I have been going through a lot of the marketing blogs on this site and there is a lot of great information. When companies like RIS Media and INMAN are pushing blogging for real estate professionals it certainly lends credibility to social network marketing. I have been doing it for four years now and have had a lot of success at it. My background is in SEO and Search Engine Marketing.
I have been writing a series on website usability on my wife's activerain.com group Marketing To Home Buyers, but also want to post to the general community about a few important things. No matter what business model you are using to govern your Internet presence, it is very important to not overlook some basic Internet practices. I am going to break these strategies down for both Google and Yahoo, which are now giving webmasters a lot of help, all you need to do is ask for it!
First and foremost you must have good analytics. Analytics is the data gathered off of your site that concerns your visitors, where they came from and most importantly: their behavior on your site. I personally use Google Analytics along with Google's Webmaster Center to gather stats on my site. If you don't have anything like this, the first step is to create a Google account. Your Google account can also be for their email program called Gmail. You can register for a Google account here. Once you have a Google account you will have access to all their webmaster tools.
If you are blogging at Blogger or Typepad, through your employer or agency, have your own website or use an online realtor service the first step is to find out if you have any control over your site. By control I am talking about your blog theme or index page. The best case scenario is to be able to upload to your site directory, but only a few web hosts allow that. Because of tight security both Google and Yahoo have made it easier than ever to Verify your site.
By verifying your site (the easiest way is to paste a line of code that both Google and Yahoo provides into your sites <HEAD>) you are telling the engines that you own the site. Like a secret handshake once you get in, you now have access to many powerful tools. Because this data is so important and you surely wouldn't want you competitors to see it, Google and Yahoo have tight security on the data. Some of the most important parts of how a search engine views your site are right there at your fingertips, how many and what sites are linking to you, any errors that might be within your linking structure, the list goes on.
Once you have verified your site the next step is to go to your account home at Google and follow the Analytics icon. Here you can set up your website with Google Analytics. Once you have entered your website info it will give you a couple lines of code. All you have to do is paste that into your sites template or theme and you are ready to go! There are many different website designs so if you have any questions please post them as comments to this post and I will answer your questions.
Once you have inserted the code all you have to do is click one button to verify that Google is receiving data and you are on your way to knowing everything about your site visitors. After a week or so of collecting data you will be able to get a real good look at your traffic. One of the best features is called the site overlay. This puts up a screenshot of your home page and shows you what links people are clicking on to enter the interior of your site. This is probably the single most important group of data that you have. Knowing if visitors are clicking on certain links and not others will give you a clear picture of the success of your navigation and the words within your actual links.
Now if you have a blog, you have an RSS feed. This is one of the most important parts of your site. More and more users are utilizing feed readers or adding feeds that they are interested in right on their home page, whether it is Yahoo, AOL, Google, MSN, whatever. They all allow their users to add their own RSS feeds to their page.
I personally use Feed Burner to manage all my feeds. Not only does it make you visitors have a much easier time subscribing to your feeds, but it also has very advanced tracking capabilities so you can track your subscribers.
In our Marketing To Home Buyers group I am writing very specific usability articles that explain how people are using the Internet, and how those behaviors effect websites. Feel free to join our group and to post your questions here.
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