Real Estate Marketing & Branding

A Complete SEO Strategy

Gabe Hoggarth (eXp Realty) — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 19:44:43 -0700

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an interesting topic with huge potential for business. Everyday across various Google services several hundred million searches are performed. Some of those searches are refined and many result in visits to websites, videos, photos, news articles, blog posts, sales pages, and profiles. SEO considers how search engines work and what people are searching for to increase the visibility of a web site or web page.

For some, SEO is debatable topic with varying beliefs and hat colors. A person referred to as a Black Hat uses deceptive strategies to better rankings while White Hat conforms to the search engine guidelines. Rules can be bent but ultimately black hat techniques are at risk against the evolving search engines.

What is SEO Success?

This is a trick question since SEO is an ongoing process and the evolving search engines create new opportunity and competitors. SEO success begins when your website is generating targeted traffic and a positive return on investment in the form of sales leads, purchases, contacts, brand recognition, subscriptions, connections, etc.

The image below shows the consistency of search engine traffic specifically for PhoenixPowerSearch.com a website with near top ranking for "Phoenix real estate" and several variations of the phrase like "Phoenix Arizona real estate" and "Phoenix AZ real estate". Last month Google, Bing, and Yahoo! sent 3,892 visitors to this website. In my opinion the value of consistent targeted traffic to a site from organic search ranking is often underestimated.

Begin with Keyword Research

A proper SEO strategy has clear keyword goals with an understanding of the content and inbound links necessary to produce the desired results. The first step is to identify keyword phrases that your target audience is typing into Google on a consistent basis. From my experience for real estate these will be "city"+"real estate" and "neighborhood"+"real estate" search phrases, "real estate" can also be exchanged for "homes for sale".

Generally, the most common keyword phrases (aka the ones search the most) are the most competitive. Finding keywords that are localized to your market will usually have the most search traffic without being unnecessarily competitive. The two services I use the most when research keywords are the Google Keyword Tool that reports the estimated search volume for any keyword as well as other suggestions, and SEMRush that also reports search volume along with Pay-Per-Click estimates, competitors, and other useful data. Use these two tools to determine the right keyword balance.

Content

Google loves unique fresh content and so will your website visitors. Using software to browse and index millions of web pages, Google examines the site title and measures keyword density to quickly analyze any page. Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. Optimum keyword density is suggested to be 1 to 3 percent.

Include your desired keywords in the site title and blog posts titles, write content that supports your overall topic, and structure content with categories and tags to ensure Google has a clear idea of what keywords are relevant to your site.

For those with WordPress sites I recommend the All in One SEO Pack to edit title's and meta tags, Google XML Sitemaps to properly index your site, and Keyword Density Checker.

Link Building

Quality inbound links from other sites to yours are valuable for search engine positioning. In a recent survey of over 100 search experts worldwide inbound links are agreed as the largest influence on organic search engine rank, the top 5 factors for organic search ranking are listed below (Source).

Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links
External Link Popularity
Diversity of Link Sources
Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains

Some linking will happen naturally, if you're blogging quality content it's natural that your visitors will share or reference your content on other sites creating links for yours. To compete on competitive terms it's generally necessary to be more proactive with link building. Some other ways to build links to your site are...

Social Media Links - Many times social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn let you add a link to your website in the profile. While some of these social networks have "nofollow" links meaning they do not pass search engine authority there is a growing benefit both for traffic generation and ranking influence.
Blogging - There are many benefits from blogging and one of them is link building. Blog posts can be linked between each other to boost rankings. Sites like ActiveRain that allow you to blog on them should include links back to your site. I'm a Seattle Real Estate professional.
Comment Links - Many sites that allow comments on their posts will allow you to leave your name and website. This type of commenting for links can be considered spam if the comment isn't of value. Your comment and link will have a better chance of being approved if the comment is thoughtful.
Natural Links - Based on the quality of your site and the content, people will bookmark and link to your site naturally. Giving visitors ways to easily share your site with others will encourage more natural links.
Press Releases - Press releases can be helpful for building optimized links to your site. While search engines have gotten better at discrediting this type of link building it is still used with some results.
Reciprocal Link Exchange - Reciprocal linking between two sites can be a good way to build inbound links. This starts with first evaluating a site to determine if it is good potential link partner, then emailing the owner of the site requesting to exchange links.

I recommend the Contextual Related Posts WordPress plugin to automate the healthy cross-linking between your own blog posts that is also useful for your readers.

Lastly...

There are unique situations in SEO that require unique solutions. If you've followed the suggestions above and your website is not showing up in the search engines it could be that Google is having an issue indexing your pages properly. I encourage everyone with a site to register at Google Webmaster Central which can be useful to diagnose issues. Leave any questions or comments below and I'll be happy to take a look!

Originally posted on Working The Magic under Search Engine Optimization.

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I'm a web developer at eXp Realty and Working The Magic. This blog is about online marketing, search engines, and lead generation in today's real estate.

For my services visit real estate web design, search engine marketing, and social media.

