I don’t know how many RE Bloggers are using Hittail. I hope it is alot. I know some of you think you can track your traffic through your RSS reader results or your feedburner reader numbers. To me that is like asking the magic 8 ball if your traffic is up or down.I first started using Hittail when I had the one website and blog to track. When it got really interesting was when I started tracking a website and 5 blogs. I’m especially finding it useful as I get the new Tucson blog up and running. I know right from it’s first day how traffic is coming to the site.
Hittail Multiple Accounts
You have to set up a new account for each URL you want to track. But you want to always use the same email address for the contact information. Once this is done instead of logging into each account using their individual user names you enter your email address and password. When you login this way a drop down box appears in the upper right hand corner of the screen and you simply pick the account you want. The stats appear.
Hittail Search Hits
I try and look at the long tails, and the other stuff but I don’t seem to be interested in them. The Tab for me is Search Hits. I love going back and forth between the accounts and looking at the hits coming in. Being able to see where they came from what the search phrase was that brought them and clicking to reproduce the search, this is the kind of instant gratification I’m after.
Hittail Search Hits tells me exactly which blog posts are bring in traffic and which aren’t. I have one post written last fall that gets a lot of traffic even today. I know this is a topic of interest and a new post will be coming in a few days to update the information. Because of Hittail Search Hits I already know the title and the traffic it will produce.
I’ve written about Hittail before “Hittail a Peak Behind the Curtain” It shows in detail how Hittail can help you know where your traffic is coming from.
Even if you don’t think you need the premium account I will recommend you get it. There isn’t anything you can really do on the premium that you can’t do on the free account, Yes, you can generate a sitemap, but any decent blog is going to outgrow the page limitation in a couple of months. I recommend you get the premium account because it is worthy of your support. There is no tool for monitoring my blog sites better than Hittail.
If you don’t have a Hittail account get one.
If you use this tool you will soon be amazed at what you learn about your site.
I’ll do a follow-up in a few days showing what I’ve already learned about the experiment site Tucson AZ Real Estate.
Update: As of Friday Noon July 27, 2007 it was working again.
Request Timeout
This request takes too long to process, it is timed out by the server. If it should not be timed out, please contact administrator of this web site to increase ‘Connection Timeout’.
You might want to try and send a manual ping for your site! I’m getting connection time out error meaning right now it doesn’t appear any pings are going through.
There is not contact form at Ping-O-matic so the next best thing is to blog about it and see if everyone is getting the same results. Ping-o-matic
I usually don’t rely on Wordpress to automatically send out pings whenever a post is published. I like to see it myself. Sometimes I get the Hold on Cowboy you just sent a Ping! and that is fine. I know it went. Sometimes I don’t.
I also check blogsearch.google.com to see if the post is there. Yesterday was a busy day, I didn’t do either. This morning I’m looking for one of the post on blogsearch.google and it isn’t anywhere to be found. I try to manually ping and I’m getting Connection Time Out Errors on all browsers.
Check it out and let me know if anyone else is getting the same message. If so, it would appear they have been down for at least 24 hrs. maybe longer and there are a lot of blogs out there sending pings, or at least they think they are.
I’ll be interested to see what results you are getting.
For now you can use AutoPinger
- Scroll down when you get there.
- I suggest you check let me fill in the title.
- Scroll down again, (on some browsers)
- Fill in your information
- Ping
Hope you all have a great pinging day. : )
Photos on a blog post are cute, sometimes they have nothing to do with the post, sometimes they are stolen and used without permission, but that is a post already written, just not by me. They should enhance the post. Photos are like adding seasoning to the meal. You can eat it without seasoning, but it taste so much better with seasoning to spice things up and bring out the full flavor.
Most bloggers don’t think a thing about the images other than they help get the point across they are trying to make.
Photos:
- They are pretty
- They help make a point
- They are funny
- They illustrate the post
- They are the subject of the post
Photos are used for a lot of these reasons and that is good. But are you overlooking the traffic you can bring to your site because of your photos?
