Online Real Estate Technology

There are a number of factors that search engines use to rank a web site, and as search engines often change the algorithms used to determine rank it can sometimes be very difficult to keep up to date.

One of the factors that Google for example uses to rank web sites is back links, or the number of incoming votes from external web sites or domains to a web site. The more votes for a web site, the higher Google and other search engines will place your web site in the SERP’s .

Other factors also come into play, the age of your domain name, the older your domain name is the better as search engines will trust your site more than a newer site, how much authority or page rank your site has, how may web pages are trying to rank in the top 10 for your keyword and even how long your domain name is registered for are all factors.

The reason back links are important, is the more votes a site has usually indicates the popularity of that site and its content with other web users. Search engines love popular sites.

It is harder to generate votes for a static web site than it is for a blog based site such as WordPress, due to the fact that most blogs are updated on a daily basis whereas most static based sites often get few or no updates.

One of the techniques that you can use to generate back links for your site is by placing comments on blogs that you either read or follow on the web. This is even better, if you can find a blog that allows for a “follow” link back to your web site.

What is a follow link? Some time ago Google invented a piece of code that can be inserted into a hyperlink that tells search engines “not to follow” that link from its place on a web page.

This essentially stops most search engines from following the link, so it effectively stops the link juice, it does not however stop the traffic from following a link on your site.

Web pages that have 100 or more links on them can be penalised by search engines and in this, read Google, so if you have a web page that features a lot of advertising links, say for example on your home page, then you could be penalised for having a lot of links, this is usually one of the tell-tale signs of a spam site.

Likewise, having no code placed in the link means that a search engine will follow the link and discover in some cases new web sites. You can also use this method if you’d like to get your web site indexed quickly in the search engines, as placing a link on a web site already in Google’s index will result in your site being indexed quickly as Google will “follow” the link.

Creating votes or back links for your web site, whether you use a blog based site or a static web site is not easy, there are some web masters who believe that the process of link building is easy, that’s because they like to use paid link building services and a quick search on the web will uncover a number of these services on the web. But you need to be very careful with buying links, Google frowns on this and will penalise your web site if it catches you doing it.

One of the ways you can build back links to your web site is by commenting on other writers or companies blogs, most of these blogs still allow follow links back to your blog, and if they happen to have a very high page rank with Google, this adds considerable SEO value to your blog.

If you have a blog and want to start building links this way, one thing you do not want to do ever, is to use automated blog commenting software, I find with my blogs, I constantly get comments that are generated by these stupid software programs.

These comments often have no relationship to my article, are blatant advertising or add nothing to the discussion and it’s very obvious that they have been generated by a software program because in most cases we humans do not speak this way.

I will delete them without a second thought as they add nothing to my blog.

So when creating your comment, always make sure that you make it relevant either to the content on the blog or the story you have been reading, if you do this, the blogger will appreciate that they have a real person taking the time to comment and you’ll always get published which includes your link.

Getting your site ranked highly on search engines is one of the fundamentals of SEO, just how you go about that is a topic which creates a lot of discussion, which method works best, and is off page optimisation more effective than on page optimisation, and how valuable are links or votes that are directed to your site from other web sites on the net.

I’ve always worked on the premise that I get as many of these factors working for me when optimising a site and a very effective tool to get high rankings is relevancy to the subject you’re trying to rank for. Getting as many of your URL’s or pages indexed by the search engines can lead to an increase in both traffic and conversions. So I thought this research from HubSpot would be of interest to you.

The more pages a company has indexed by Google, the more leads it will generate, according to research by internet marketing firm Hubspot.

Incremental Indexed Pages Can Cause Double-digit Lead Growth
There is a strong positive correlation between the number of Google indexed pages and median leads. An incremental increase of 50-100 pages indexed by Google can cause lead growth in double-digit percentages. For example, going from 60-120 indexed pages to 121-175 indexed pages can increase a company’s median leads from seven to 12, creating 58.3% growth.

The most significant improvement in median lead growth comes when a company increases its indexed pages from the 176-310 range to the 311-plus range. Median leads skyrocket from 22 to 74, representing triple-digit 236% growth. After exceeding the 311 indexed pages mark, median lead growth subsides.

Size Not Critical Factor
Overall, Hubspot research indicates that size is not a critical factor for achieving significant volumes of Google indexed pages. Size and number of pages are mildly positively correlated, mostly in the extreme categories of indexed pages.

