SEO | Real Estate Blog Lab

Photos an Overlooked Part of Your Real Estate Blog Traffic

By Dave Smith Tuesday July 24, 2007

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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:

Sign in to Webmaster tools
Click the site for which you want to enable enhanced image search.
On the Diagnostic tab, click Enhanced Image Search. Once you have opted in to enhanced image search, you can opt out at any time by returning to this page and clearing the checkbox.

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.

Google Dance Update

By Dave Smith Wednesday June 27, 2007

bent google logo Any body feeling the effects of the Google Dance on the last update a few days ago? I’ve read about an update taking place on a couple of forums. Many seem to have noticed some big changes in their rankings for key search terms. Most were not happy with the new results.

I’ve noticed some brand new sites coming to the first page and to be honest after looking at their sites and doing some quick checking on pages indexed, keywords saturation, fresh content, I’m wondering where did they came from and how long will they be staying.

Has anyone noticed a change in their positions on Google in the last week, since, let’s say the 24th of June?

I would be interested in knowing if your position improved or degraded in the last week or so.

Building a Google Trustbox

By Dave Smith Wednesday April 25, 2007

Google Trust box The discussion of the Google Sandbox goes on and on. Some say it doesn’t exist, other say it does most certainly exist. Lately I’ve read some are calling it the Trustbox and not a Sandbox.

Trustbox makes sense. I think you can build a Google Trustbox and put all your websites and blogs in the Trustbox so they will get found quickly on Google.

I built a Google Trustbox and didn’t even know it.

You too can build your own Trustbox and avoid the dreaded Sandbox once it is built.

The Google Sandbox

Many have explained the sandbox I won’t go into detail. Link Building Blog gives a good history of the Sandbox “Secrets to Beating the Sandbox. . .”

The Google Trustbox

Interesting thought and if this is the case and I’m beginning to think it is. There is a great way to establish new websites inside the trustbox.

Trust – The Creature or The Creator

Here is a real advantage to having complete control of your hosting and domains.

The website is often what is quoted as having authority, Google Juice as it is often referred, but I wonder if this isn’t a misunderstanding of what Google is doing which leads to some confusion related to the “Google Dance”.

What if it is the author of the site or sites that has established trust with Google and not the individual sites?

It is the author that sets up the account/accounts.
It is the author that submits the sitemap.
It is the author that controls the robot text for the Googlebots.
It is the author that verifies the website/blog.
It is the author that is responsible for clean easy to follow code.
It is the author that makes sure the code is W3C compliant.
It is the author that continues to add quality content.
It is the author that creates the SEO for the site/sites.

The author is the one that establishes and maintains trust with Google.

I am the author, the creator, and I have a trusted site based on everything mentioned above. I create another creature, a new site. This new creature is verified by the author with Google. The new site is born inside the trustbox.

Building The Trustbox 10 Steps

Avoiding the sandbox in the future requires building a trustbox in the first place. This takes time, six month to a year, but done right you can put all your future web and blog sites in the trustbox.

All the building materials are mentioned above. The best order is:

Build your website using CSS with as few tables as possible.
Make sure all the pages on your site will validate using W3C Validator.
Set the meta tags and titles for each page specific to the content on the page. Don’t just have “Blah, Blah City Real Estate for all your real estate needs” at the top of every page.
Get a good hosting company providing you with complete access to your databases, 404 redirect, and htaccess file.
Create a robot text file once you have your hosting set up.
Get a Google account set up.
Verify your site with Google.
Upload a valid xml sitemap to your Google account.
Keep uploading a new sitemap file whenever you make additions to your site. I try and upload a new sitemap file at least once a week.
Track your Google Diagnostics. If Google can’t find a page or a link, fix it.
Add a blog if the site isn’t one, and create new content regularly.

OK, I threw in an extra one. Maybe I should have titled this section:
10 + 1 Steps to building a Google Trustbox.
When you add new sites, do the same as above. Google will know it is yours when you add it to your account and verify the site as yours. You will be amazed how quickly your new site will move up in the organic searches.

Trustbox Odds and Ends

open trustbox Buy your domains when you think of them, not when you need them. Keywords in the domain name itself is another way to help get organic rankings going quicker. I’ve owned some good domain names for more than a year before building sites for them. If you have hosting then create a directory and point the new domain to it. All you need is a single page with content and the things mentioned above for it to start getting some attention from Google. This isn’t a requirement. I’ve also bought names and created sites right away. But it can help get you PR building for the home page. If you have the trustbox built it won’t take long to be found.

The new blog Oro Valley Real Estate is an example of a site started in a Google Trustbox. I’ll be writing about the first three weeks of birth hopefully this week. It is a site born in the Google Trustbox I built with our first site Tucson Real Estate and Tucson Real Estate in The News.

Yep, a do it yourself plug and links. Build, Build Build.

Check Your Permalinks with Wordpress 2.1

By Dave Smith Wednesday February 7, 2007

UPDATE Here is a great plugin for changing your Permalink structure. It creates 301 redirects when you change the permalinks.

I’ve noticed lately that Google was showing a lot of missing URL and URL’s not found and HTTP errors.

I thought most of those were due to the change in domain names mentioned in other posts here.

Today I noticed that when I installed Wordpress 2.1 it set my custom permalinks back to default. This causes the search engines to get errors when looking for pages previously indexed.

If you have used any permalink structure besides the default structure and have upgraded to 2.1 you should check your permalinks structure.

Personally, I like the custom set up described in this Permalinks Post. If you chose carefully the names of your categories using keywords and use the custom setting of /%category%/%postname%/ you should recognize a boost in your search engine results.

I would also recommend you check your google account diagnostics summary page.

I catch a lot of things by looking at that page, unfortunately there have been too many changes lately to domain names and the Wordpress 2.1 upgrade.

Consolidating URL and A Little Help from Friends

By Dave Smith Friday February 2, 2007

technorati 100

The trials and travails of this little experiment have take their toll on sleep and other things in life the past couple of days. But in barely two month of existence. Lots of help from 2000 bloggers project and others linking here we broke the 100 barrier.

It does pay to keep track of these things. One way to know you have an issue:

If you start seeing links back from yourself. You have an issue.

I’m not going to miss this little experiment in the Lab. I certainly hope others will benefit from this little stinker of an exercise.