue from today’s perspective.

Write a post about something you learned this week or month.

Create your own charts or graphics to illustrate a point about your product or service.

Compile your old posts into relevant groups and link back to them appropriately. You’re reading one.

Google Keyword Tool simplifies real estate SEO

Mike Scotty — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 10:37:00 GMT

SEO is about keywords and keyword phrases perhaps more than any other factor.

A good website strategy will cite the specific and broad keyword targets of a page. But if you’re building a new page, you want to find the right terms to fit the idea of that page. Or if you’re writing content on a blog or another site that will link back to your site, you want to find the right terms to use in your anchor text.

So where do you start? Google Keyword Tool. It’s free, and, well, it’s Google measuring itself.

Google Keyword Tool is actually built for AdWords (pay-per-click ads), but it is a world of information on search behavior and keyword targeting.

Let’s say I’m a Realtor representing a new townhome development in Wicker Park. I want to build some web pages on my site and I want to post some articles, blogs and news releases that drive traffic and SEO relevance to my site.

My first inclination is to focus on some obvious terms like

Wicker Park townhomes

Wicker Park new construction townhomes

Wicker Park townhome specialist

But a query of those keyword phrases show that there isn’t even enough measureable data on any of the three terms give you a number of monthly searches. Try adding some broader terms and you can see where you might have better success

This is not to say that you shouldn’t include your specific terms like “Wicker Park townhomes” in your content – you absolutely should. What the keyword tool data tells you is that you should also work in some of the broader terms that are actually used in search queries.

Very often in real estate you find yourself wanting to penetrate a neighborhood, community or city. What I usually do in these situations is take a group of real estate terms that I’ve saved, stick the community name in front of each term and put them into Google Keyword Tool. I then look at the results in relation to each other and to my SEO goals and plot the best strategy from there.

Use this information to

Look at keywords that have driven traffic in the past

Looking at the search volume behind those keyword phrases

Looking at the difficulty in achieving page one ranking for appropriate phrases

Decide on your best options

Build on your pages and content (and occasionally adding pages) to optimize for those phrases

Spend a little time with Google Keyword Tool. You can learn a lot. All you need is to sign in with your Google account and start testing.

Real estate SEO page diversity grows the forest using the trees

Mike Scotty — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 12:15:00 GMT

A fairly common mistake that real estate brokers make when trying to optimize their website for search terms is that they try to rank for too many terms without supporting each term with specific content or more appropriately, a specific page.

Achieving page one ranking for your home page is almost impossible for more than one search term. It’s very important to remember that search engines surface web pages, not web sites, and that each term you want to rank for needs its own landing page, optimized for that specific keyword phrase.

Let’s imagine a real estate firm that serves Oak Park, River Forest and Forest Park, three close-in suburbs that are geographically contiguous. Each suburb has its own demographic, and although there is some crossover, it’s pretty likely that any search engine user looking for one of the three suburbs is looking specifically for real estate in the suburb searched.

But it’s also quite true that between the three suburbs, a wide range of housing is available and it is logical that a real estate firm would want to rank for all three individually.

The operative word here is individually.

In a case like this, the site SEO should concentrate sending users to three (or more) individual landing pages, one for each suburb, and more pages if you want to rank for neighborhoods within. And each page should have a variety of community-related information and links.

Given that search engine optimization is as human as it is structural, clicking a page one link is only the tip of the iceberg. Getting that person to stick with your site is your primary objective. And you get them to stick with you by giving them what they asked for. If they typed in ‘Forest Park real estate’, give them Forest Park real estate. Don’t give them your agent profile, don’t make them find your search function (they won’t) to once again type in Forest Park, don’t send them to your home page to read about all the places you do business, how great you are, or all the things you get when you work with your firm, or you. Give them what they asked for.

A Forest Park real estate landing page would have a little bit of everything, but most importantly listings (preferably new) and recent solds, a bit about the community, perhaps market stats and plenty of link opportunities. Anticipate what your users are looking for in a search term and give it to them, and they’re much more likely to go deeper into your site.