Many Real Estate Bloggers spend a great deal of time doing SEO on their site to get the title tags just right, the URL and permalink structure for good SEO etc. They install plugins like Ultimate Tag Warrior, or Tags in the Head, Simple Tags and other to help optimize their keywords for the search engines. Here is my question.
What are you doing about SEO and images on your site?
Tagging your images
It is more work to tag your images, but believe me it is worth the effort.
I know you don’t like to take the time to do this. I know this because when I mouse over images on a lot of blogs I see things like “photo 89″ or “dsc00134.jpg” or nothing at all.
Here is an example:
This is a more descriptive tag. Don’t you think so?
Another example:
Gregg doesn’t use images much at Bloodhound blog so I thought this was quite a find. These are from his famous Debunking Zillow.com post.
Take the extra second and write a descriptive tag for your images using keywords. Mouse over the communities image at the top. Sight impaired users have readers that read these tags to them because they can’t see the words or images.
Google Enhanced Image Search
| What does it mean to opt-in to enhanced image search?
If you choose to enable enhanced image search, Google will use tools such as Google Image Labeler to associate the images included in your site with labels that will improve indexing and search quality of those images. To enable the images on your site to be used with these types of tools:
|
When you opt into this program your images get indexed quicker and will become another source of traffic to your site. You might be amazed at just how much traffic your images will generate.
You do this through the google webmaster account. When you log in to the site down at the bottom of the left navigation you will find the Enhance Image Search. Click on the button and the option to be in this program window appears with a checkbox.
Check it and click ok. It is that simple and you are in the advance image search program.
Hittail Search Hits
I will be the first to admit I haven’t paid much attention to the image hits. I have considered them more a distraction than anything. But recently we have had two calls from people based on image searches and not word searches.
One from an architectural magazine wanting more information on a rammed earth home we had an image of on our site.
We were able to find the home on the MLS and get the architects name to the author of the article.
I know of other agents that are actually selling homes and getting clients from the images on their sites. It is worth the effort to make them so they can be found.
Our Hittails Search data for Sunday July 15, shows exactly 100 hits and 20 of those are from image searches. This seams about right. Twenty percent of our traffic is probably from image searches.
Do you want to increase your traffic to the site by a possible 20%?
Sure it is an image that gets them to you site, do you care how they get there?
Hittail doesn’t record the hit till they actually come to the site. This means they didn’t just find it in the search results it means they clicked on it and came to the blog.
Start adding those description tags to your images and turn on Google Enhanced Image Search Let your blog images add some flavor, some zest, and some traffic.
Has anyone found it odd that there is a CMA Request form on the lab?
I thought someone might ask me about it, but I haven’t had anyone inquire about it.
Yep, I’m running another experiment on this CMA Request Plugin from Realivant.
I like the results.
- It is easy to install and Activate
- Create a page (I suggest using the HTML editor)
- Add <!–CMA Form–>
- Save the Page
- Options configuration
- Test the page
In the options setup your email for notification, write an introduction, write a thank you note when the request is sent so they know it went through.
DON’T Forget to set up the email address. The plug-in will do you no good if you don’t have an email for the request to be received.
Test it. Fill out the form and submit it. I know this sounds like a no brainer but it is often an overlooked step.
There is an option for getting Zillow house values. Personally I still consider Zillow house values more a parlor game so I don’t want to encourage it. Zillow also provides sold data, that is reliable and if you want to try and run your own mini CMA you can look at what has sold around a home recently. At least the Zillow evaluation is an option.
I’ve mentioned the Realivent plug-ins before with a caveat. The code wasn’t W3C compliant and caused a lot of errors on the page. I worked on a couple of the early plug-ins to bring them into compliance. I’m happy to say they have done some great work and this plug-in is compliant. I’ve not tested any of the others on their site. I hope they have brought them all into W3C compliance.
If you haven’t been to the Realivent site check it out; they have a lot of great content and platforms. The site and blog is filled with useful information and tools for RE Bloggers.
Is Your Real Estate blog listed in the Zillow wiki?
Would you like to be listed? It is free.