Organizing Twitter with Lists

Gabe Hoggarth (eXp Realty) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:55:59 -0800

Twitter lists have been around for a few weeks and until this point I only somewhat understood how to effectively use them. When they first came out I jumped in, made a few lists of my own and moved on not taking any significant time to explore them until now. What I have since found are that Twitter lists can be very useful.

It’s a known fact that following any number of people can produce a lot of noise. Add business Twitter accounts to the stream and many Tweets are drowned out and never read. The thing is, sometimes the noise is a benefit providing a shared link, resource or inspiration. Twitter lists allows the best of both worlds, the ability to organize groups of followers into broad or very defined categories to easily view a specific live feed of Tweets through the Twitter.com site. Previously the best method for oranizing groups of people or businesses on Twitter was to use 3rd party services like Tweetdeck, Seesmic or Twibes. With lists being centralized at Twitter.com it makes them much more public, powerful and accessible through the Twitter API so developers and use them in app they create.

Here are a few of the lists I have created..

@GabeHoggarth/barcampers - People who have attended local and online Real Estate BarCamps.
@GabeHoggarth/realestate - Real Estate Twits.
@GabeHoggarth/brilliant - A very selective group of smart people who I learn from.
@GabeHoggarth/wordpress - Interesting members of the WordPress community.

Brilliant. Here’s where I think it gets interesting, as Twitter lists grow in popularity they are becoming a very important metric to determine Twitter credibility and a great way to discover people and brands within nearly any category. The new site Listorious has jumped at the task of organizing lists for discovery. I’m excited to see how this plays out, I see some very popular category lists forming that will be valuable to sort just about any topic.

Here’s some continued reading…

10 ways you can use Twitter lists: http://mashable.com/2009/11/04/twitter-lists-uses/
What Twitter lists say about you: http://www.mustexist.com/list_tags
Top Twitter users based on followers: http://twitterholic.com/
Top 237 Twitter users who will follow you back: http://socialnewswatch.com/top-twitter-users/
Directory of the best Twitter lists: http://listorious.com/

I originally posted about Twitter Lists on my Personal Blog. If you're on Twitter let's connect, follow me at http://twitter.com/gabehoggarth.

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I'm a web developer at eXp Realty and Working The Magic. This blog is about online marketing, search engines, and lead generation in today's real estate.

For my services visit real estate web design, search engine marketing, and social media.

Personal Social Media Plan

Gabe Hoggarth (eXp Realty) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:42:58 -0800

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about social media lately, we're two months into a company and social media launch of eXp Realty and I have had a lot of opportunity to run analytics on a various marketing strategies. Starting from the ground up it's interesting to watch a company from relative birth spread through the efficient and real-time web. We all know that in social media there is no one thing, rather a compilation of many things mixed with consistency, value and conversation.

With Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google and hundreds of other broad and niche social networks out there it becomes an important task to figure out what is relevant, how to engage and respect each online community while maintaining a consistent brand across them all, and somehow pull it all back together. Is what we're doing today going to work tomorrow? The only constant is change. Facebook and Twitter are powerful now, are they going anywhere immediately? No. Will they be around forever? Only if they evolve to something else.

All of this swirling thought mixed with the desire to coach social media newcomers the best, and most simple way to put this whole plan together, I decided to reign in my own social media presence; my brand. The following is what I have determined essential in the focus of my time and effort..

Additional Recommendations

Yelp
Google Profile
Many various niche networks

Mentioned before, create consistency and interact. Interlink your personal website with your LinkedIn profile, give Facebook users a way to access your Twitter, etc.. That said I personally want to give all of the users from these networks a place to gather where I have the most control and ownership of the content. That thought lead me to create a "/me" page, a custom landing page on my own personal domain for all of my social network friends and visitors where I can control the content. I have the freedom of adding personal and company sites, projects and additional ways to connect while collecting analytics. I'm not the first person to create a custom landing page for social networks but it is something I am surprised not to see more of. The goal of this page is to provide the most targeted and most useful information to the visitor, immediately. Visit my "/me" page and let me know.

One step towards a complete social media plan (link to the original post on my blog).

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I'm a web developer at eXp Realty and Working The Magic. This blog is about online marketing, search engines, and lead generation in today's real estate.

For my services visit real estate web design, search engine marketing, and social media.

Short vs. Long Tail Keywords, A Strategy To Dominate Your Local Market

Gabe Hoggarth (eXp Realty) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:21:18 -0700

There’s a correlation between search phrases, search volume and conversion rates that anyone interested in dominating their local market should understand. The graph below illustrates this relationship between short tail (highly searched, low converting) keywords and long tail (low searched, high converting) keywords.

The balance that needs to be implemented in any search engine marketing plan is that of quality AND quantity. Dominating an online market involves a strategy of achieving top search engine placement for all relevant search terms and driving lots of targeted visitors who will ultimately convert into quality leads. So how do we accomplish this?

The Problem With Targeting Short Tail Keywords

The search phrase “Real Estate” is entered into Google 45,500,000 times/month and is highly competitive. For an example let’s think about this from the perspective of a someone looking to dominate the Seattle Washington market. Only a fraction of those 45,500,000 searches for “Real Estate” would find a Seattle real estate related website useful.