Tip: when you’re looking to rank for a search term, google the term and evaluate the content of each page that the top results are linking to.

Social media real estate: annoyance vs relevance

Mike Scotty — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 12:58:00 GMT

There’s no need to cite the validity of social media consumers – Facebook and Twitter are most certainly useful marketing channels for anyone in real estate, from the big brokerage to the national builder to the individual agent. To ignore Facebook and Twitter, or to use them poorly is doing your marketing plan a disservice.

As I see it from people I've talked to about it, many Facebook users use their own experience with business pages as a Facebook user as an indication of the overall effectiveness of business page postings. They see all the annoyances, but don’t really recognize the few businesses that they actually do read because, well, the content is interesting to them. It’s a classic case of ‘You don’t stand out until you annoy me’. On successful business pages, relevant information, regardless of the frequency, has a measured positive and cumulative effect in a prospect’s relationship with that business like few other marketing opportunities can.

Some classic annoyances:

The business page that posts on a regular basis, regardless of the relevance of the content.

The business page that curates (posts what others have written) every article about the marketplace or industry. Oh wait – only the positive articles – never even the slightly negative.

The business page that posts the ‘viral of the day’. Do we really need a local business to share ‘hot dog eating contest winner throws…’?

If you want to be seen and more importantly valued for you Facebook posts and tweets, perhaps a better tactic is to post

Business-related content (your business, that is)

Content that your competition isn’t also posting (curated articles)

Original content – links to your blog posts, your listings, your special offers

This post was inspired by a comment our salesperson received from a broker when we were discussing new listing feeds into their office Facebook pages. One of the products of our firm is a real estate data management system that collects, refines and distributes listing data and images to various online and print marketing venues, social sites included. The broker’s comment was “We don’t want to post our listings on Facebook – that’ll bug the hell outa people.” My response would be to consider your target prospects who have ‘Liked’ your local real estate firm’s Facebook business page and consider what kind of info would they be looking for from you? Market data. Pricing. Timing. All the things new prospects are looking for before they choose representation.

So the question becomes “Would a potential future client be interested in seeing a new listing that is local, that they probably recognize with a listing price attached to it? I would say yes. And would they be interested in the volume of listing business the local real estate office is doing, indicated by the frequency of those posts? Again, yes.

Think about your audience – your TARGET audience – the audience that might bring you future business. What are they following you for? The weather? To be friendly? Because they need another source of news each day? Not likely.

A qualified prospect that follows a local real estate office is likely to looking for market information about the relatively small area or community that the office serves. What can you tell them about your community that is real estate related?

A qualified prospect that follows an apartment high-rise or community probably lives there or is considering living there. That person is interested in amenities, special offers and future events at the complex and the benefits of living there.

A qualified prospect that follows a builder is interested in whatever the company is building, the custom variations, construction quality, etc.

That is not to say that other types of people don’t follow each of the business page types in these examples – employees, friends, the friends of friends of friends that you recruited to boost your page’s ‘Like’ count – but your focus should be on your real prospects, with real information.

Nor is it to say that your Facebook page should not be ‘social’. Many large real estate companies talk to each other on their Facebook pages – which is fine and a great internal communication device – just don’t expect to get much real business from it.

The frequency of your posts should be guided by how often you have something relevant to post. No one gets annoyed by good information – information that your ‘Likes’ essentially asked for.

And if you don’t know how to rid yourself of those annoying pages you ‘liked’ but are tired of seeing – hover in the upper right corner of any post – and click 'unsubscribe'.

Building SEO with a real estate blog

Mike Scotty — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 12:36:00 GMT

You’re not going to change the world with a single blog post, but the cumulative effect of real estate blogging can help you rank for the search terms that your prospects use most.

As you sit down to write a new post:

Decide on a topic

Your website has a focus – pick a subject that supports a sub-topic – a neighborhood, market trends, a property, or community events. Use these blog ideas for agents/brokers or builder/developers to help choose and refine a topic.

