Online Real Estate Technology

Search Engines

Your blog will have a better SEO result when you utilise good SEO techniques such as link building, and one of the ways to do that is by creating internal links within your posts or content.

A good internal link structure can have a size-able impact on your rankings on the major search engines. Most blog writers either don’t use this strategy or don’t know how to create internal links and it is really quite simple. You want your readers, particularly new readers to discover all your great content, and by including links to your older posts, it gives them a whole new life, as well as maintaining your readers on your blog for a longer stay. For example, in February I wrote a post about Google Analytics and in January I wrote about how important an SEO strategy is to your business, as you see I’ve included internal links to both of these posts I’ve mentioned, knowing that when new readers visit my blog, they will be able to visit those posts and read the stories, effectively giving those older posts a new lease on life.

So here are a few tips for you on creating an internal link strategy and a few things you should avoid:

1. Avoiding Bad Anchor Text: Whilst adding “Click Here Text” may drive a better click through rate, it is not good for anchor text. You need to decide if click here or keywords are more important. In the examples above, I’ve decided that keywords are more important, you can of course mix them up, by including good keywords and then a separate link containing the words “Click Here”. So if you want to rank for “Red Widgets” don’t use the phrase click here. I’ll cover this in my next post.

2. Uneven Distribution of links: Make sure you spread your links around, promote all your old posts in your new content. But one word of advice, don’t over do it. One or two links per post is sufficient.

3. Broken Links – Make sure all your links work,there’s nothing worse for a reader than to click on a link in your post and it not work. If you change or upgrade your blog software it can cause broken links,so make sure they all work and test them regularly. If you are using Google webmaster tools on your blog, it will tell you if a link is broken. But beware, the search engines don’t like broken links.

4. Missed Opportunities: If you are blogging about a subject you’ve written about before, don’t miss the opportunity to link to your older content.

5.Edit Instead of Linking: Sometimes there is the temptation to go back and edit an old post, or you might even want to add some up dated information to it, Well resist the temptation, you are far better to write a new post and then include a link to your old one.

I hope this post on how to create internal links is helpful to you in getting a better result for your blog. You can breath new life into your old articles and posts by creating internal links, and it will help you in the search results.

Good Luck and if you need help please let me know by leaving me a comment on the blog. I’ll always respond to your questions.

You can now download and listen to this post as a podcast, click here to get the latest episode.

There’s a very interesting report from UberCEO about how Fortune 500 CEO’s in the US are largely absent from any form of engagement with social media. The survey revealed:

Another interesting find is that Twitter was the least used service by the Fortune 100 CEOs, despite being one of the fastest growing social media networks. Wikipedia had the highest level of engagement among the Fortune 100 CEOs, yet 28% of those entries had incorrect titles, missing information or lacked sources.

LinkedIn, a site mainly used for professional networking, only attracted 13 Fortune 100 CEOs, five of which had just one connection. Three CEOs stood out from the pack on LinkedIn, each having more than 80 connections. However, they are all from technology companies – Michael Dell (Dell), Gregory Spierkel (Ingram Micro) and John Chambers (Cisco).

While there were slightly more Fortune 100 CEO users on Facebook than on LinkedIn, most of them had limited information on their page and few friends. More surprising is that no Fortune 100 CEO has a public blog that could be easily found.

In my opinion, the top CEOs appear to be disconnected from the way their own customers are communicating.  They’re giving the impression that they’re disconnected, disengaged and disinterested.  There’s no doubt that some would be nervous of regulations that make CEOs cautious about communicating freely, but they’re missing a great opportunity to connect with their target audience.  The survey also showed some of the reasons CEOs aren’t using social media is because of:

1. Fear
2. Lack of knowledge
3. Time constraints

CEO’s can really learn a lot about how consumers use their product or even relate to their company by using social media as a research tool. I believe that customers who can talk with or communicate with a CEO would have a far better engagement with that company. The one thing about social media is it reveals the culture within a company, be prepared to share information with your followers and engage and interact with them, it’s the best form of market research you and your company will ever have.   

During the course of my blog workshops I present a lot of options on how you can promote and syndicate your blog when you are just starting out, and one of the ways you can generate new readers is by putting your blog with, what the experts call, Link Farms.

The question you may have on the tip of your tongue is “What is a link farm? well link farms are web sites that have lots of inbound links that help increase their ranking and page rank on search engines such as Google. Some of these sites actually build or contain links to unrelated web sites, and sometimes these sites also link to themselves. Search engines are very strict on link farms and in some cases ban them all together from being indexed and displayed in search results.

If they are banned by Google for instance, they will lose their page rank, but that’s not the worst part, because if your blog is linked to one of these sites then you too can be banned and lose your page rank. That is why it is extremely important that you know what a link farm is, and you know how to properly identify one so that you avoid linking to that site.

If in the past you haven’t analysed the sites and directories you link to then you really need to start doing so, as they can have a massive impact on your site or blogs ranking. It is most important that you review the site closely before adding a link to it. Hopefully the following advice will help you know what to look for and help identify a link farm.

