Real Estate Blog Lab

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Black Beetle

I think that was bad advise.  What is the difference.

Blogroll in the sidebar

When the blogroll is in the sidebar it shows up on every page and post on a blog.  If that blog has 100 blog posts and pages there will be 100 links out to each blog in the blogroll.  This also means that every time a new post is created a link back to the sites in your blogroll is created for each.  When a post achieves a PR in Google a part of that PR is passed to the blogs in your blogroll.

Google has stated that PR is no longer the heavy weight in deciding rankings in the organic.  It has also stated, and we all know, that the means by which PR is calculated is always changing.  We have all known for a long time that back links from quality sites has played a big part in PR.  We also know to a lesser degree the sites we link out to play a part in the PR rankings for our site.

I think in the past year the weight for links out to quality sites had increased in the part it plays in assessing PR for a site and the posts/pages on that site.

Blogroll on a page

When you move your blogroll to a single page there is a single link out to the blogs on that page.  When a blog moves their blogroll from the sidebar to a page the number of backlinks going out to the blogs drops from the number of pages and posts on the blog to ONE.

If you use the Google webmaster tools to check your external links back to your site and you have suddenly seen a large drop in the number of backlinks to you more than likely this is the reason.

If you link to that blog in the blogroll in your sidebar and your link has been moved to a single page. . . Do I have to explain what is happening here?

Anecdotal Observation

I have no absolute proof of this observation.  Absolute proof with Google is hard to come by.  However, I have noticed that some blogs which have moved their blogrolls to a single page have lost more PR and not regained it.  I know there are some exceptions to this, notably any blogs which have been in existence for three years or more.  Any blogs which have garnered national attentions and every new blogger wants those sites in their blogroll. These blogs don’t seem to be effected to the same degree.

Your Input and Observations Welcome

This is where I need more than anecdotal input.  Anyone out there with personal information about their own blog or blogs who want to share their experience please weigh in on the question.  I appreciate any input I can gain regarding blogrolls in the sidebar or on a single page.

Personally, I’ll continue to put my blogroll in my sidebars and giving backlinks to those blogs in that blogroll with every post I publish, including this one.

Post Tags: back links , blogroll , Google Webmaster Tools

Do you have testimonials on your real estate blog?  I know people like reading testimonials.  I personally like a good roast better, but that’s just me.  The question is how do you handle testimonials on your blog and not come off as egotistical.  It you have never thought of that, then you have bigger issues.

If you do post a testimonial it can look very much like you are tooting your own horn.

You risk becoming the group member honored for their humility with a Humility pin. Then have the group take away the award because you wore it.

How then do we get testimonials on our blogs and not come across as egotistical.

How to Handle Testimonials

• First get and install the Post Plugin Library.
• Next get and install the Random Posts Plugin.
• Activate the Post Library Plugin first then the Random Posts Plugin
• Create a Category for Testimonials
• Under Setting for Random Posts set the number of testimonials you want to randomly display a link to (5 is a good number)
• While still in settings select the “Filter” option.  Check include the Testimonials category.
• Go to Design, Widgets and add the Random Post Widget
• Position the widget where you want it on the page and Title it “Testimonials” (or something to that effect).

Options for Entering Testimonials

I personally don’t like testimonials showing up in my posts.  My suggestion; enter the testimonials and when you publish them do so with the date of the testimonial.  If it was written three months ago, then date it for that date.  This will publish the post, it will appear in your category and on the widget, but will be far enough back in our post stream it won’t show up on the front page of your blog.  And they won’t appear all grouped together by “salting” the dates throughout your blog.

If you get a new testimonial I would publish it with a date the goes beyond the posts that appear on your homepage.  Some of display 5 posts other 10, others even 50.  I display 5 post and would date any new testimonial to be back at least to the sixth post. Hint: Don’t title the testimonials “Testimonial One” “Testimonial 2″ etc.  Don’t title them “Why Jan and Doug Think I’m the Best”.  Get the idea.

Random Posts Plugin

There are lots of ways you can use this plugin, and it is very configurable.  The help and instruction from the setup page is filled with variations on how to implement this plugin on your blog.

I looked at several different options for handling testimonials.  This was the one I liked best.  A quick search on Wordpress Testimonial Plugins will reveal a few other options.

Post Tags: Humility Pin , random posts , testimonials

Are you tired of uploading video to YouTube that looks great on your screen but like CR@P when you embed it on your site? Want to change that? Here is how you do it. And it is simpler than you might think.

Add &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 to the end of the URL strings just inside the final Quote (”) for BOTH URL Strings in the embed code.