Develop the focus

If you’ve built your website with a good on-page SEO strategy, you’ve built individual pages that focus on specific topics and search terms. Decide which page or pages you want to direct your internal links to. These will be you most important links in a strategy to interest your readers in additional intelligence on your topic that you provide within your site.

For instance, if you’re writing about a neighborhood and/or market trends within it, link to a property search in that neighborhood, or current market stats you provide on that neighborhood, or even specific properties you have listed in the neighborhood. The objective of blogging is to create a relationship between the viewer and your site.

Craft the story for the audience

Make sure that you write your post in a way that will keep a reader interested. Write the way you speak to someone – don’t work on getting the links into the story until you’ve finished. You’ll find that the linking text will naturally be in the text you’ve written without trying.

Craft the story for the search engines

After you’ve written your post, go back and create links to the pages you determined were appropriate for this post’s focus. The right anchor text will probably already be there, if not, find a way to work it into the story without disturbing the flow.

Consider these factors:

Your blog headline should include your most important keyword phrase – the closer to the front of the headline, the better.
How and where you place your links matters. The flow of your story should be preserved, but when you can implement these linking factors into your post, you’re in a better SEO position.
Use your best anchor text. Consider what people are likely to type into the search box to find your post – and work it into your links when reasonable – and your headline.

Real estate video myths

Mike Scotty — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 14:36:00 GMT

Video is a prevalent medium – no need to rehash the Comscore stats – you need to be under a rock if you haven’t purposely or inadvertently watched a video online this week – or today for that matter – or in the past hour.

In a world where stories, news and products are repeatedly placed in front of us in audio visual form – what keeps real estate practitioners from using video – the near perfect medium for exhibiting the attributes of a property?

It could be that you read too much advice, this column notwithstanding. Making a video is a big undertaking the first time, but it gets easier as you begin to understand what really matters in a video, and what makes a video work – and get viewed.

Myth: You need the best production quality

Of course your video should be professional. But it doesn’t need to be a Hollywood production. There are so many decent cameras out there for $200-300 (and less) that record HD video with good sound quality. You’ll need a steady hand and a little practice – add a monopod that helps keep the camera steady and you’re in business.

And consider the believability of the content. The more a video looks like a commercial – the less believable it is. Every consumer understands that you can make a dog look like a beauty with selective photography and video production. Consider the realism and believability of this property tour.

Myth: a video needs to be less than 2 minutes

Not so. Yes, consumers have short attention spans – for things they’re only marginally interested in. But the qualified prospects you really want to reach with your video will watch as long as you continue to give them the information they’re looking for. Check out this post that debunks the 2-minute myth.

Issue: I’m not good in front of a camera

Well, that may be true in some cases but there are many ways around that. If you’re nervous to be on camera, just be the voice behind the camera – talking to your prospects the way you would talk to an actual live person looking at a space to buy or rent.

There is little doubt, though, that viewers are more engaged with your property tours when a live person is talking to them – it creates a personal connection that makes a realtor or a leasing agent seem more accessible – and enhances the likelihood of a virtual or phone connection by tht prospect.

Myth: I do virtual tours. Isn’t that a video?

A video file is a video file, but a slideshow of moving images, sometimes with a voiceover, more often without, has limited engagement qualities to the viewer. They are very popular because they can be made with little or no effort on the part of a property manager or agent, and they are typically inexpensive. Obviously, a live-motion tour is going to bring much better results.

Myth: Posting my video on YouTube is guaranteed viewership

Not exactly. The SEO factors of good video optimization, the popularity of the hosting YouTube channel, number of views, engagement, number of inbound links and video embeds in other sites all contribute to when and how often a video surfaces in search and what terms it surfaces for.

Real estate blogs – images make all the difference

Mike Scotty — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 10:05:00 GMT

A picture’s worth a thousand words. This adage has been true since the beginning of time. And you’d be hard pressed to find anyone that disagrees with it.