Would a Seattle website ranking at the top of this search term generate leads? Sure. But with such a general “Real Estate” term some of these leads may be looking at Seattle, Denver, Miami or other cities. The extra effort it took to rank for such a generic search term would have been better spent targeting many highly searched Seattle related terms.

The Problem With Targeting Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords by definition are very specific search phrases with low competition. An example of a long tail keyword is “Queen Anne 2 Bedroom Home For Sale” (Note: Queen Anne is a popular view neighborhood in Seattle, WA) and ranking well for this phrase is relatively easy.

Unfortunately, taking a quick glance at the search volume for “Queen Anne 2 Bedroom Home For Sale” using the Google Keyword Tool there is “Not Enough Data” to report the search volume meaning this phrase is hardly searched. Despite the fact that very specific search phrases enjoy higher conversion rates into leads, even #1 ranking for this term will generate little business. So, how do we capture many of these long tails and optimize and rank for high volume related search phrases?

Finding The Balance – Quality AND Quantity

Initially keyword research and then a long-term strategy, balancing what will produce the quantity and quality of search results, are invaluable in dominating a local market. Accomplishing this takes a two-fold approach.

1. BUILD AUTHORITY FOR THE MID TAIL:

First this involves selecting a ‘mid tail’ keyword phrase, something that is highly search and relevant to the website. Based on these factors for the Seattle market the keyword phrase “Seattle Real Estate” fits wells with 8,100 searches/month, enough volume to support lots of lead generation if ranked well and the visitors will be specific enough that they will convert at a decent percentage. Optimize the main page of the website for this keyword phrase by building links and Google authority.

(Disclosure: Working The Magic manages the #1 ranked website for “Seattle Real Estate” in Google with 10,000 visitors/month that converts roughly 5% of all visitors into leads)

2. CREATE CONTENT FOR THE LONG TAIL:

Once authority is built into the website, the second part of balancing quality and quantity is to then generate content for the long tail. This involves blogging, neighborhood and community information and additional commentary on the website. Using the long tail example from above it would make sense to add content to a Seattle website about Queen Anne 2 bedroom homes that would likely rank well for that search term. The additional content will add relevancy to the website as a whole and those pages will show up in results for all types of long tail keywords.

Permalink: Short vs. Long Tail Keywords

If you would like to learn more about our Real Estate SEO services please email me at GabeHoggarth@WorkingTheMagic.com or call me direct at 888-442-5115 ext. 104.

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I'm a web developer at eXp Realty and Working The Magic. This blog is about online marketing, search engines, and lead generation in today's real estate.

For my services visit real estate web design, search engine marketing, and social media.

How To Create A Presentation In Google Docs

Gabe Hoggarth (eXp Realty) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:32:46 -0700

Yesterday I posted a blog on Vlogging & Video Publishing sharing the slides I recently used for a presentation on video marketing and I recieved a couple of comments asking for a tutorial on how I created the presentation. This is a simple process and here's how...

First things first you will need to sign in to Google Docs and will need to create a Google Account if you don't already have one. Google Docs is a free service that allows users and groups to create, share and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentation.

Screenshot of Google Docs main page:

Presentations in Google Docs work similar to a lite version of PowerPoint and are made up of slides each with the ability to add text, images, videos, shapes and drawings. For this presentation I used a combination of basic text and images, most of which were photos I already had and screenshots I took of the video publishing process. Create your presentation however you want adding colors, images, bullet points, links, etc.

Screenshot of the Presentation Editor:

Lastly, the "Share" options (found at the top-right when editing the presentation) allows you to invite other collaborators to the project, publish the presentation to the public and generate the embed code to post the presentation to your website and blog posts.

Screenshot of the Share Button:

That's it! For more information please visit my Real Estate Web Design & Marketing Blog!

Follow me on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/GabeSEO/

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I'm a web developer at eXp Realty and Working The Magic. This blog is about online marketing, search engines, and lead generation in today's real estate.

For my services visit real estate web design, search engine marketing, and social media.

Vlogging & Video Publishing

Gabe Hoggarth (eXp Realty) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:03:42 -0700

It's important to understand that the ways consumers now digest their news and information is much different than years ago and I consider real estate professionals to be the best poised to benefit from the type of citizen journalism we see a lot of today.

Here are some slides I used recently for a Vlogging and Video Publishing presentation covering some of the basics from recording to sharing.

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I'm a web developer at eXp Realty and Working The Magic. This blog is about online marketing, search engines, and lead generation in today's real estate.

For my services visit real estate web design, search engine marketing, and social media.

New Team Member Joins Working The Magic!

Gabe Hoggarth (eXp Realty) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:24:24 -0700

Hey ActiveRain'ers, please welcome our newest team member Eddi Hughes to the Working The Magic group!

Eddi joins our team with a strong background in web, graphic design and multimedia communication. Eddi stood out from a number of qualified applicants for his use of social networks to connect with consumers through local niches in the real estate and automotive industries and his technical understanding of content management systems including WordPress.

As our client base continues to grow Eddi is an intergrate part of our team understanding that search engine visibility is an increasingly important investment for real estate professionals hungry to create ongoing relationships with their clients and we are excited to have him on-board!