- Go to the link below
- Create an account if you don’t have one
- Log in to edit the wiki page
- Find the section where your blog belongs
- Type in your blog name
- Highlight the name you enter
- Click the Globe add link at the top of the editor
- Type in your blog URL
- Save at the bottom of the page
- Test Your Link (always a good idea)
There is a section created for Local Real Estate blogs that would be perfect for many of the blogs I read on a daily basis.
Zillow Directory of Real Estate Blogs
More than an experiment a passion.
The premise for the experiment
- Setup a new domain name.
- Use Wordpress as the basis
- Posts & Pages
- See how the search engines respond
The process that brought about this new venture is outlines in the posts I’ve written recently in this order:
- Real Estate Weblogging 101
- A Tucson Realtors Journey in Web Presence
- Building a Real Estate Blog Site or Refurbish
This new blog about Tucson is constructed on the basis of the things I’ve learned since starting real estate blogging.
What’s in a name?
We are told to have a URL that is rich in keywords. I didn’t know that before. Actually the first time I read it I didn’t even know what that meant. Now I have a good keyword rich name www.tucsonazrealestateblog.com
If you are just starting out do your best to find a URL that is keyword rich for your area. Don’t be afraid of the word “blog” either. I know it has appeared on a couple of “poison word” lists, but lists change and so do uses of words. Some of the best placing blogs in search engines have “blog” right in the url. Google has even created an entire www.blogsearch.google.com just for searching blogs. Did you notice that Google has “blog” in that URL? For this experiment I have included the word blog in the URL.
Wordpress
I chose Wordpress for my platform. This isn’t to say that other platforms aren’t good. I simply have never used anything but Wordpress. The other day Jay Thompson call me the Wordpress Wizard. I’m still glowing from that one.
Pick a platform that fits your comfort level. I know the reason a lot of bloggers have made changes to their site has been the limitations and restrictions of the first platform they started to build their blog on. Ask other RE bloggers for suggestions and make sure you pick to fit your abilities.
Choosing a Theme?
This one is probably one of the most important choices you will make. Many chose a them because the like the way it looks. My grandfather used to say, “Most fishing lures are made to catch fishermen, not fish” It doesn’t matter how pretty the theme is if it isn’t designed to bring your content to the internet so it can be found it isn’t a good theme.
I’ve used and tweaked a lot of themes in the last year. I’ve finally found some that are pretty easy to change and get my content to the Internet quickly. I don’t know all that is involved in this. If I did I would share it. I do know I’ve picked a couple of themes for the single property sites and those sites were never found. After waiting a couple of months in one case I changed the theme and in two days it was placing #1 in Google for its location.
I won’t recommend any particular theme or themes in general here. The right theme in many cases depends on how much you are willing or able to make changes to the theme in the theme editor. If you are comfortable doing this there are some great themes I would recommend using and tweaking for your blog. If not there are others to pick from.
Anyone wanting help here please contact me. I’ll be glad to share what I can. (No I don’t charge for this) Wow, another good reason to be a RE Blogger, you meet the nicest people.
It also depends on how you want your content displayed. I like lots of picture and I like room to write without making a post look like it is a novel. This means I modify or pick themes that provide me at least 600 pixels of writing and display space.
I like three columns, but have learned to live with two. It is hard to get three columns and 600 px to write in and keep it on the screen.
The theme for this new blog has been modified significantly since I first downloaded it. I have used it on several of the property blogs. It is great and gets the placement I want quickly on Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Post and Pages
I’m going to incorporate more pages on this blog than any I’ve created before. There is some content I don’t want moving down, and into achieves. I want it there all the time so I’ll have a pages index of content (I don’t know how I’m going to do this yet) for information I want to convey and make available not in posts.
Search Engine Placement
I’m going to expand on this in a separate post. Here is a little to chew on for now and a hint at how you can help your blog.
Everyone wants their blog to be found. We are told “Don’t write for the search engines, write for your readers” I agree completely with this statement.
Here is the issue.
If I can’t get my posts found on the Internet, how am I going to get readers?
Second, Once I get my content on the search engines how can I keep it there?
Remember this is just an introduction to these questions. Here is a quick answer to number 2 that will help RE Bloggers keep their content from falling into supplemental results or disappearing all together.