Amazingly though, web publishers often ignore this truism for reasons that are hard to fathom. I think perhaps that in the age of blogging and ‘anyone’s a publisher’, writers focus on keywords and content to get found. What they may be missing is that once a reader is facing your content on a computer screen (whatever size), it’s the image that gives them the sense of where they are and whether they want to continue reading an article.

Finding the best image to support your story/blog/article/ad is perhaps the most important element and the appropriate amount of time should be spent researching, finding, or even creating that element.

News articles

There is a stunning lack of attention to using images online in both Chicago newspapers. I often read headlines in an online RSS reader and often click specifically to see a picture of whatever the subject is – only to find none. Incredibly, there are sometimes photos in the printed edition, but none in the online edition. Go figure.

I also frequently choose the Top Story of the day for our online real estate news feature ‘Chicago real estate news’ on YoChicago. Almost half of the stories I attempt to use, based on their appropriateness for a particular day, get skipped because when I open the article – it has no image. I won’t use an article for this spot unless it has an image because I know from analytics that the image draws readers – and these publications miss out on being featured on the second-most-viewed page on our site.

Blogs

Blog posts should be summarized by a good image. It is nearly as important as the content itself. Your blog’s home page should have a thumbnail image accompanying the excerpt (summary) text – especially if you have substantial direct traffic to your blog. A glance at that page should give your potential reader a sense of what your overall content is about.

Facebook

Friend posts aside, when it comes to the business pages you’ve liked, you probably blow by the posts without images. Unless the article is particularly worthy of your target audience’s attention, an imageless post is only likely to take up space in a reader’s scan. Skip it if you can’t give your readers a sense of the content in a glance.

Video

Video thumbnails most definitely have an effect on viewership. If you have a partner channel, YouTube allows you to add a custom thumbnail.

We upload custom thumbnails to most of our YoChicago YouTube channel videos. We’ve discovered that in our YoChicago weekly emails, when we use a thumbnail with a person (the more animated the better), we get more than twice the click-throughs. I’m guessing this is for the same reason that YoChicago videos get good viewership – people like watching real people.

Good image selection is ALWAYS worth the effort.

How long should a real estate video be?

Mike Scotty — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 12:05:00 GMT

The answer to that question is that there really is no right length – as long as you can keep it interesting.

There’s a recurring request that we hear from clients that a property video should be short – some say less than a minute – some say 2 or 3 minutes, others less than 5.

If you’re showing a studio apartment, your video probably should be only a couple of minutes, but if that studio apartment is in the heart of a lively neighborhood, your video could go on for several minutes – as long as it takes to describe the things that makes that apartment appealing and hold your audience interest. And that includes the building amenities, the local dining and bar scene, entertainment, and so on.

Generally, the argument for ‘short’ stems from the misguided notion that all people have short attention spans – “no one will watch a 10-minute video of a property”. But here’s the thing – if you’ve got an interested prospect, they’re going to stick with it – heck they’ll probably even want more. And who are you really trying to entice with your videos - casual encounters or live prospects?

Like any marketing medium, real estate videos are going to get many casual viewers and a smaller percentage of potential buyers or renters who are truly engaged.

I went to our YoChicago YouTube channel for some audience retention stats.

This 2-minute video (click the images to view the graphs) is holding on to nearly 50% of its audience at the end of the video. This 6-minute video is holding on to 30% at the end, and this unusual (for us anyway) 20-minute video even has 30% of its audience watching the entire tour.

While these numbers at face value may suggest that the 2 minute video is better option because it retained a higher percentage of viewers, I would counter that it retained a higher percentage because it was short – which doesn’t gauge interest. And 2 minutes into the 6-minute video, there was over 60% retention.

I picked a representative sample after looking at about 30 samples (of our 2,100+ videos) and the trajectories are fairly similar. Some of course are better and some fare worse. We had one 15-minute video with hundreds of ‘views’ that fell flat before the 5-minute mark with zero-retention. It really depends how interesting the content is to begin with, and then how much more interesting you make it.