We continue to provide great results for real estate professionals interested in succeeding in the online marketplace. Contact us to find out how we can bring more traffic to your website!

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I'm a web developer at eXp Realty and Working The Magic. This blog is about online marketing, search engines, and lead generation in today's real estate.

For my services visit real estate web design, search engine marketing, and social media.

The Website Trap: Do You Lease or Own?

Gabe Hoggarth (eXp Realty) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:57:57 -0700

On a daily basis I am evaluating websites for search friendliness, researching effective keywords, title tags, content, lead capture and many other contributing factors to Google success. I do this for websites big and small, new and old with varying marketing budgets. My job is to create an effective personal strategy to move a website to the top of the search ranks for competitive keywords, ultimately driving traffic and generating leads. I want everyone to be successful but unfortunately I can’t help everyone and it’s not because I don’t have time (Our SEO system is scaled well and we have employed the talent to perform).

The biggest problem I see day-to-day are websites owners with little to no control of their websites.

This has happened for a couple reasons.

Template websites are priced right and consumers don’t necessarily know what they are buying. I’m not going to say every template website is bad, only the ones that restrict access to the website so much that even small changes are an added charge, a week delay, or impossible. For me as an owner of multiple websites myself, that is unacceptable. If there is one thing I have learned it is that Speed of Implementation is essential to success and survival in a changing Internet world.
Many web design companies have built a subscription based service into their revenue model. The client pays the monthly and the company evolves the platform. This can work if the design company is as enthused about change and the future as the client and they consistently evolve their services. The problem here comes when the company stops evolving and the site grows outdated while the client is stuck paying monthly. Now if the client wants to move away from the companies services (and monthly payment) their website is so entrenched, and possibly under design ownership rights of the company, that to really get away involves the client paying someone to build an entirely new site to making the switch.

TIP: Find a company that gives you FTP access to your website. It’s your own website and you deserve to have control. If a company insists that they can’t let you have FTP access, there are plenty of other companies that will.

An evolution of design and control.

With new open source publishing platforms like WordPress designers can now offer clients a customized website built on a framework that allows for complete ownership and control. No more monthly maintenance fees and open source means that community collaboration has developed and will continue to develop the platform, at no cost. As the web, search engines and design evolve the community as a whole participates in the growth for the benefit of everyone. These platforms are the future of design.

Here are a couple examples of sites I built on the WordPress platform:

SeattlePowerSearch.com - #1 on Google for Seattle Real Estate

PhoenixPowerSearch.com - #3 on Google for Phoenix Real Estate

If you would like to know more about WordPress or optimizing an existing website, please contact me at GabeHoggarth@WorkingTheMagic.com or at 1-888-442-5115 ext. 104.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/GabeSEO/

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I'm a web developer at eXp Realty and Working The Magic. This blog is about online marketing, search engines, and lead generation in today's real estate.

For my services visit real estate web design, search engine marketing, and social media.

The Ins and Outs of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

Gabe Hoggarth (eXp Realty) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 16:30:36 -0800

Lately I’ve been discussing the role of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) strategies in an effective SEO campaign. For those new to this, PPC generally uses an auction based pricing system for purchasing visits to a website based on specific keywords. Prices for keywords go up as the number of advertisers goes up because the space available for advertisers is limited. Paid for links are then shown as “Sponsored Links” along with the organic results in Google searches and advertisers are charged a market price when someone clicks and visits their site.

To make some sense of this the average cost per visit for the keyword “Seattle real estate” is $5.03 or an amazing $100 for 20 visits. Wow, seems expensive to me but if a website is converting visitors into leads and closings at a rate that produces a positive return on investment, even though that site is probably not maximizing profit, it can make sense especially if work is being done to improve organic rankings in the interim.

Thinking about it, here are the reasons PPC is appealing…

Immediate results. Start a PPC campaign right now and you can be sending visitors to your site for a specific search term by the end of the day.
Easy to calculate return on investment. At the end of the day marketers and site owners want to be able to crunch the numbers and report their return on investment. I can understand this and believe this is the biggest reason there is such a large disconnect between PPC vs. search engine optimization (SEO) spending despite the real opportunity that “SEO drives 75%+ of all search traffic, yet garners less than 15% of marketing budgets for SEM campaigns. PPC receives less than 25% of all search traffic, yet earns 80%+ of SEM campaign budgets”. What effective marketers need to do is weigh the daily ROI decisions against the yearly and long term ROI to make a clear decision. If it is any indicator, the #1 organically ranked website for “Seattle real estate” has traffic valued at $37,400/month.
Keyword testing for SEO. PPC allows sites to bid and drive traffic for specific keywords and then analyze the conversion rates based of those keywords. Keyword testing is useful to examine if “Seattle real estate” or “Seattle homes for sale” converts visitors into leads and at what percentage. This can be useful to give direction as to how the best use of resources for managing an SEO campaign can be spent.