- Leave Comments on other RE Bloggers posts.
I’ve noticed the post that continue to be indexed month after month are the posts with comments on them. - Write posts with quality content oriented links in the post to other blog post both on your blog and on other blogs. (Yes, this is called link love; spread it around it will do you good)
- Allow a do-follow on comments. I moderate all comments on all the blogs because even with askimet and a couple of spam filters some thing will still slip through with words and links I don’t even want to read. This means only comments get on the blog I want there and so I use a plugin called do-follow that takes the no-follow tag off that Wordpress automatically turns on for comment URL’s
This means if you leave a comment on any post on any of the blogs I author, and you put in your URL, you get a link back from that comment to your site.
I recommend other bloggers taking this same approach and help other bloggers keep their content indexed and allow do-follows on their comments so they are receiving quality links back to their blog site.
This is the part of the experiment where I need the help of others in the RE Blogosphere.
- I’ll provide posts and content on the Tucson AZ Real Estate blog that you will want to read and enjoy reading.
- There should be ideas there other bloggers can use as seeds for their own posts.
- I’ve already installed the do-follow plugin on this blog so if you leave a comment you get link back to your blog.
- I’ll keep sharing what I learn from this experiment right here in the lab so everyone benefits from what is learned along the way.
- I’ll keep posting here in the lab and providing links to your posts and blogs as they pertain to the post topic.
I’m asking for RE Bloggers to:
- Read the blog
- Comment when you want to, or need a back-link : )
- Put it on your blogroll because it is a good blog not just because I asked
- Let me know what you think of it either on site or here in the lab
I think this is going to be a great experiment and experience. I’m excited about putting it all together with
- A Clean New URL (just two weeks old)
- A new Theme
- A new approach to Posts and Pages
- Tightly focused, hyper-local content
Tucson AZ Real Estate I’m putting the link down here for those that don’t want to scroll back to the top. This should be fun and educational. If it helps any blogger new or experienced it will all be worth it.
Final note: In the recent post Real Estate Blogging Hot Topic of the Hour I talked about why you write. I said this blog is for RE Bloggers and it is. This new blog is for anyone interested in Tucson. It isn’t a sales blog, it isn’t a service blog, it isn’t to get clients. It is about the community in which we work and live. If you want to have a Great RE blog don’t sell it. Build it right and they will come. I can’t believe I said that. Thanks for your support.
Have you ever said, “I wish I had known what I know now when I started all of this” I’ve said it over and over during the last year. I’ve continued to make improvements to all the sites we have but there has been this nagging desire to put it all together and see if it can be made better.
The Decision Process: Start Over or Refurbish
The great internal debate and the reason for many sleepless nights over the past three weeks has been deciding how to proceed with this project. I really wanted to see what a new site would be like building it from the ground up, but I didn’t want to be competing with myself in the search engines either.
The debate ran something like this:
I have a new domain name that is keyword specific verses a domain name that is not specific and a blog url that is long and cumbersome. The home page itself has a url of :
http://www.barbaralasky.com/tucson-real-estate-blog/ Pretty long isn’t it. I’m sure you noticed I have a “poison” word in the URL , more about that later.
Add a post to the home URL and it looks like this:
http://www.barbaralasky.com/tucson-real-estate-blog/tucson-real-estate-news/tucson-record-number-of-unsold-homes-flood-the-market/
This is even longer. Couple that with the information that “Google doesn’t like long URL’s” and I have to say this is a long URL. It is not keyword specific at least not in the beginning where the keywords should be weighted.
Refurbish
By that I mean, take all the pages of the website and the blog put them under the new domain name and do a permanent 301 redirect to the new URL.
Advantages:
- It puts every thing together in one place
- You don’t split the juice
- You have a consolidated effort on the web
Disadvantages:
- You loose all your back links
- You start over building new links
- You risk confusing the search engines if you don’ t get the 301 redirect right
- You might see your web traffic almost disappear
The Decision:
I took the safe way out. It keeps the old sites doing what they are doing now. I don’t sacrifice any web traffic already established. More important I don’t want to get thrown out of the house running a blog lab experiment that kills our web presence. That last one weighed heavily in the decision.