And don’t forget that the casual viewers may not be interested in your property, but they’re getting your marketing message that promotes you as a savvy marketer who’s willing to utilize video to sell properties. That counts.

YouTube moves to favor video engagement over views

Mike Scotty — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 15:24:00 GMT

You may have to work a little harder to get your real estate videos to come up in search results.

On March 15, YouTube altered its recommendation system to make engagement, or time spent watching a video a stronger indicator than the initial click in determining which videos actually surface to a user. The change is to the ‘related video’ algorithm – the one that drives all the suggested videos (most often in the right margin) while you’re watching a video on YouTube.

Before the change, YouTube would track the length of views up to 30 seconds, primarily to make sure each click led to an actual view. Now it's tracking across longer timeframes to see if viewers watched two or three minutes of content.

Always one to favor the user, Google-owned YouTube believes that videos that are watched longer indicate stronger interest in the subject, hence a better video, and one more worthy of higher search engine results. Clicks are often a good indicator of popularity, but enticing thumbnails and alluring titles can mislead users into a lot of clicks for a marginal video.

And of course there’s a business reason at play too. Longer viewing means a better ad format, and engaged viewers are thought to be in a more receptive mind-set for brand advertising, a cluster of ad dollars largely untapped by YouTube. YouTube has invested $100 million to create content channels in anticipation of this change.

While the change in the algorithm is now pointing only at the internal YouTube recommendation system, it is a very powerful search medium – the second most powerful on the web, save for Google itself. On our YoChicago real estate video channel, just shy of 50% of our 60,000 video views in the past 30 days came from views resulting from links within YouTube.

YouTube has just begun to surface these ‘Time Watched’ metrics in their analytics, albeit as a data dump, but we can now see total views on any given day or week, total watch time and average watch time per view. We can now see that on a single day (June 6, 2012), the latest day of accessible metrics, over 700 YoChicago videos were viewed for an average of just over 2 minutes – a great showing in this age of fleeting interest.

Interesting to note is that YouTube does not indicate percentage of video watched, but appears to look at a video’s value in minutes viewed. That is not to say that a percentage calculation is not a part of the algorithm and it is pretty easy to figure out given their new metrics.

At this point, there is little reason to believe that Google search results won’t eventually pick up the change in focus and begin surfacing videos with high engagement over click rate. Videos with engaging content are going to be the winners in the search engine results pages.

Key visitor metrics guide to SEO strategy

Mike Scotty — Thu, 31 May 2012 12:47:00 GMT

Who’s your star real estate marketer? Your website. Or at least it should be.

Last week I talked about improving your website’s ‘stickiness’, i.e., keeping your viewers on your site. This week we’ll look at ways to evaluate if and how they are navigating your site using the most common (and free) analytics platforms – Google Analytics. If you don’t have access to your analytics account, talk to your webmaster.

Here are some of the basic metrics and how they define your website traffic.

Traffic sources

Your traffic sources generally come from four groups:

Search traffic. Fairly self-explanatory, this group finds you on the search engines. They probably didn’t know about you, but were looking for a search term that fit your profile. Search traffic is split into two categories; paid and organic. Paid search results come from clicks on ads that you paid to appear under specific search terms. Organic search results come from users clicking search results that appear because of the natural content on your site.

SEO is about earning organic search results. Search traffic is almost entirely new visitors – a rate that you want to keep high. Aim for about 50%.

Referral traffic. This group of users link into your site from other websites. This is a good indicator of your success at generating inbound links from quality content. A good rate of referral is around 20%-30%

Direct traffic. This group is typing your URL directly into their browser. Typically this group found out about you offline and looked you up on the web and/or are repeat visitors, some of whom may have bookmarked your site.

Campaign traffic. This group has subscribed to your RSS feed(s) or your email campaigns and linked into your articles.

