But in any case, what amazes me is that this company (as well as many others) could charge business owners $6,000 for what appears to be simple websites. I say simple because they appear to be within my range of capability, and I'm not a very sophisticated web design guy.
Are business people that gullible, or are some web design companies that greedy?
Some of the website designers that I've met personally charge only $50 to $100 for a simple, but still decent looking, website. They charge separately for web hosting, and then set up a retainer for updates.
I suppose I could get into the business of selling $6,000 websites that are effectively simple HTML and CSS. But I haven't because I have this thing called a "CONSCIENCE".
If you're looking to get a real estate website built, just know that a simple, clean looking design shouldn't cost you more than $100.00 to build professionally. Web hosting fees should't cost you more than $10.00 a month. If built effectively, you'd hardly need to update it.
Surprisingly, there are still people who have difficultly recognizing a hyperlink when they see one. The problem occurs particularly with links embedded within articles. While it's a great way reference external sources, hyperlinks within an article are often confused for emphasized text.
For example...
While many of us are experienced enough to know that the underlined text in the example above is a link, many more still don't realize they can click on that text.
I know this for a fact, because I get phone calls about this everyday.
I publish many other blogs besides this one, and many of those blogs are "product blogs", where I write reviews of products, or announce new products. Every article I write has a link to the manufacturer's website, or a link to a retailer. Someone will conduct a Google search for that product, and often times they find my blog.
Then, they'll call me on the phone asking me how they can purchase this product, or if I'm still selling it. The conversation goes something like this...
Caller: "Hi, I'm wondering if you're still selling the one gallon size of Soft Paws?"
Me: "Well, we don't sell products, we just write articles about products"
Caller: "Well, where can I buy it?".
Me: "In the article you read, there is a link to the manufacturer's website."
Caller: "I didn't see any link in the article".
Me: "It's there. Look for some words that are underlined, and then move your mouse pointer over it."
Caller: "Oh, I see it now! Thank you."
This conversation happens with greater severity during the Christmas season. In fact, I just received such a call this morning, around 6:30am Pacific time, while I was still sleeping.
Albeit as a real estate agent, you're not selling products. But if such a person needed your services, and they visited your website, they might also not realize that the underlined text are links.
Jakob Neilsen, who is perhaps the most respected authority on website usability, wrote a book entitled, Coordinating User Interfaces for Consistency, where he said, "One of the most important aspects of usability is consistency in user interfaces." What he means is that today everyone's website works differently from one another, and this causes people to become confused in how to use a website. There are just as many websites that removed the underline on their hyperlinks, as there are websites that use them.
Here are some tips you can employ that might help your web-challenged visitors navigate better...
All links should be underlined. If you set the text-decoration parameter to "none" in your CSS, then turn it back on (remove the parameter altogether). I realize that links without underlines might look cool, but your visitors don't really care about the aesthetic appearance of your links.
Or, instead of underlines, use dashes or dots. More websites these days are doing this instead because it still gives the appearance of an underlined link, but the dashes or dots set it apart from emphasized text. For example, check out CSSPortal's examples on this: http://www.cssportal.com/hyperlinks/
Use italics for emphasized text. This will create some additional differentiation from hyperlinked text.
Use call-to-action-words, like, "Click here". My favorite way to do this is to present a call-to-action statement, and then display the URL as a hyperlink. For example...
They currently sit at #1 on the Google SERPs for "nova scotia real estate", and #4 for "halifax nova scotia real estate", and #1 for "nova scotia canada real estate", which are 1, 2, and 3 on the list of popular search terms for these keywords.
But Nova Scotia is a big place, and I'm guessing potential home buyers conduct their searches more locally. So I left out the words "nova scotia" and just Googled stuff like, "halifax real estate" or "lunenburg real estate" or "yarmouth real estate".
I found that Tradewinds' website did not appear for the "halifax" or "yarmouth" searches, but it did show up at #1 for the "lunenburg" search. Then I noticed that Tradewinds' homepage has the word "lunenburg" on it. That may explain why it appears on Google for that search.
Tradewinds does indeed have dedicated pages for these community-oriented searches, but those pages are two clicks away from the homepage (clicking on the "Our Properties" link). I'd recommend adding links for 10 of its most popular community pages to its homepage, to help boost their appearance on Google. These links can be indented below the Our Properties link.
Their individual community pages can be enhanced as well. For example, take a look at their Halifax real estate page.
The TITLE tag should say, "Halifax Real Estate Listings", instead it just says, "Properties by Area: Halifax". Adding the words, "real estate" to the TITLE tag should help it rank better on Google for local searches.