If you want a sneek peek http://www.tucsonazrealestateblog.com of course feel free to link to it if you want to : )
Tomorrow, I’ll post more on this site experiment and the new site. I’ll also share some insights I’ve been gathering on comments and do-follow.
Real Estate blogging is the hot topic of the hour. It will continue to pop up at the top of the charts for the rest of 2007 and into 2008. Let’s face it Real Estate is tough especially now. Real Estate Agents everywhere are looking for ways to better market themselves and their services.
In years past it was:
- You have to have a cell phone
- You have to have email
- You have to have a website
- You have to have a personal coach etc.
Now, You have to have a blog. They know what a cell phone looks like, they have email now even if it is @aol.com, most have a webpage on their brokerage site and are told it is a website, not a webpage. . . But they have no idea what a blog is.
RE Agent walks into Office Max.
“Can I help you”
“Yes, I would like to purchase a blog”
“Excuse me, you want a blog?”
“Yes, I’ve been told I have to have a blog and I figure you would know what it is and tell me how to work it.”
When agents were told they needed email many went out and got a juno or aol email account. Okay, now they had email. The same was true with getting a personal website. What did they do. Most did what they were being advised to do by people selling Real Estate Websites and Hosting services:
- Purchase your name as a domain name
- Buy hosting from our company
- Buy the package deal and for $500 we will design your personal website which is just like everybody elses personal website
- Sit back and wait for the lead to come in
The leads don’t come in:
- Buy leads from someone selling leads for $xxx or 30% of the commission.
- SEO “guy” calls and will put you on page one of Google and the other search engines for just $1000 a month.
- SEO sales rep calls you. We can set up a Pay Per Click campaign for you for $xxxx and the leads will come in.
But they have a website.
Oh, Oh, now I have to get a blog. I don’t know what a blog is. I don’t know how to work one. I don’t know how it gets me leads or clients, or sales, or commissions.
Sounds like a vicious cycle? It is.
Building a House from the Center Out
Can you imagine if you started building a house, I’ll use this since we are all associated in some way with real estate, with a pile of lumber and built from the center out that way you could put the furniture in as you go. This doesn’t sound like a very good way to build a house does it. I wouldn’t want to buy this house, I wouldn’t want to try and sell this house. I certainly wouldn’t want to live in this house. It is best to have a plan when building a house. The same is true when you start thinking about blogging.
There is so much about this that you can get caught in the details and forget to ask the first questions first.
Am I going to write?
- This isn’t can I write?
- It isn’t am I willing to write?
- Not am I a writer?
- Not even do I like to write?
It isn’t worth even looking into having,
- a blog
- or a blogging platform
- or finding your voice
- or deciding on be local or hyper-local
- or finding your audience,
if you aren’t going to make the commitment to write.
A good place to read more on this is Teresa Broadman’s post on The Real Estate Tomato on “What Is The Biggest Barrier To Real Estate Blogging?”
Next, read her post: “Food for Fodder – 101 Real Estate Blog Topics”
If none of these topics interest you, don’t waste you time thinking about blogging.
Why am I writing?
Why am I writing is the next important question you will have to answer. Here you will encounter a paradox. It is a paradox in this sense.
If you are writing on a blog to:
- Get leads
- Get clients
- Get famous
- Get more money
Then you won’t get any of these things. Two years ago a friend got into real estate because they wanted, and I quote, “To get all that moneyyy”. The friend lasted less than a year.
You write, for your readers. Sure you can enjoy writing yourself, and have some fun and learn a lot about your community while you are at it. You can inform, educate and even entertain your readers, but don’t try and turn them into clients or a paycheck.
Don’t write about what a great Agent you are. Don’t sell, sell, sell. Maybe you were told to do these things on your website, promote yourself and your services, brag about what a great Agent you are, “Number 1 in …” “Top Producer” “Multi-Million Dollar Agent”
Real Estate Blogging isn’t about:
- selling real estate
- or real estate services
- or even selling yourself.