Unique visitors

Unique visitors are individuals who visited your site during a specific time period. A visitor who visited your site 100 times would be considered one unique visitor. This metric gives you a better idea of how many prospects you’re actually reaching.

New vs. repeat visitors

This comparison of what percentage of users returned to your site during a specific period. This metric will give you an idea of how ‘sticky’ your site is. While it is very important for you to generate new visitors, you want to know that a reasonable percentage of them are returning for the value of your content – a good benchmark is around 20%.

If your repeat visitor percentage is below 10%, it may be an indicator that your site does not have enough valuable content. Conversely, if you repeat rate is high, say over 30%, it could mean that your new visitor rate is falling off. Time to generate more content.

Most and least popular pages

Look at what your visitors are reading as a guide to future content creation. You may think you’ve written a great post or done a great video, but when the page views are low, there’s a reason. Look at your pages that have the most views and evaluate the common elements of that content - that’s what people are interested in. This is not to say you shouldn’t try something new every so often. But use your time wisely by writing about what interests your prospects most.

Real estate SEO enriched by website stickiness

Mike Scotty — Thu, 24 May 2012 12:10:00 GMT

If your users don’t stay on your site – what good are your SEO efforts?

If your prospects didn’t see your website before they’ve made contact with you (unlikely), they’ll be looking at it after they’ve met you. They’ll be looking for clues to your organization skills, your market knowledge, clear explanations of products and services, and a host of other signals that speak to your professionalism and expertise.

Your website is now your personal calling card – and it doesn’t leave anything to the imagination. If you’re deliberating withholding information in the hopes of filling your lead funnel, you’re only irritating your users – not an effective strategy.

Some key website design ideas.

These are the most basic attributes of a good website strategy.

Make it functional

What would a user be looking for? Make sure the answers are in the main menu, preferably in the order of their relevance. What is your best selling point – your community, the unit attributes, yourself as a resource? Whatever it is – put it out front.

Make the navigation work

No information should be more than two clicks deep, if possible. Make it clear where your internal links are going by using appropriate anchor text.

Skip the moving graphics unless they serve a purpose

Any animation on a website should NOT keep the user from proceeding in their quest for information. Don’t make your users have to turn the volume off, or click links like ‘Skip this introduction to proceed’, or worse yet have to wait through a song and dance to get to your home page. You couldn’t make a worse impression – no matter how slick your graphics are.

Attract attention to your expertise through blogs / videos

How do you extend you and/or your company’s personality to your website? Video. There’s nothing like giving your users the opportunity to hear directly from you.

How do extend your expertise in your relevant disciplines to your users? Blog posts and articles that cover current events that are relevant to your business. Posts on your website go beyond the ‘Use me’ or ‘buy here’ requests to ‘My knowledge of this neighborhood/community qualifies me to find you a home here’.

Next week – evaluating your website’s effectiveness through key metrics.

A real estate blogger needs a link strategy

Mike Scotty — Wed, 16 May 2012 12:21:00 GMT

While most bloggers write for a higher purpose than pure SEO, most of us have a secondary purpose (OK, occasionally primary) of helping our sites rank better. We want to throw some link juice at one of our own websites, a client website, or a website we respect – one that shares good information.

But if you’re linking out from your blog to your own site or another with the intention of sending SEO credit, or ‘link juice’ to the destination, there are several SEO guidelines to consider. To writers unfamiliar with some of the finer points of how the search engines break down a page, these tips might help to fine tune your efforts and increase your link strategy's effectiveness.

Use your links sparingly

Too often, writers assume that the more links you have, the more effective your SEO strategy. Not true.

Your opportunity to send off-page SEO from a new page or post on your site to another site is finite – with the limits determined by your domain’s authority. For the sake of this example, let’s say you have 100 points* of available SEO credit to use with an original article on your blog. If you have four links in that article each gets 25 SEO credit points. If you have 20 links, each link gets 5 points.