Tradewinds can help its community pages even more by adding the words "real estate" to the query string in the URL. In the case the URL of their Halifax page is as follows...
I'd recommend renaming "Halifax & Area" in the query string to "Halifax Area Real Estate". Add "Real Estate" to the query string to all community pages. This will help it rank higher on Google for these specific searches.
While the META keywords and description tag is present on the homepage, it's missing from the community pages. Adding unique META tags for each community page, will help those pages rank higher on Google.
Each property featured on Tradewinds' website has its own dedicated URL. This is good. But each page is not well optimized. For example, here is a home for sale named, "Simply Enchanting".
If someone were searching Google for the phrase, "simply enchanting halifax" this property shows up at #2. But who in heck searches for that?
I recommend using more relevant keywords to name each property page. Instead of "Simply Enchanting", call it "South Halifax Home for Sale". If you have two or more homes in South Halifax, variate the names: "South Halifax House for Sale", or "South Halifax Charming Property", etc.
On a usability standpoint, Tradewinds' website removed the underline on their links. I recommend keeping the underlines on links. People tend to click on links more often when they see the underlines.
Another usability tip is that right now the homepage has the following welcome message, "Welcome to SeaNovaScotia.com". This is confusing on a real estate website. It should instead say, "Welcome to Tradewinds Realty, Inc.", with a sub-phrase of "Nova Scotia Real Estate Services". That will encourage potential clients to stay on the website.
Another thing on the homepage, use photos of homes. Right now, the homepage randomly displays images of Nova Scotia's landscape, making it feel more like a vacation and travel website.
Tradewind's "Nova Scotia Real Estate Blog" is hosted on the same domain name, which is a great way to host a blog. It helps disperse PageRank to the whole website. But the blog is poorly updated. The last article is from a year ago. To make a blog work for you, it has to be kept current. Post a minimum of three new articles per week.
On the blog itself, Tradewinds' should have links on the sidebar to its key real estate pages, such as its community pages (Halifax Properties, Lunenburg Properties, etc.). Doing this will disperse more PageRank value into those pages.
Will Inbound Links From a Non-Related Site Hurt Me?
Monday, December 10, 2007
There's a common perception among a minority of people that inbound links from an off-topic website will devalue the authority of your website.
That is, if your website is about Real Estate in Medford, Oregon, and another website about baseball cards is linking to yours, will that help or hurt the authority of your website?
The answer is that it won't hurt.
The better question is, how much can it really help?
Preface this by accepting the fact that you cannot control which websites link to yours. If someone with a website about baseball cards, decides to put a link to your real estate agent site (maybe because he thinks you're a great Realtor), it's nothing you can help.
Therefore, it's nothing that Google can penalize you for.
That link can only provide with some Google PageRank value, IF, Google decides to credit that link to your website. Remember that Google doesn't credit all inbound links to you; it only does so for those links that it feels meets its criteria, and falls into its authority algorithm.
So, if Google DOES credit you with that inbound link then it does provide you with some PageRank value. How much, will only be known to Google.
You can do a inbound links search for this blog, "link:http://www.realestatehow.com/", and you'll see that Google is crediting me for inbound links from dog blogs, motorcycle blogs, food blogs, business card blogs, and more. As long as you can see those links in that search results, Google has credited me with PageRank value from those sites, and of this writing, my homepage is a PR5 on the toolbar.
But does that help my authority?
Authority is the combination of the prominent keywords of a website, and the website's popularity. Thus, any inbound link that Google credits you with, adds to the popularity of your website, and thereby addresses at least half the equation for authority.
You can also raise your authority by publishing a continuous flow of content. Your blog is an excellent avenue for this. You can also strengthen your authority by one-to-one link exchanges between two blogs. This form of reciprocal linking still works very well when done between blogs, as far as SEO is concerned.
Summary
Authority is something that is well within your control. You can still enhance that authority even with inbound links from totally off-topic websites.
While inbound links from off-topic websites cannot hurt you, it's really more of a question of how much can it help you. It may not help you that much, but then again, that depends on other factors.
PayPerPost and ReviewMe are the top two contenders offering sponsored content marketing.
Through their service, you can purchase a link from another blog. The blogger actually writes a blog article about your product, service, or website, on their blog, and it includes a link to your website. So basically, you're buying an inbound link from a blogger.
The way it works is like this...
1. The service has a large base of bloggers signed up with them, and categorized into subjects.
2. An advertiser can buy a review from the service, either targeting a specific blog, or opening up the offer to any blogger who wants to accept it.
3. Buying a review from a specific blog is usually much more expensive, ranging between $40.00 to $200.00, depending on how popular that blog is.
