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"Bait Sites" Domain Strategies to flood your site with traffic

Are your clients searching for you by name?

Probably not, while some Realtors have managed to build up that sort of name brand, the vast majority are looking for ways to stand out from the crowed and get noticed.

What are your prospects searching for when they start their home search? Are they starting it from goggle? or from your local MLS site?

From my experience they are starting their home search on goggle or another search engine of choice. They are probably typing in something to the effect of "Neighborhood Property Listings" (where neighborhood equals the area they want to live in).

Recent studies have shown that home buyers generally are looking in neighbourhoods for their homes, they know the area they want to live in and they are searching for it by name.

So, let's take my client Rick Stonehouse, a successful Vancouver Realtor that specializes in the Strathcona area.

While a quick goggle search for "Strathcona Properties" or "Strathcona Homes" will not bring up his main website (RickStonehouse.com) you'll notice that the bait site we developed for him (liveinstrathcona.com) comes up on the first page, in fact in the top 5.

Now, where do you think his traffic to his website is coming from, it's not from goggle searches, it's coming from liveinstrathcona.com. Which they found FIRST on goggle, before his name.

Why? Well, we have done a little SEO work on the word "Strathcona", but having it as part of the URL makes that really easy, over trying to do it with optimized text, dozens of articles with the word "Strathcona".

You get the idea. A domain name now can be picked up for under $20 - in-fact, you can get a domain for just $5.99 from 1and1 - : If you'd like some help setting up a bait site, don't hesitate to contact us.

I'm updating this post with a video that I made on the subject

Posted by Riel Roussopoulos - SEO & Web Strategy Expert on 08/07/2007 09:41 PM

Comments (12)

Bait Site in the Online Marketing Channel

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12 Comments on "Bait Sites" Domain Strategies to flood your site with traffic

AUG

2007

Great advice. I have three bait sites and intend to keep adding a few more. I think the link backs to my main site will also help my SEO.

Thanks.

What are your bait sites Brad?

That is pretty smooth. I had a local site in addition to my "name" site, but it never really took off. I think that I might have focused too much on mortgages instead of moving to the area or information about the area itself -- i.e., I did not offer enough value about the locale which would make it more of a resource. Anyway, the "name" site carried far more information about me and my practice than did the "bait" site.

Thanks Jefferson,

We're actually just getting it going, we have a full redesign coming with a more flexible layout and more opportunity for user submitted content.

It's drawing well though already and without any local advertising we've more than doubled his average number of listing and moved him from more of a buyers agent, to now having more of his own listings than buyers.

The focus shouldn't be about you, it's not a bus shelter ad. You use it to create organic traffic and act in a more subtle way. The listing interest all comes to you, regardless of if it's your listing or someone else's listing, so you don't need your smiling face on every page. Buyers know when they're being marketed to, and they much prefer a more subtle approach.

Save the big smiling picture of you from 15 years ago for your post cards and if you must, your personal website.

(sorry, it's late and I'm probably being too snarky, but some Realtors really don't get it (of course they're probably not going to be here anyway - you guy's are at least on the web enough to have found this place :)

And finally, Yes Brad, the additional backlinks to your personal site from your bait site add extra "umph" to your SEO efforts.

I'll give you another tip about that, if you blog on your personal site, you can use a feed from your blog (as we have in the side bar of our livein sites) that is published on your bait site. This means that when you update your blog, your content on your bait site is updated. That elevates the relevance of both your sites (don't worry about the duplicate content rule, that's more for within your 1 site and the link value over rules it) and most of all your personal site, since now.. you've got X number of links back to your site from this bait site.

(final note on that, if you want to really maximize the value, make sure that you're not hosting both sites off the same IP address, that will lower your ranking - put them on separate servers, or buck up for a private IP address and get off the shared one).

Hope that was helpful.

AUG

2007

OK... so after reading my own advise, I thought I'd do the same with my Active Rain feed to show you an example.

So - check out the right hand side bar of SellFM.com -

You'll notice that I've used the RSS feed from my blog here on Active Rain, to publish my latest blog postings from active rain to my SellFM home page.

Furthermore, you'll notice that I have randomized the feed, so every time you reload the page (try it) you get a different order.

As I add more posts to my blog here, it'll randomize the posts and only show 3 at a time,

We're also using that trick on the "visuals" pages of liveinstrathcona - but there we're grabbing feeds from Flickr and YouTube (talk about instant relevant content)

WOW! This is really neat information. I feel like such a technological dinosaur. I need to come hang out in this group more often.

Yes, come and hang out in this group: "where the geeks roam free"

Thanks Tracy, I'm glad you're getting useful info :)

OCT

2007

Be very very careful with these types of sites. It is treading the line between white hat SEO and gray hat SEO and I have seen some recent examples of Google detecting similar techniques. I spend a lot of time over at the Google Webmaster Help Group and there has been a rise in sites who are being demoted because they are using domain farms that operate like this. Now many of them are using quite a few different URL's to point to each other but Google could change the algorithm to lower the threshold. I am not telling you not to do this but I want to warn you that there is a risk of getting zapped by Google if you go too far.

Great post and a great marketing/SEO tip. I'm setting up a bait site in the next week or so. However, are you advising us to set it up with a different server host than our primary site is set up with to maximize SEO?

Mark: Obviously you can't just be setting up a link farm circle jerk, each of the sites that you're setting up have to have some valid content in them, like anything, there is a wright way and a wrong way to do things. If you look at liveinstrathcona.com you can see this is not just a page of links or anything spammy, there is lots of original content, media and things for people to do. Feeding the listings from Rick's site however (and a blog feed or two) still works very well.

Seth: Yes, it will help if the sites you're setting up are on different IP blocks (not just numbers) but to be honest, it's not required, the examples above are all using the same IP and it's working just fine. (sure it would maximize it though if I moved it to another IP range.)

Riel, good point. I was just trying to point out that if done the wrong way it could create problems. I would prefer just putting all of that content on one site and using SEO friendly URL structure. Maybe even throw up a 301 redirect from the keyword rich URL. I agree that the way you have it set up should be OK but I wanted to warn others who are less savvy away from simply buying a bunch of domains and creating a link farm.

OCT

2007

Thanks for the great info, it will come in handy for future reference.

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