The trick is to determine which links matter most and concentrate on those links. If your article is all about a new development in Lincoln Park, and during the course of the article you mention a couple of nearby restaurants, you don’t need to link to the restaurants – they aren’t what your article is about. To do so would diminish the authority of the SEO credit you are sending to your most important links – namely the development’s website.

You have to ask yourself the question, “Am I helping my readers understand the gist of my post by linking to the side conversations?” If not, save the juice for the important links.

Important links first

When you can, link to your most important pages early in your post. The first links on a page carry more weight than those later in the post. This isn’t always feasible and it is never worth making your article difficult to read. Just keep in mind that the first links get the most juice.

Incidentally, search engines almost always recognize the core content on a page as the main content. You are NOT competing with sidebar and footer links. Those links do count and pass SEO credit, but their share of the available credit is much less than those in the main content block of the page.

No duplicates

Don’t link twice to the same page. The second link won’t count (for SEO anyway). There are instances when you want to link twice because it just makes sense – you want to give your reader a second chance to see some important information. Just know that the anchor text on the first link is the one that Google is going to associate with the SEO credit given to that destination page.

Don’t forget image links

Your images can link as well and are often at the top of your page. Use these links wisely – it’s a good opportunity to link first to your strongest idea. More often than not – your image will define the main point of your post.

*there is no such thing as SEO credit points. The concept is used as an example.

Social real estate marketing – remember talking to people?

Mike Scotty — Thu, 03 May 2012 12:40:00 GMT

Every so often we stop and think, “Geez how did we ever get anything done before the internet?” Well, we did. And funny thing about that is that, especially in marketing, the fundamentals haven’t changed. The tools have. Reach and frequency – you identify your target audience and you reach out to them at regular intervals with the right message. Eventually when one of those prospects thinks of real estate, you come to mind.

I had the chance to talk to a local Chicago Realtor this week who told me that her consistent use of Facebook alone had built her a steady stream of referrals and a sale every couple of months. But she probably doesn’t do it in the way you’d expect.

Eileen has built her fan base up to over 500 Facebook friends that include personal and professional acquaintances, aka her sphere of influence. She doesn’t post new listings on Facebook, she doesn’t advertise open houses and she doesn’t ask directly for business. She tried building a business page for a while, but felt it was too contrived and went back to focusing on her personal page.

What Eileen does is talk to her sphere. She posts her status and photos, joins groups and talks about what she’s doing day-to-day. Because she’s a busy Realtor – the real estate angle works its way into the conversation – “I’m between appointments and trying to get tonight’s dinner figured out”, “I’m sitting an open house and can’t believe the traffic”, “I just saw the most gorgeous house that went on the market this week”. Never the hard sell.

Every one of her friends knows that she’s a Realtor and knows that she’s busy. And when they’re looking for a real estate expert, Eileen comes to mind.

Remember talking to people? Lots of people? We’re just doing it in a different way now.

Eileen commented on how people who are house-bound, taking care of a family or in a home-based business can really make a connection and build a solid friendship with you on Facebook.

Think about the things you know about your friends and acquaintances that you’d never know were it not for Facebook. If you’re a Realtor, perhaps you should make sure your friends know what you do – conversationally.

Over-the-top real estate SEO in for a wake-up call.

Mike Scotty — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:33:00 GMT

About a month ago, Google search guru Matt Cutts let it ‘slip’ at a mainstream search conference that Google would begin actively seeking out and devaluing sites that over-optimized their web pages, referring to the on-page user experience.

This week, Google made it official with its announcement that a change in its search algorithm would punish sites that violate the company’s quality guidelines. Appropriately, the announcement was headlined ‘Another step to reward high-quality sites’.

From the Google announcement:

The opposite of “white hat” SEO is something called “black hat webspam” (we say “webspam” to distinguish it from email spam). In the pursuit of higher rankings or traffic, a few sites use techniques that don’t benefit users, where the intent is to look for shortcuts or loopholes that would rank pages higher than they deserve to be to be ranked.

Now would be a good time to reassess your on-page SEO for potential problems. An easy place to start is with your use of keywords on your pages.