4. While opening up an offer to any blogger often costs as little as $5.00 to as high whatever you want. The higher you offer, the more bloggers will accept.
Does it Work?
Actually, yes. I purchased a review over a year ago for my dog blog. I targeted one particular blog, that seemed to have a pretty good ranking on Technorati, and had several inbound links according to Google. I paid $100.00 for it. The blogger earned $50.00. She gave me a good review, with a few inbound links to me.
Eventually, Google did credit that inbound link to me, and it still shows up when I do a "Backward Links" search on Google.
Recently, there's a lot of talk that Google is penalizing bloggers that participate in PayPerPost, though I've disputed this here.
The question becomes, how much is an inbound link worth to you?
Remember that the end goal of all this is to get Google to credit that inbound link to you, and there's no guarantee of that. Google will not credit all inbound links to your website. Many are ignored, actually. But inbound link from blogs seem to have a high success rate in getting credited by Google. Services like PayPerPost and ReviewMe have popped up because of this high success rate.
And by the way, I sell paid reviews directly from this blog, click here. (shameless plug).
A blogroll is the list of links to other blogs (or websites) on the side column of a blog.
You should maintain a blogroll with links to your favorite blogs. Don't worry if those blogs are not linking back.
Once you have this blogroll displaying on your blog, regularly click on the links. That is, instead of visiting these blogs from the "Favorites" or "Bookmarks" of your browser, visit your blog and click on their links in the blogroll.
When you do this, a visit is recorded on the statistics (server logs) of those blogs. Those bloggers will see that someone clicked through from your blog to theirs. They won't know that it was you that clicked through, they'll only know that people in general are being referred from your blog to theirs.
(Well, technically a blogger CAN see the IP address of each referral, but few people ever take server log analysis to that extreme).
The net effect of all this is that these other bloggers will get a sense that they're receiving a valuable benefit from you, and thereby will put you on their good side. Maybe they will put you on their blogroll. Maybe they'll mention you in their articles. Maybe they will add you as a friend to their Linked In profile, or who knows what.
With so many bloggers out there, there are enough of them to get a good percentage willing to reciprocate a favor. And it all started with you clicking on your own blogroll links.
Vanessa Fox, who has gained fame in SEO circles with her previous employment at Google and Zillow, speaks on camera about about real estate agents can do when marketing themselves online...
Of course she can't explain it all in just 4 minutes of video.
The main thing that Vanessa said, however was to identify the specific keywords that your target audiences searches for. The operative word there is "specific", not general. She went on to explain that "homes for sales" is not the same as "houses for sale". She recommends identifying what specifically is searched the most.
I want to bring that up because she reinforced what I've been telling you all along, that keyword variation is more important than keyword volume. Read my previous article, "Keyword Variation and Keyword Volume".
In short, Vanessa clearly identifies that what might seem as related phrases to Google, are not always in fact identified as related phrases. So, it's better to incorporate all of these keyword variations into your website. You can still use the most volumnous keyword, "reno real estate" in your domain name, but go on to create lots of pages with other keywords, "homes", "houses", "properties", etc., in their filenames.
When asking yourself the question, "What should a real estate agent blog about?", here are some ideas...
1. Newspaper reactions - Go through the local newspaper (use their online edition), and react to its articles. Write a new blog article telling your readers about a news item you read in the paper, and you can even post a quote from the item, and then provide your response or interpretation.
Look for articles that are real estate related, or, find a way a put a real estate spin on an otherwise unrelated article. Do a search for "real estate" on Google News, and look for blogging ideas.
2. MLS Updates - Each month gather data from whatever MLS you're linked up with, and publish statistics from the previous month. Show the number of new listings, properties sold, average price, average square foot, price per square foot.
3. Strange stuff - Everyone loves to read stories about the strange, odd, and funny. Assuming you're someone who spends some time reading real estate news, and visiting real estate forums, I'm sure you come across funny or weird real estate news. Stuff like this gets people to e-mail your URL to their friends.
4. Tips - Tips for sellers and buyers are always good, but the problem with most tips is that they're too short, or not specific enough. Identify one tip, for example the smell of a house when you first walk in, and go in-depth on it, devoting 3-5 paragraphs.
5. Your Properties - It's certainly good to blog each new property you've listed. When blogging a property, use a different title for each one. For example, use the neighborhood as the title, "Wilshire Square Home For Sale". This will create more keyword variation for search engine indexing.
6. What's new with you - Write about what you've been doing lately, but try to put a real estate spin on it. You want to keep mentioning "real estate" or "homes" in each blog post to help reinforce your authority as a real estate blog with Google.