It is about communicating, informing, laughing, building relationships, some readers may become clients, they might even become friends.
If you do these things, the leads, sales, commissions will come. But if leads, sales and commissions are your reason for writing, readers will see right through you. Readers are people and people don’t want to be sold, they want to chose. They want to trust in a business that has been fraught with dis-trust.
If you can answer those two questions then you should consider learning and doing more. Start by reading the blogs in the blog roll on this site. Next go to Real Estate Weblogging 101 for more resources and information. Oh, and you can stop by the Real Estate Blog Lab anytime. We are always trying to provide tool, resources, information and a little humor to make Real Estate Blogging a better experience for the authors as well as the readers.
Otherwise, put your efforts into some other form of “Real Estate Marketing”. Honestly, you don’t have to have a blog to make it in Real Estate. If you are needing permission. Here it is, “It is all right if you don’t have a blog. You are not a failure in real estate if you don’t have a blog.”
Things have been very busy here at the lab over the last month. I know the number of posts don’t reflect that, unfortunately some experiments and setting them up takes time to perk and have some results worth sharing. There are a number of those brewing as I write.
The latest is one of the most exciting for me personally. Without risking boring anyone with a lengthy post (of course meaning this will be a lengthy post), I’ll try and give this history in a short form with photos to keep attention spans from drifting. We are a visual society after all. Keep those images coming. I’m sure there are others that have a similar path or story to tell.
The Canned Site
It was 3 years ago when every agent was told “You have to have a website”. Like most Barbara was encouraged to buy a domain of her name before anyone else got it. She did and www.barbaralasky.com was born. Then she needed a website to go with that domain and she chose a company that was used by a top producing agent in town figuring “good enough for them good enough for me“. How’s that for SEO 101.
Here is what that site looked like:
Wow that’s a beauty isn’t it? It was something to behold we were on the web now all we had to do was sit back and wait for the leads to come rolling in. It had all the cool things, the buttons gleamed as the mouse moved over them. There was community information, contact, Relocation form etc.
The opening paragraph described us as “Not Your Typical Realtors” I’m not sure what people think of as a typical Realtor. . . I’m just glad we didn’t use “For all your Real Estate Needs” I almost barf, for Greg Swann defecate, every-time I read this phrase on a real estate website. I digress, sorry.
There was no way to input keywords, meta-tags, descriptions, etc. The editor broke often while trying to make changes. There was no way to check traffic to the site. There was never a lead, there was no finding the site on any search engine except under a search for Barbara Lasky. I wasn’t into the web, I was a serious Database guy using SQL Server, the web to me was like Myspace, a toy for the masses but not for serious folk.
Honey, Can You Take over the Site
Okay, I buy some books on XHTML I get a copy of Macromedia Suite including Dreamweaver 8 and Fireworks 8 etc. I buy more books on those programs and read and read and read.
I start adding pages and fresh content, I tweak the title tags and add keywords relevant to each page. I discovered a few things along the way as well that made me wonder.
Discoveries of the Black Hat Order
Tiny white text with lots of keywords
I loaded the index page into Dreamweaver and was looking around at the page when I discovered at the bottom of the page what looked like a white smudge of some kind. It turned out to be more than a hundred keywords in a font size of less than 1 and white so it wouldn’t show up on the page and located off the screen. I called tech support and they said this was for search engine placement and needed so the keywords could be found. A which search on Google and I discovered this was asking to get your site banned from the web. I removed it from the site immediately.
Participating in a link farm
I learned how to generate a sitemap and submit it to Google. I discovered 17 pages on our site I didn’t know anything about. It turned out to be a link farm of pages that were once again hidden but for the purposes of backlinks to all their clients sites from their clients. When I asked to have those pages removed from the site since I wasn’t granted access I was told they were server generated and they couldn’t stop them either. Time to find another Hosting Company for the site.
Honey, my site looks like something out of the 70’s can you change it?
A couple more books on CSS and site design Flash embedded on the site and here came the new site look and feel, with even better SEO management of the Title tags, Meta tag descriptions keywords, CSS formatting in a separate file streamlined to make it easy for the bots to scan quickly. It looked almost like it does today.