And the downside of PPC…

Lower conversion rates. The overall conversion rate or the rate at which searchers take a desired action on a site is higher for unpaid search results than the rate for paid (4.2% vs. 3.6%). On Google, 72.3 percent of users surveyed felt that organic results were more relevant, while only 27.7 percent rated paid results as more relevant.
Not as many visits for a given keyword. 30 percent of search engine users click on paid listings, leaving 70 percent who are clicking the organic listings or refining their search.
Infinite investment required. Immediate results are a double edged sword, site traffic stops just as abruptly as it starts. There is a constant infusion of PPC spend needed to maintain traffic levels.

I specialize in finding the very best online marketing strategy for real estate professionals and am very interested in hearing your success and struggles for the benefit of everyone, please share! Until next time.

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I'm a web developer at eXp Realty and Working The Magic. This blog is about online marketing, search engines, and lead generation in today's real estate.

For my services visit real estate web design, search engine marketing, and social media.

How To Make Searchers Click - The Meta Description Tag

Gabe Hoggarth (eXp Realty) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 12:58:22 -0800

I was recently asked how to control the text that gets displayed along with each link in the search results. This is a good question because this text is your chance to tell searchers exactly what to expect from your site and entice them to click on the link and visit your page. The highlighted yellow text in the image below is an example of this text at work:

So how does Google generate this text? One of two ways.

1: Most often, Google grabs this text from the meta description of the page. The meta description is a snippet of code placed in the HEAD of your website. You will have the best results from writing a clear sentence or two that accurately describes your page or article. Keep the length of your meta description short since there will be a limited number of characters displayed in the search results and adding additional keywords to the meta description wont give you any extra value. Each page of your website should also have its own unique meta description. Here's a snapshot of the highlighted code showing the meta description of this Phoenix page:

To add a meta description to your website, insert the following code (WITHOUT the four $ signs) into the HEAD section of your website and customize the descriptive sentence or two:

<$$meta name="Description" content="Your descriptive sentence or two goes here."$$>

2: Google will sometimes display 1 or 2 sentences directly from the content of the website. This will happen when a website either does not have a meta description OR if the keywords of the search phrase are in the content but not the meta description. At that point Google will grab the text from the sentences surrounding the keywords in the body of the website to display.

For more information about ranking at the top of the search engines visit Working The Magic or read my Real Estate SEO Blog.

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I'm a web developer at eXp Realty and Working The Magic. This blog is about online marketing, search engines, and lead generation in today's real estate.

For my services visit real estate web design, search engine marketing, and social media.

Where Are You? Search Engine Rank vs. Click %

Gabe Hoggarth (eXp Realty) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:55:59 -0700

The behavior of users as they fly around the internet performing searches is an interesting topic that reveals the importance of SEO and ranking for top positions. It is fairly intuitive that ranking number 1 or 2 for a highly searched term is good, but the question is how good?

Here are some numbers that shed light on the real benefits of rank position by taking a look at the number of clicks (aka visits to a website) determined by where those sites show up in the search results. Notice search results 1-3 account for over 62% of the visits for any search term, and the entire second page receives under 7% of the search traffic.

The Importance of Top Rankings

Search Results (Top 10)	% of Clicks
1	42.1
2	11.9
3	8.5
4	6.1
5	4.9
6	4.1
7	3.4
8	3.0
9	2.8
10	3.0

11 - 1000

11.3

Search Results by Page	% of Clicks
Page 1	88.40
Page 2	6.43
Page 3	2.21
Page 4	.92
Page 5	.58

Search Market Share
Google	60.2%
Yahoo	22.5%
MSN	11.8%
Other	5.5%

Data sourced from Enquisite Search Analytics - http://www.enquisite.com/

For more information about ranking at the top of the search engines visit Working The Magic or read my Real Estate SEO Blog.

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I'm a web developer at eXp Realty and Working The Magic. This blog is about online marketing, search engines, and lead generation in today's real estate.

For my services visit real estate web design, search engine marketing, and social media.

SEO Tool – Instant Content Visualization

Gabe Hoggarth (eXp Realty) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:08:46 -0700

Every once in a while I come across a new SEO tool that works exactly how I want it to and it opens the door for a lot of great ideas. This is one of those tools. The people over at TagCrowd.com have put together a simple way to convert any webpage, copied text, or document into a visualized tag cloud. Tag clouds are really just a visual depiction of the word content of a site, the more times a word is repeated the larger the word appears.

What this allows you to do is take a large body of text, or an entire website at a time, and instantly generate a visual representation of all the content. Generate a tag cloud of your own website to analyze. When optimizing for a specific search term it’s important that those words show up prominently in your tag cloud. Notice in the tag cloud to the right of our website the most prominent words are “real”, “estate” and “SEO”, we are actively optimizing for the search term “real estate SEO”. If your desired keywords aren’t showing up prominently, reworking your content for a higher keyword density (Using your keywords in your content more often) makes sense.

Generate a tag cloud for your top ranked competitors websites. Are there prominent words showing up that you haven’t thought about optimizing for? Hope you have fun with this tool like I have, the usefulness of it extends even beyond SEO.

Related posts:

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I'm a web developer at eXp Realty and Working The Magic. This blog is about online marketing, search engines, and lead generation in today's real estate.

For my services visit real estate web design, search engine marketing, and social media.