7. React to other real estate blogs - Maintain a list of real estate blogs and visit them regularly. When you read something that interests you, react to it by writing an article on your blog. Then, include a link to that other blog article. When finished, write to that other blogger, let him/her know that you mentioned them. 50% of the time, they will voluntarily link back, even if you didn't ask for a link.
Question: If I post a comment on someone's blog, and that comment included a hyperlink to my website, will that link provide any SEO benefit for me?
Answer: Generally, no.
Many blog platforms, including Blogger, WordPress, and TypePad, insert the "rel=follow" attribute into the anchor tags of comments. If you were to post a comment on someone's blog, and included a hyperlink, that hyperlink will automatically have the "rel=nofollow" attribute added in by the blog platform.
So, all those hundreds of comment spam you posted on people's blogs, was all for naught. Google won't count them as backlinks, nor will it count them as anchor text, nor even follow them.
The only thing it's good for is to get direct traffic, that is, a click through from the comment.
If you want an inbound link from a blog, try contacting the blog owner and asking them. Reciprocal links, on a one-to-one basis still works very much between blogs. Google doesn't downplay nor ignore one-to-one reciprocal linking between blogs, because as I've said before, Google loves blogs.
It's true, however, that Google hates "spam blogs", but then you're not publishing a spam blog, right?
RealBird Inc., a technology company that integrates Google Maps with MLS data on agent websites, issued a press release today naming Keith Bird's website, as generating the most MLS searches of all the company's subscribers...
RealBird, Inc., a leading supplier of MLS search solutions and single property websites for real estate, announced today that Keith Byrd, a Century 21 REALTOR® in San Luis Obispo County, California, generated more MLS searches through his website than any of their other agent subscribers nationwide. Keith's interactive MLS Search Map was accessed by over 225,000 unique visitors in the first 11 months of 2007 resulting in over 625,000 MLS searches.
That translates to about 681 unique visitors per day.
So, I decided to do some investigating on Keith's website, "slocountyhomes.com" to see where all the traffic is coming from.
1. Keith's website does fairly well at optimizing on Google for the "san luis obispo homes" phrase, showing up at #5. It also shows up #10 for "san luis obispo real estate". Not stellar, but good.
2. Better yet, he's getting #1 for the "slo" variations. He's #1 for "slo homes" and "slo real estate". San Luis Obispo happens to one of those communities (like Los Angeles), that people often refer to by their initials.
3. His blog is awesome. First of all, he's been writing it since 2004. Second, he's writes it everyday. This translates into hundreds, perhaps a thousand, unique URLs (permalink pages) that he's seeding into Google. Each one of those pages will rank #1 for something. Therefore, the more pages he creates, the more visitors he captures from Google.
4. His blog links to his MLS searches. On the side bar, he has several community links, and each one points to a page on his own website.
5. Backlinks. Actually, Keith doesn't have that many. Which shows that backlinks aren't everything. Though he just picked up a new backlink from me!
I credit his website success first to his domain name, "slocountyhomes.com". It contains two of his most important keywords, "slo" and "homes".
The domain name is the reason why his blog works so well (http://www.slocountyhomes.com/real_estate_weblog.htm). With "slo" and "homes" in the domain, each article adds several unique keywords to it's URL, creating hundreds or thousands of keyword variations on SLO homes. The effect is that anyone searching for ANY variation of SLO homes, will find one of Keith's pages.
Keith is hosting his blog on his agent website (on the same domain name). This is a great way to host a blog. In my previous article "Hosting a Real Estate Blog", I said to host it on its own unique domain name, so that you can also get the backlink benefits. While Keith won't get that, he seems to be doing great with it by virtue of the "slo" and "homes" keywords in his agent website domain.
It goes on to show the power of the blog. It worked for Keith because he's been writing it for years, and still blogs everyday. As I have stated before, Google loves blogs. So blog often, everyday, and keep on doing it, just like Keith.
This is a paid review.
There's a common perception among a minority of people that inbound links from an off-topic website will devalue the authority of your website.
PayPerPost and ReviewMe are the top two contenders offering sponsored content marketing. 
A blogroll is the list of links to other blogs (or websites) on the side column of a blog. 
When asking yourself the question, "What should a real estate agent blog about?", here are some ideas...
Question: If I post a comment on someone's blog, and that comment included a hyperlink to my website, will that link provide any SEO benefit for me?
RealBird Inc., a technology company that integrates Google Maps with MLS data on agent websites, issued a press release today naming Keith Bird's website, as generating the most MLS searches of all the company's subscribers...
