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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.
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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?