Linking for SEO - Tips and Secrets

Gabe Hoggarth (eXp Realty) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 13:52:11 -0700

--------------------- Some Google History -------------------

Google began in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page, who was soon joined by Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California.

They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page. Their search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine.

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Links are the highways that Google and other search engines travel in an effort to determine the popularity, relationship and relevancy of every page and website they come across.

Very generally speaking if a website has a large amount of links pointing to it search engines can assume that others will also find that resource to be valuable. Search engines have evolved from simply counting the number of links (They now look at quality of links, originality of content and other trust factors) but this basic idea still exists.

There are two types of links; "external" and "internal"
An internal link is a hyperlink that links to another page on the SAME website.
An external link is a hyperlink that links to another page on a DIFFERENT website.

Internal links will generally make up your navigation, links to your articles and blog posts, and all the pages on your website. An optimized internal link structure helps search engines efficiently index your content and check for updates, along with ranking your pages for the best keywords.

Optimizing your internal link structure includes having proper categories and search friendly content, featuring your best pages by linking to them more, and taking a look at the anchor text of each link.

Anchor text is the visible text that you click in a link. In this example link: Real Estate SEO, the words "Real Estate SEO" are the anchor text. Search engines associate the anchor text of a link with the page the link leads to (In this example our SEO website WorkingTheMagic.com) and will begin ranking that our site for those keywords.

External links on your website send visitors to other websites. External links on other people's websites to yours are called "backlinks" for you, also called incoming links, inward links and inlinks.

To improve rankings in the search engines the key is to get relevant, quality links from respected websites to yours. The more relevant backlinks the better, especially if those backlinks contain the keywords you are trying to rank for in the anchor text like "Seattle real estate" or "Phoenix homes for sale".

I'll cover some effective linking strategies next, for now subscribe to this blog, visit my SEO for Real Estate website or read more at my Real Estate SEO Blog.

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I'm a web developer at eXp Realty and Working The Magic. This blog is about online marketing, search engines, and lead generation in today's real estate.

For my services visit real estate web design, search engine marketing, and social media.

Make an ActiveRain Blidget in 2 Minutes

Gabe Hoggarth (eXp Realty) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:54:51 -0700

A Blidget is a widget that displays your blog (Example to the left). As ridiculous as that is to say Blidgets are a simple - and free - way to drive additional readers to your blog and make it more 'sticky'.

You can make a custom Blidget for your ActiveRain (or any) blog in minutes and then share or embed your Blidget on as many websites as you want. Once it's setup your Blidget's views, clicks and subscriptions are all tracked for your use. Here's how to make your custom Blidget:

Step 1 of 5:
Visit the Make Blidget page at Widgetbox. I've taken a screenshot of the page shown below. Once there, enter in your Blog URL (aka your blog web address) and click "Continue".


	Step 2 of 5: Customize the size, color, style, title and caption for your Blidget as much or as little as you like. Don't worry too much about making it prefect if you can't decide, you can easily change these features at any time in the future.

	Step 3 of 5: Chose an image that will appear at the top of your Blidget or enter in the address of an image already on the web. Add relevant tags and description for your blidget for others to find. Other visitors may want to embed your Blidget on their website, always good! Click "Publish Blidget" when done.

	Step 4 of 5: Almost there. If your Blidget looks good click the big green "Get Widget" button.

Step 5 of 5:
Chose from Flash or Javascript code, or from one of the optimized selections for all different types of blogging platforms. Flash seems to work best for ActiveRain posts. Click "Copy".

Now paste the code in blog posts, along your blog navigation bar, on your other blogs or websites, wherever you want your new Blidget to show up.

All done.

For more on promoting your web visibility online visit my Real Estate SEO website or read more on my Real Estate SEO Blog.

UPDATE: How to add a Blidget to your ActiveRain Blog Sidebar

1. Create a Blidget for your blog and copy the code
2. Login to your ActiveRain Account
3. Go to your profile page or "My Home"
4. Click "My Settings"
5. Paste the Blidget code as part of your Blog Description
6. Click "Update"

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I'm a web developer at eXp Realty and Working The Magic. This blog is about online marketing, search engines, and lead generation in today's real estate.

For my services visit real estate web design, search engine marketing, and social media.

How To Evaluate Your Google Competition

Gabe Hoggarth (eXp Realty) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:01:12 -0700

After selecting the right search phrase (Generally "City"+"Real Estate" for the sites I work with) it is useful to be able to evaluate the competition already showing up in the results for that term. Use these tips to evaluate the competitive landscape for any given search term. These two factors, and having a solid SEO strategy, will determine the time and effort it takes to obtain top search engine rankings:

Factor #1: Age and Authority of the Domain
Aged websites will enjoy results from SEO efforts faster than new websites. New websites tend to take a little longer to get traction in Google, especially for highly competitive search terms.