The Site has lots of links-If you go to a site and it has lots and lots of links then you should immediately realise it is possibly a link farm.

Low Page Rank -Usually link farms get penalised by Google and lose their page rank, therefore you need to be careful if you see a site with a page rank of 0, not all sites with this rank are link farms of course, but at least this will help you start to look more closely at the site.

Little or no content – Those that control link farms don’t care about content, all they want is the inbound links to help drive page rank. Therefore as a rule, don’t Link to a site that has little or no content on it.

Badly maintained sites- Most link farm webmasters don’t maintain their sites very well, links are all that are important to them. I’ve just removed my blog from one site that had heaps of broken links and links to pages that went nowhere. So check them carefully!!

Be careful as well, as to where you link your site, I added a link to a site about 6 months ago that was heavily used by spammers, unknown to me, and this caused my blog to be flagged by Wordpress and removed from public view, the first I new about it was when my traffic decreased considerably, so be careful as Wordpress will not notify you that you have been flagged.

My advice is to check out the directories and sites really well before you link to them. If you are still not sure, check out some really well known blogs, that have been around for awhile, to get a feel of what sites they link to.

I hope this helps and as always, if you need help, please leave me a comment and I’ll respond accordingly.

New research from the US today has revealed that Home buyers are twice as likely to use on line sources than print sources to find information about open houses they are interested in, this is according to research conducted by Harris Interactive.

The survey commissioned for Trulia.com found that 62% of US home buyers use or plan to use on line sites to find open houses, compared with 53% who use/plan to use information from real estate agents, 36% who use/plan to use neighborhood signs and less than one-third (31%), who use/plan to use print sources, including newspapers and local flyer’s. 

The study also found that though many home buyers rely upon a range of different sources to gather information about open houses, 41% say online sources are their primary resource, while 14% cite print sources.

More than 9 in 10 home buyers in the US (91%) attended or plan to attend open houses during their home-purchase process.

“The real estate section of the weekend newspaper is no longer the go-to resource for open houses,” said Sami Inkinen, co-founder and COO of Trulia. “Home buyers are increasingly going on line to not only search for the most up to date listings but also to obtain rich information about the neighborhood, schools, and local shops.”

Inkinen added that on line sites – such as Trulia – and related iPhone applications have experienced dramatic growth in recent years because they enable home buyers to search for open houses in neighborhoods that interest them, sign up for email alerts and learn more about the local areas in which they’re looking.

“We used to see home buyers walk into open houses with a newspaper in their hands,” said Aman Daro, VP of Integrated Marketing at McGuire Real Estate in San Francisco. “But now they walk in with print outs of their search on the web. What’s more, consumers are walking in very educated from their on line research – they know details about the property and the neighborhood, and are more highly engaged in the process than the casual lookers of years past.”

Here are the results of the survey as published by Harris:

On Line Vs Print

Mike Andrew's Real Estate Podcast Series

I’ve had a number of people ask me about my podcast series over the past few weeks and where they can download them from, so I’ve included in this post the URL link to download the entire series of 25 podcasts. These are designed as a series for you and you can download and keep them as a reference source on technology and marketing tips.

I’ll continue to update the series on a regular basis so to make sure you get each new episode, subscribe to the RSS feed at www.mikeandrew.podomatic.com, grab the feed from my blog or get them via ITunes by searching podcasts and entering Mike Andrew Real Estate Podcasts.

Let me know if you have any problems with downloading the series.

As a follow up to my post yesterday on Facebook vanity URL’s, it seems there’s a little more to this than I first thought. On reading the FAQ’s for Facebook user names, there are a few revealing terms about how you can go about claiming your URL and more importanlty a number of restrictions on you doing it. Firstly you have had to have a live page prior to May31st which is the cut off date and you have to have a minimum of 1,000 fans as of May31st.

That is no mean feat for most small business owners, let alone people like myself who don’t have anywhere near that many friends or followers. This rule will affect many operators who want to have their own vanity URL, just like Twitter and other sites allow you to do. The reason as I understand it from Facebook, is to stop squatters and people creating accounts just to take advantage of reserving a user name.

Squatters pose a real risk to the vanity URL issue going smoothly on Saturday, so it is good to see Facebook make a positive step to try and stop this happening.  

I’m aware that Facebook’s restrictions could create a situation where the primary desired name gets snatched up when the names are released on Saturday, But Facebook has already addressed this to an extent. If you’re at all concerned about your trademark or intellectual property being registered, you can almost be assured that you’re protected. You can submit this form now to prevent individuals from using your trademarked name or request removalafter the fact. However, it’s still unclear as whether or not those efforts will net you the user name of your choice if you don’t meet the fans requirement.

If I have any additional information to add to this before Saturday I’ll post an update for you.