While HubSpot’s large customers formed the biggest group with 311 or more indexed pages in Google, small and medium-sized customers together outnumbered large ones in this category, 57% – 43%. In addition, small customers formed the largest group with 176 to 310 Google indexed pages (39%).

As might be expected, small customers do form the largest group within the less than 60 (53%) and 61-120 (54%) indexed pages categories.

Marketing Takeaways
Hubspot advises marketers considering a Google page indexing program to use the following techniques:

• Build page volume: Consider starting a blog to quickly increase the number of indexed pages.
• Improve each page’s optimization as per Google’s methodology to maximize chances of having all corporate web pages included in the index.
• On-page search engine optimization: Place keywords in the right places on web pages such that Google and other search engines know what each page of a company’s web site is about, and what keywords to rank it for.
• Off-page search engine optimization: Build inbound links from reputable sites, thus demonstrating a company’s popularity to search engines.
• Inbound links do not generate more leads, but do generate more unique visitors.

Google Dominates Core Search
Google Sites clearly dominate US internet users’ core search activities, according to comScore. In March 2010, Google Sites led the core search market with 65.1% market share and 10.05 billion core searches, up 6% from February 2010. Both of these statistics represent the continuation of long-term core search trends.

New research out today highlights the growth in local search rates in the Asia Pacific region with Google continuing to dominate as the preferred search engine particularly in Australia with 83% share and New Zealand with 80.5% share.

This really does demonstrate that you need to get your web site up to scratch when it comes to getting a high ranking in the search results, make sure your site ranks highly for those keywords or phrases that your customers use, and if you don”t know what they are then please ask me and I’ll do a free SEO audit on your web site for you.

The study found that 38.6 billion searches were conducted in the region in September 2009, with searchers averaging nearly 88 queries per person during the month. Google Sites ranked as the top search destination in Asia Pacific, commanding more than 44 percent share of searches performed in the region.

Google Sites Captures Largest Share of Search in Asia Pacific

In September 2009, Internet users in Asia Pacific conducted 38.6 billion search queries, an increase of 33 percent from the previous year. Google Sites was the top search destination with nearly 17 billion searches performed on its sites during the month, accounting for 44.1 percent share of all searches in the region. Baidu.com Inc. followed with 8.2 billion searches (21.3 percent share), while Yahoo! Sites grabbed the #3 position with 5.3 billion searches (13.8 percent share).

Searchers in the region averaged nearly 88 searches per person during September. South Korea’s NHN Corporation, which owns search engine Naver.com, saw the most prolific search intensity among the top 10 destinations with an average of 81 searches per searcher. Searchers on Google Sites averaged 59 searches per person, while searchers on Lycos Sites averaged 51 queries.

*Excludes visitation from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

Local Players and Global Brands Compete for Searcher Loyalty Across Markets

An analysis of top search destinations across the 10 individual markets in the Asia-Pacific region currently reported by comScore revealed various search brand preferences across markets. Google Sites was the search market share leader in six of the markets including Australia, India, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore. Yahoo! Sites captured the majority share of searches in Hong Kong (58.9 percent) and Taiwan (65.4 percent).

Although multinational search brands led many of the markets in the region, the popularity of local brands was evident in both China and South Korea. Baidu.com Inc. led as China’s top search destination with 63 percent share of searches performed, while NHN Corporation captured 49.3 percent of queries in Korea, leading the market as the top destination.

*Excludes visitation from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

The report is compiled by ComScore,a leader in measuring the digital world

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.

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.

Questions that come out of my seminar series often centre around the search engines such as Google and Yahoo, and how to measure your office’s web site traffic, and where do readers come from? Well I thought I’d share a video with you on a great tool called Google Analytics.

The video is produced by Google and shows you how to use Analytics effectively, it takes you on a tour on how people find your site, how they navigate through it and how they become customers.

Personally I’m a big supporter of business’s taking more control over this side of being on the web. I mentioned in an earlier post How Important is An Effective SEO Strategy to Your Real Estate Business  that the real estate industry had neglected SEO and handed it to the major real estate portals on a silver platter. 

If you’re not using this tool in your office then this will be a great start, if you are, this video will show you some nice techniques to understand your on line audience more thoroughly. Once you start to understand them better, you’ll then be able to communicate with them and convert more of your web site visitors to customers.