Factor #2: Search Term Competition
The most accurate way to gauge the competition for a specific search term is to evaluate the sites currently ranking in the top 10 for that search term. Here are some things to look for:

Number of backlinks for the top sites
Backlinks, also called incoming links, are all the links from other websites to a particular site. Some search engines, including AlltheWeb, Google and Yahoo!, allow users to get a list of backlinks to a specific page by typing "link:http://www.WEBSITE.com" into their search boxes, replacing WEBSITE with the domain in question. From experience, AlltheWeb and Yahoo provide the most accurate counts of backlinks while Google only displays a fraction of the backlinks it recognizes.
PageRank for the top sites
PageRank is Google's proprietary measure of link popularity for Web pages. Here's what Google says "PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results". Typically the higher the PageRank the better they are at competing online, but does not necessarily mean a site is optimized for a specific search term. PageRank figures are updated quarterly and should be taken as a historical figure rather than up-to-date. PageRank is built into the Google Toolbar that you will need to install in order to view.
Search terms in title tag
When viewing the search result page for a specific search term take a look at how many of the results contain that exact search phrase in their title. For example in the Google results for "Denver Real Estate" nine out of the ten results contain the exact phrase "Denver Real Estate" in the title. Compare these results with the search result page for "Denver Property For Sale" that only has one result (#9) with the exact search phrase in the title. These results show that fewer websites are optimizing for the search phrase "Denver Property For Sale" making it less competitive of a term than "Denver Real Estate". More competition for the term "Denver Real Estate" makes sense because it is searched much more often.
Number of national sites in top 10 (Trulia, Yahoo!, Realtor.com)
The more national sites in the top 10 the less the competition. Trulia, Yahoo!, Realtor.com and a handful of other national sites work hard to achieve fairly good results for a lot of state and city real estate search terms. That said, these sites have a tough time competing against and out ranking well crafted area specific agent websites. If national real estate sites are dominating the search page for a specific search term this generally means there are not a lot of individual agents competing for that term. By implementing a good SEO strategy an agent website should always be able outrank the national sites in their specific area.
Number of non real estate related sites in top 10
Non real estate related sites showing up in search results are a sign of weak competition. Examples of this are when area newspapers and other websites with a strong web presence unrelated to real estate show up for real estate search terms.

If you're interested in a professional competitive analysis for your targeted search phrase(s) please visit my Real Estate SEO site, read the latest at my Real Estate SEO Blog or contact me directly.

Read my previous ActiveRain post about Online Lead Capture Tips.

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I'm a web developer at eXp Realty and Working The Magic. This blog is about online marketing, search engines, and lead generation in today's real estate.

For my services visit real estate web design, search engine marketing, and social media.

8 Tips: Online Lead Capture

Gabe Hoggarth (eXp Realty) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:34:57 -0700

What are you doing to capture leads with your website right now?
Your website should be using 3, 4, 5+ ways to capture leads and convert traffic into contacts and ultimately closes. Assuming you are generating some traffic through your site, these are some of the best practices in online real estate lead generation that your competitor is already using.

1. Solid IDX Solution - IDX stands for Internet Data Exchange and is a property search site which allows the public to conduct searches of approved Multiple Listing Service properties in a certain area. For every client I have worked with their IDX platform is their #1 lead generating resource. There are quite a few IDX options out there and not every product is available in every city so finding the right solution for the right price may take some time. What I look for besides availability and price is a usable intuitive map search and the ability to integrate the product seemlessly into a site. Here are a few platforms I have had good experiences with:

2. Property Request Forms - Not every visitor has the time or desire to browse all the listings and search the map. Some people just want to tell you what they want and have you get back to them with the details; property request forms are great for this. You, or your web guy/gal, should create a simple website form asking for their desired type of property, time frame for purchasing and current state in the buying process along with contact information. Put some links on your site to this "Property Request Form". You know what types of property area desirable in your area, create multiple similar forms for "Waterfront Property Request Form", "Condo Request Form", "Commercial Request Form", etc..

3. Visible Phone Number and Email on Every Page - This is self-explanatory but I am always surprised when I have to click around to find contact information for an agent on their website. Don't make it hard for your visitors to contact you. I'm not saying to put your photo on every page, but a phone number and email should be easy to find.

4. Contact Form's' - There should be some sort of lead capture on every page. On your content pages make it easy for visitors to get in touch with you about questions or comments. Contact forms (short ones asking for only a name, email, phone and question/comment) can easily be added to your side navigation or at the end of articles.

5. Relocation Packets and Baited Content - Relocation packets, neighborhood resources, in-depth school reports, and useful area information like maps and tourist information area great offers to entice visitors to fill out a contact form.

7. Available Online Agent - We have experimented with this in the past with mixed results but it is another avenue to explore. A Google search for "live chat software" brings up a mix of different options that allow your visitors to engage in a live chat or click to call features directly from your site.

8. Newsletter Email Capture - If you are an expert in your area on something it may make sense to begin building your email list for a weekly/monthly newsletter. This can be a great way to reconnect with past visitors and bring them back to your site month after month which can be helpful to increase your site traffic and search rankings. If you are blogging already, blog posts you have already written make a good base for your newsletter without the need for much additional content.

For more information on driving substantial amounts of traffic to your website by ranking at the top of the search engines visit WorkingTheMagic.com a Real Estate SEO company or read more from my SEO for Real Estate Blog.

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I'm a web developer at eXp Realty and Working The Magic. This blog is about online marketing, search engines, and lead generation in today's real estate.