There were more things that happened:
- addition of more content pages,
- more SEO management,
- click counting from the home page.
- State directory pages instead of “Links” pages. This was for a referral network and a clean place to organize backlinks to the site. (This is not longer being done, sites are getting banded and penalized for having State page directories on them.
We began getting some leads coming in from the site. We started showing up for some terms about Tucson real estate. There are almost 50 pages in the Google index of the site.
Lets Start a Blog | The birth of Tucson Real Estate in The News
More reading, buying of books, research. I start reading Arizona Real Estate Blogs. ( I could give out some link love here, but will refrain at the moment, but it will come.)
The short form of this:
- Hosted on our site
- Wordpress format
- directory of home domain
- Focus Localism Tucson
The Result:
- Increase in traffic exponentially
- A wider audience
- Quick increase in Page Rank
- Fast building of quality backlinks
- Around 600 pages indexed in Google
- Becoming a part of a quickly growing Real Estate Blogging community.
The original idea behind starting the blog was to try and provide a place for honest analysis of the Tucson Real Estate Market in two ways. First, detailed analysis of the Tucson MLS Statistical Reports that are released each month for the previous month. Second, provide commentary and analysis of Real Estate related articles in the local and national press which we felt often was all about headlines and selling papers and not providing a true picture of the state of real estate in Tucson or the nation.
Over time it added more content and posts about living in Tucson as well.
The Rest of This Long Short Tale
Where we are today is enjoying fair placement for the major search terms for our market and great placement for the “long tails” of searches in our market. We have helped a lot of people with information from “What is a post tension foundation” to “How do I clean a Saltillo Tile Floor”. We have picked up some clients and made some friends along the way.
These are the good things that have come to pass over the past year.
It has been a learning experience to say the least.
The Real Estate Blog Lab
The real estate blog lab was an outgrowth of all the real estate bloggers that provided support and invaluable information and advise when I was faced with starting a new blog or incorporating the lab post into the Tucson Real Estate posts. The overwhelming majority advised, “Keep the message focused, start a new blog” I have never regretted the decision to create this site.
The journey continues, I hope this overview of the path so far is in the least an interesting read for some. Possibly a chuckle for others that have walked this path themselves. Maybe, some subtle advise to others that are struggling with some of these issues themselves.
The journey now is taking another turn in direction. I want to put it all together I want to see if by starting over from scratch and applying what has been learned along the way a better blogging experience can be created for the reader. It all has to do with one of the big questions in Real Estate Blogging, “Why are you Blogging?” I have my answer, “I blog for the readers.”
Now, I have to make sure the readers can find me. This is the next step in this journey of Real Estate Blogging.
BTW, in case you haven’t figured this out, this site is for Real Estate Bloggers : )
Greg Swann at Bloodhound blog on June 21, 2007 launched the new blog Real Estate Weblogging 101.
What Greg didn’t realize was he also set in motion an experiment I have been wanting to run here in the lab.
Here is the basis for the experiment:
- Setup a new domain name.
- Use Wordpress as the basis
- Instead of Post use Pages
- See how the search engines respond
When I say search engines, I’m referring to Google primarily.
I know from all the various single property sites I’ve set up that if I want that site indexed quickly, I’m talking hours, that process starts with the posts.
I’ve created single property sites and quickly delete the hello world post and the about page. By quickly I mean in less than 30 seconds after I’m in for the first time. Once that is done and the plugins are setup I go about creating pages and publishing those pages. I don’t worry about them being found before I’m ready for traffic to the site. It takes a few days to get the site found if it only has pages.
Recently I tried an experiment by actually having the video montage page made the front page while I was getting the post content ready. That had an interesting effect of getting that page indexed in a day.
I’ve seen it take a week for those pages to get indexed if there were no posts on the blog.
Then Greg came along and created an entire blog of pages. I think there are three post and all the rest are pages.
Today, July 11, 2007 I ran a site check on the blog in google to see how many pages were indexed, and how many were in supplemental results.