A Rating Site for Blogs

For those of you that have just created your blog  or would like to start to get readers and traffic to your articles, I thought it worth a mention of a site that I’ve just added my blog too. There are a number of directories on the web that you can add your blog to to start to get readers and this one is quite a good one as it also allows users to provide ratings of your blog and/or topic.

This is a great tool for getting feedback on your articles and researching what they like or don’t like about what you write.

It’s called Scribnia and whilst it’s only in public beta testing at the moment, which means it’s under going changes and tweaks regularly, I found it quite easy to navigate, and to find authors and blogs on all types of topics that were of interest to me.

Scribnia is a social community, based on the premise that everyone has a favourite author, blogger or even publication, and it’s goal is to help you discover new writers based on analyzing user ratings and your preferences.

You can rate my blog and articles here if you would like to see how it works and give me some valuable feedback at the same time. 

Any blogger can claim a profile on the site and to verify the claim you just add a small piece of code to either a widget on your side bar or add it to the bottom of one of your posts. The code is invisible so your readers won’t see it. Once you’ve claimed your blog you can use your profile to interact with interested readers and another great section to the site is the ability to search by publication, so if you have a favourite topic and like to just search through the available blogs you can. 

It’s well worth a try, so here’s a shot of the front screen to give you a heads up on what it looks like.

Front Screen Shot

Whilst Twitter & Myspace already provide vanity URL’s for users, Facebook has not until today, well actually from Saturday the 13th June,because that’s the date you’ll be able to get your vanity URL on Facebook. The vanity URL is an important part of social media, because it allows you to create a common theme across all the sites and it makes it easy for your followers to find you.

To get your URL, you’ll need to visit the following link on Saturday, http://www.facebook.com/username/, on the page you’ll find instructions on how to claim your URL or create your own, you will only be able to use numbers, letters & periods , no hyphens or underscores will be allowed. Once you have selected your URL you will not be able to change it.

I would think there will be a rush for names on Saturday so If I were you, I’d make a note in the diary and get in in as soon as the site goes live.

Good Luck   

What is the Government doing with all our money?

This article is a departure for me from what I usually publish on this blog, however,given that at some stage in all of our lives we will head to a bank or financial instituion, borrow money and get into debt, I thought it worth sharing with you. I think it’s also relevant as the news of recent days has shown the Australian economy not in recession and the news that the Queensland government is about to sell off all the states assets.  

When it comes to finances and managing the household budget we all try and stay within your means, not spending more than you earn and not borrowing more than you can pay back. Now, great in theory, but not all of us can manage it, well here is a very interesting article from Ross Greenwood of Money News.

If this doesn’t scare you I don’t know what will:  

“Right now the Federal Government is at pains to tell everyone – including us the mug-punters to the International Monetary Fund that it will not exceed its own, self-imposed, borrowing limits.  How much? $200 billion. And here’s a worry. If you work in a bank’s money market operation; or if you are a politician; the millions turn into billions and it rolls off the tip of the tongue a bit too easily.

But every dollar that is borrowed, some time, has to be repaid. By you, by me and by the rest of the country.

Just after 5 o’clock tonight I did a bit of maths for Jason Morrison. But it’s so staggering its worth repeating now. First though … here’s what Chairman Rudd has been saying about – what he calls – these temporary borrowings.  Remember those words … temporary deficit … but the total Government debt could end up around $200 billion.

So here’s a very basic calculation … I used a home loan calculator to work it out … it’s that simple.

$200 billion is $200,000 million. The current 10 year Government bond rate is 4.67 per cent. I worked the loan out over a period of 20 years.

Now here’s where it gets scary … really scary.

The repayments on $200 billion come to more than one and a quarter billion dollars – every month – for 20 years. It works out we – as taxpayers – will be repaying $15.4 billion in interest and principal every year … $733 for every man woman and child – every year.

The total interest bill over the 20 years is – get this – $108 billion.

And remember, this is a Government that just 18 months ago had NO debt … NO debt. In fact it had enough money to create the Future Fund to pay the future liabilities of public servants’ superannuation … and it had enough to stick $20 billion into the Building Australia Fund last year …”

Money News
Ross Greenwood Presenter 

Thanks to http://www.australia.to/ for the use of this story

Have you ever been concerned about how much information is included in Tweets on Twitter and how much people share about themselves and their movements or whereabouts?  I know I tweet sometimes about what I’m doing and where I travel to, but I never thought about the implications of what I publish, until now. We should be paying more attention to what we publish about ourselves and our movements, because it could lead to us being monitored tracked and even robbed. 

An example of this, as reported on Mashable is Izzyvideo, real name Israel Hyman. Israel took a trip with his family recently and published tweets about his trip, when he returned home, his house had been robbed. Although the police have yet to directly link the robbery to his tweets and Twitter, both Israel and the local media have linked the robbery to his history of tweeting.

So I think the lesson in this for all of us, is to be aware of what we publish and how much personal information we put out into the public domain. Robbers and Predators have every reason to be aware of the sharing element of the social media craze, lets not give them anything they can use to make our lives miserable.

So  now you have been warned. Take Care.