For my services visit real estate web design, search engine marketing, and social media.

Questions to Ask an SEO Company

Gabe Hoggarth (eXp Realty) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:43:31 -0700

A few days ago Google updated the "What's an SEO?" page of their Webmaster Help Center. They have done a good job to outline the benefits professional SEO companies provide while giving advice on how to spot and avoid unethical SEO companies.

Here are the six questions - and our answers - that Google recommends you ask a prospective SEO company:

1. Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
We have several examples of our #1 search rankings for highly competitive search terms in our SEO Portfolio. Because of client confidentiality we don't display every success story but we are happy to provide more examples if you contact us.

2. Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
Yes, we follow the technical and quality guidelines including:

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
Don't send automated queries to Google.
Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

3. Do you offer any online marketing services to complement your organic search business?
We provide competitive analysis, keyword research, SEO strategy updates, technical assistance, webinars, monthly analytic reports; a full range of SEO Services and Real Estate Coaching.

4. What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe?
With our system we will give most anyone in the real estate profession top rankings (#1-5) in the organic search listings for their most relevant and highly searched term. We constantly track the climb in rankings and generally achieve our goal results 4-12 months from implementation with the factors being:

Age of the domain (Brand new websites take longer)
Competition of the search term

5. What's your experience in my industry?
We ONLY position websites related to the Real Estate industry.

6. How long have you been in business?
We have positioned Real Estate websites in highly competitive markets across the county since early 2002. Here is a bit of our Real Estate Business History.

To get in touch with one of our SEO Professionals or to learn more Contact Working The Magic.

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I'm a web developer at eXp Realty and Working The Magic. This blog is about online marketing, search engines, and lead generation in today's real estate.

For my services visit real estate web design, search engine marketing, and social media.

Tracking Success of Online Advertising Campaigns

Gabe Hoggarth (eXp Realty) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:22:38 -0700

Despite spending the majority (An understatement) of my time working SEO, Search Engine Optimization, to achieve top organic results in Google and other search engines I enjoy experimenting with online advertising campaigns.

Online advertising campaigns work well in the early stages of launching a website to drive traffic and begin converting leads from day 1. The downfall of this type of advertising campaign is that visits to a website will be determined by the amount of continued daily or monthly spend, but that is the subject of another post on the Return of Investment of SEO vs Pay-Per-Click. That said, to manage a successful online advertising campaign one must have the ability to monitor the generated traffic and conversion of leads for specific campaigns.

The best way I have found to track the results of individual campaigns is to "Tag" links. Tagging links involves creating unique link ID's with embeded information for each online campaign you have. This will allow Google Analytics the ability to track of the success of refering campaigns (If you are not familar with Google's web analytics system you may want to read Who Visits Your Website? Use Google Analytics).

Specific instructions are found within Google's help archives titled How Do I Tag My Links? where you will find access to the URL Builder that makes monitoring and managing your online advertising campaigns possible.

To discuss long term online marketing and SEO strategies call 888-442-5115.

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I'm a web developer at eXp Realty and Working The Magic. This blog is about online marketing, search engines, and lead generation in today's real estate.

For my services visit real estate web design, search engine marketing, and social media.

Who Visits Your Website? Use Google Analytics

Gabe Hoggarth (eXp Realty) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:43:18 -0700

How did your visitors find your website?
Who stayed and for how long?
What pages are performing the best/worst?
These are a few of the important questions to ask yourself about the ongoing health of your website and Google Analytics has the answers. Best of all, it's free.

Below is a recent screen shot of the Dashboard of one of our Google Analytics accounts for May 17th - June 16th. All data can be viewed specific to any time period (Hourly, daily, monthly, yearly) and then compared against historical data.

Because it can be overwhelming at first to try to make sense of all the available information here are a few key terms to pay attention to.

Visits tells you how many visits there were to your page. A visit is defined as a page view when that user has viewed no other page on your site in the past half hour.
Pageviews tells how many times the pages on your site have been viewed.
Pages/Visit tells how many pages, on average, users view when they come to your site.
Bounce Rate shows what percentage of users left after viewing only one page on your site. The lower the better.
Avg. Time on Site shows how long each user spent on your site.
% New Visits shows what percentage of your users have not visited your site before.

How to start using Google Analytics
Step 1 - Visit the Google Analytics Sign Up page and create a new account.
Step 2 - Once you have an account, use your new name and password to log in at the main Google Analytics page. You will be shown a step-by-step setup wizard for configuring your new account.
Step 3 - At the end of the setup wizard Google will give you a snippet of code. Copy and paste the tracking code to your pages directly above the < /body > tag (Note: The code must be placed on every page that you want to track). Once the modified pages are uploaded, Google will start tracking your website's traffic.

This is just scratching the surface of the capability of Google Analytics, I will post on advanced analytic techniques including how to track and improve lead conversion in the near future. In the meantime visit my Real Estate SEO Blog or Real Estate SEO website.

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I'm a web developer at eXp Realty and Working The Magic. This blog is about online marketing, search engines, and lead generation in today's real estate.

For my services visit real estate web design, search engine marketing, and social media.