The site search showed there were 61 pages indexed, of that 59 were in the active index and only 2 pages were in supplemental results. This might not impress you initially, but I often find that 1/3 of the pages of a site up to 1/2 or more of the pages are in supplemental results.
The two pages were:
I don’t think Greg intended for the blank page to be live.
Now the fun continues. I’ll keep checking this to see when and if these pages begin to go into supplemental results or if they will stay in the active index.
If you are new to real estate blogging and reading this post, please take time to read some if not all of Real Estate Weblogging 101. Read it a couple of times at various times. It might not all make sense the first time through but as the learning curve starts to flatten out you will realize what a valuable resource Greg has provided for Real Estate bloggers.
Initially Greg had invited me to add content to the book on setting up Wordpress as a Real Estate blogging platform. I didn’t have such an article and the more I tried to write one I found there was more involved than would fit in a single article.
I’m still in the process of putting together a series to make a chapter on Wordpress. I’m writing this and making it public so it doesn’t become one of those To Do’s that turns into a Never Done.
Greg sent out an email at launch, here is a quote near the end:
Do please feel free to write about this on or after Thursday morning. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to bring them up. I think we’ve made two important accomplishments: We’ve built a practical guide to help would-be real estate webloggers get themselves started. And we have pioneered a new book-publishing medium.
Greg is right in thinking there are two important accomplishments.
Thanks Greg for also building a great site for lab analysis.
I’ll get you those articles on Wordpress.
UPDATE Monday July 16
I’ve run the site command each day and it bounces a couple of pages probably due to datacenters. The result is between 58 and 61 pages in the index. Still just the two pages in supplemental results.
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A Fable Do Follow and Comments
By Dave Smith Friday July 20, 2007
There are large banquet tables set with every kind of food and desert imaginable. Everyone has a fork in their hand that can’t be removed or repositioned. The Fork is so long you can’t put it in your mouth.
The scene in hell; everyone is stabbing food and trying to somehow feed themselves with this great food stuck on the end of a very long fork.
The scene in heaven; everyone is using their fork to get food for the person across the table from them. They can use their fork to feed others but not themselves.
In heaven everyone gets fed. In hell no matter how hard they try no one gets fed.
I wrote earlier this week about the new blog experiment I was doing in our market. To make it worth while reading I threw in some things that I thought would interest other bloggers.
Posts with Comments
I’ve noticed on the blogs I author and track that post without comments can move quickly to supplemental results and right out of the Google index. However, posts with comments tend to stay in the active index much longer and some almost indefinitely.
If you find a post you really like or just one you would like to see others read leave a comment. And I’m not talking about “Great Post” or “I love your blog”. Providing a good comment just might help a fellow blogger keep their post on the web. We all know we should write for our readers and not the search engines. The reality is if we aren’t indexed by the search engines our readers can’t find our posts.
Post with Contextual Links
The second thing I’ve noticed that helps keep post in the Google index are those containing links that are contextual to the post. It means you are giving away a link to another blog. It is often called link love because these contextual links are the best kind of back-link to get from another blog or website.
Share the link love and keep your posts in the index.
Do-Follow Plug-in
This plug-in It will disable the automatic
rel="nofollow"attributes added to external links. Meaning when someone leaves a comment on your blog and they fill in their URL they will get a back-link from your blog post.Of course we should all have control over the spam comments that come to our site. I still moderate all comments before they go live. Even with Askiment and a spam filter activated. I also have the do-follow plugin on all my blogs. I’ve not told anyone this until now but I think I’m going to start, Oh, I guess I just did.
Here is the link to find the do-follow plugin.
In the options panel of the plugin you can set the number of days for the comment before the no follow is removed. I personally like it set to zero, if someone takes the time to comment on the blog and provide their valid URL, I’m glad to provide them a link back to their site.
We can all help each other out.
Before you know it instead of all of us going hungry, we all get fed.
In case you didn’t know it. Back-links are a major part of Google PageRank. Share the Link Love, improve your PageRank, which improves your position in the organics. To borrow a phrase from Athol Kay “You’ve Been Fed”.
I’d rather be in blogger heaven than blogger hell, how about you?