What is keyword over-optimization?

You’ve probably seen it in your web browsing. Some are more obvious than others:

Title tags that are laden with keywords.
Example: Glenview real estate, real estate in Glenview, Glenview homes for sale
Multiple links to the same page.
Many times a web page will link to the same internal web page using different keyword-rich anchor text, or in blatant cases – the same anchor text over and over again. It’s pretty well documented that search engines only give SEO credit to a link once on a page, and they associate the link with the anchor text of the first link. Red flag.
Link-filled footers.
Many inexperienced SEOs can’t resist the notion to fill the footer with links that contain every possible related keyword or keyword phrase to their site. Not good. Footers should contain links that users are likely to click. Another red flag.
Keyword stuffing in your content blocks.
If your blog post or article reads a little spammy, it is. If you’re inserting keywords in an unnatural way, you’re keyword stuffing.
Check out this page and count the number (ctrl+F) of times the phrase ‘Real estate SEO’ is used. I counted them for you – 43 times. Webspam.

There are many more backlink-related violations to this over-optimization issue that are more technical. But suffice it to say that if you are considering, or your web consultant is endorsing this kind of keyword use, it’s in your best interest to step back.

Black hat SEO, link schemes, Panda. What does it all mean?

Mike Scotty — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 12:39:00 GMT

Off-page SEO generally consists of link-building. Link building is the process of acquiring inbound links from other authoritative websites to content on your site. Search engine algorithms consider inbound links the highest form of credibility. Acquiring inbound links is never completely in your control – you must work and cajole other parties into linking to your site.

There are a couple ways you can garner these coveted links. You can create great content that gets noticed and linked to organically. Or you can swap links, buy links, and employ other links schemes. The former is generally referred to as white hat SEO, the latter as black hat (or sometimes gray). White hat takes a little more skill and authenticity. Black hat SEO takes a different kind of talent and is more often a financial transaction.

Finding sites with the best content – judged by the online community through its inbound links is what the search algorithms aspire to. In a perfect world, these sites would always surface first on the SERPs. Black hat tactics try to game those aspirations, by using fabricated links in meaningless sites to mimic credible inbound links. The unnatural links (as Google refers to them) are typically on sites that link to each other for ‘authority’ and are often referred to as link farms.

You won’t often find these ‘junk’ sites as I tend to call them while going about your business on the web because they don’t often come up in search results – but when you do find them, you’ll be hitting the back button pretty quickly because, well, they’re junk. Here’s a couple of examples of sites that exist just for the links…

Find the very relevant Chicago real estate listings link on this site:
http://betterdollar.com/
Read the copy on this site – it looks like it could almost be legit, but it’s gibberish. And what’s that Chicago real estate link doing at the bottom? http://www.nationalforsaleorrent.ca/

The unfortunate or fortunate, depending on who you are, aspect of black-hat link building it that it works, to varying degrees. And a fairly large industry has been built on successful black hat tactics. But its effectiveness is starting to wane.

If you follow SEO at all, you’ve heard of Google Panda, actually named after the Google engineer who spearheaded the algorithm updates. While the update as a whole and in parts can be defined many ways, its main objective and what is actually occurring is that low-quality sites with unnatural linking schemes appear to be moving out of the top rankings, rankings that were achieved through deceptive link building. Although the Panda update went global over a year ago, its effect seems to come in waves with occasional updates to the algorithm.

And this is good thing. How many times have you been dissatisfied with the results of a Google search? Chances are, not often. That requires an effort to keep the search results relevant.

The interesting thing about the Panda update is that it started with artificial intelligence built on the basis of human testers rating thousands of websites. Google then used that intelligence to create profiles of high vs. low quality sites. While the Google model is indeed very technical and understood by few, it is all about the human experience – will users keep coming to Google for their search needs? Is the Google engine surfacing the best content for the right query?

If you’re a webmaster, Google suggests that you ask this question before deciding on a link’s validity – “Is this going to be beneficial for my page's visitors?