Really important in a very cluttered market.

Over the past few weeks I’ve spent a lot of time visiting real estate offices and conducting audits on their internet marketing efforts. The point of the exercise is seeing how vulnerable they are to competitors or where the weakness’s are in their on line strategy, and there are a lot of them. One area that comes up more often than any other is SEO, search engine optimisation, and how an office or franchise group can generate a better page ranking within their local region when searching on Google or Yahoo. I’m asked this question more often than any other and I thought I would share some interesting research and information with you on this subject.

Lets look at the US market first and then come back to how real estate agents approach this field in Australia, PCMS Consulting a SEO company in the US, has released a comprehensive study on the role of SEO as a marketing tool, within the top 50 US real estate companies.

It may come as no surpise to find that most surveyed felt that an effective SEO strategy was important to their on line presence, yet could not convince the decision makers within the companies to allocate traditional marketing funds to promote their web sites with new generation SEO optimisation services.

According to the report, real estate companies are overwhelmingly neglecting SEO optimisation and thus missing out on a considerable opportunity to boost their profits and thrive in todays economic conditions.

Most searchers use keywords to conduct a search. The most used real estate keyword is “real estate”, not a brand name. Therefore, real estate companies of all sizes can effectively participate on line. As a result, even the most established companies need to optimize their websites to maintain their market position.

Now lets look at the Australian result, in August last year,NSW based SEO company First Rate, released a report on the performance of real estate offices and franchise groups in the country and the results were almost identical to the US result. FirstRate found that, individual real estate web sites are failing to compete in the search engines with the large portals, they lacked decent natural search engine rankings,did not partake in paid search engine marketing for the most popular real estate search terms and do not have good link popularity or page rank scores. As a result their web site traffic is suffering.

When you analyse the search trends on Google you’ll see the the popularity of each keyword search in each state including the spike when the last interest rate decrease was announced.

Real Estate Search Volumes for Keyword Search Phrases

There are lot of factors that you need to consider in optimising your web site, and these should  include link building, this is often overlooked by businesses, but is now a vital element in gaining higher search engine rankings. High quality links need to be formed, to benefit the most from linking, and just as important is the creation of  “Deep Linking”, links that point to sub pages within your web site, search engines are likely to rank these pages higher when they have high quality external links pointing to them. Creating good organic search results should be part of your strategy along with using paid SEO.

So how much of this can you control yourself? Write great content, a lot of SEO falls within writing great content and building authoritative backlinks to that content within your web site.

Sites that are image heavy and text light,don’t have headings and subheadings or sitemaps that search engines can’t crawl won’t fair well.

If you write frequent relevant content that incorporates keywords and phrases that searchers are looking for, your site will be found. This is where blogging and social media can help in the creation of good keyword rich copy and the building of backlinks to that content.

The other point to remember is that 99% of your competition don’t know what their doing.

There’s lot to understand about keyword rich copy, backlink and reciprocal link building and web site optimisation, so if I can help demystify this for you please ask, just send me a comment on the blog or email me from here How You Can Work With Mike

If you want an example of good organic search engine results, Google “mike andrew real estate” and see the result of good external link building, good content and internal linking.

No I can’t take the credit for that title, the guys at Internet Real Estate Success have written a great article on how you can influence your readers to click on your on line adds without offering money, lol, something I don’t have a lot of, but really about being able to communicate your expertise and then getting those consumers to click on your add.

So, check out the link below on a blog written  by Joseph Bridges, I believe you will get a lot of value from this article when it comes to getting the best value from your on line advertising.

I’ll also post a great tip for you for you on what to include on your internet listing presentation when trying to get VPA for internet advertising, that’s to come shortly.

http://internetrealestatesuccess.com/2008/08/27/5-real-estate-ads-for-success-on-google/

I get asked about this quite frequently, SEO and keyword searching, are subjects that a lot of real estate agents get confused about when trying to get that coveted position on the major search engines. I’ll cover it a little later in future posts but in the meantime, here is an interesting article and video that may help you when it comes to writing your keywords. I hope it helps. Let me know if you find this article interesting.

Click here to view: http://internetrealestatesuccess.com/2008/08/21/attract-the-customers-you-want-with-the-right-keywords/