Low Res

Hi Res

What’s the Difference

I noticed the other day when viewing one of my latest YouTube uploads there was a “veiw high quality” link I hadn’t seen before.  It has been awhile since I uploaded anything to YouTube.  When I did the mouse over going back and forth between high quality and normal I saw it went from the YouTube server to Google video server for the High Res version.

A little further investigation and I found the code to place inside your embed code to get the same high res version.

YouTube Tip if you add &fmt=18 to the end of any YouTube URL (While on YouTube) it will play a High Res version of the video.  You can add this to a link if you are just sending the YouTube link to a friend and it will show them a higher res version than clicking on High Res will.  Caveat:  If the original video was uploaded in the small 320 X 240 resolution it won’t look good.

Youtube video has been a bane to me. I love the service but I hate viewing YouTube videos which look like I shot the image through a mosaic filter. From now on they don’t have to.

Yes, you can put a caption around an embeded video.

Post Tags: embed high res video , high res youtube video

PodCampAZ Day 2

I’ve never been involved with podcasting either audio or video. I bought a flip video about four months ago and even turned it on a couple of times. I made a short video of my Dad in the hospital so my little sister could see he wasn’t going to die. He didn’t. After that it sat on a shelf with no idea what to do with it. About two weeks ago I gave it to my son so he could make videos of the kids.

I’ve never had an ipod and the only apple related items in my house are golden delicious. I don’t listen to the radio except for NPR. The whole idea of podcasting has been one of a kid growing up and throwing dried up bean pods in the furrow to be plowed under. There you have it, my entire limited understanding of podcasting.

Yesterday was interesting as I attended my first podcampaz. It is like trying to put together a puzzle without a picture and all the pieces are on the table but the lights are out in the room. Picking up pieces and feeling them in the dark with no idea what you are feeling and have no idea how it fits in the picture of PodCasting.

For me it is an hour and a half drive up to Phoenix from Tucson. Obligations in Tucson, dinner at Zinburger, has me commuting each day to PodCampAZ.

I was up and on the road this morning by 6 am. well before the sun was up. As I got to Toltec the first McDonalds appeared on the horizon and the sun was just about to peek over the mountain top.

The day is filled with promise and I hope at some point some of the lights come on and at least an idea of what the picture looks like will begin to form some image or shape in my mind.

Post Tags: podcampaz , podcasting , Tucson , zinburger

Last month I wrote about  RSS Widgets under utilized.  One of the suggestions I had for quick, fresh content which could be updated daily was to create an RSS Feed using Twitter Hashtags.  The only thing I didn’t like about the idea was the hashtags showing up on every post to the feed.

Enter KB Advanced RSS Plugin

There is a lot you can do to tailor your RSS Feeds with this plugin.  The feature I like the most to compliment the idea above is the ability to trim characters from the feed.  For example if I tweet a hashtag “#FNRR showing a friend how to use hashtags”  The hashtag shows up at the start of the Feed, but using the KB Advanced RSS Plugin I can tell it to trim off those first 5 characters.  The result, I get just the tweet and new content on my blog.

There are a lot of different ways this idea could be used.  For example, I have a friend here in Tucson who performs weddings and holds receptions.  His blog is My Tucson Wedding.  The other day over lunch I suggested he could have a big screen projection set up to display an RSS Feed so messages could be displayed to the couple on screen from the people at the reception using Twitter and hashtags.

I like the idea of using hashtag tweets for quick notes and updates of information pertaining to a particular blog.  I currently have three RSS Widgets set up to display hashtag feeds from Twitter on various blogs.

If you want to take more control over your RSS Feeds showing up on your blog I suggest you check out the KB Advanced RSS Plugin.

Post Tags: hashtags , KB Advanced RSS Plugin , rss-feed , Twitter

More and more people are using mobile devices to search then net.  Providing a way to have our blogs rendered on mobile devices is something all real estate bloggers should be doing.  The MobilePress plugin is one way to address this NOW.

Blog Lab Using Mobile Press On Blackberry

It has been a couple of months since I started using a Blackberry Curve as my phone and messaging base.  I’ve made a few small changes to my blogs to help them render on mobile devices better.  But the navigation is still difficult and the sidebars are always moved to the bottom of the main content section.

This week I installed the MobilePress plugin here at the Lab and on the Tucson Real Estate blog and checked the sites from the blackberry browser.

Both blogs load quicker and are easy to navigate from the mobile press display of both blogs.

There are a couple of options you can set the display for various mobile devices and there are themes available as well as the ability to develop and design new themes for the mobile press plugin.  If you want you can even set the blog to display using this plugin theme for all browsers.  This is something I did to see how it would render and when I turned it off, it didn’t.  I tried a refresh but that didn’t seem to work either.  I deactivated the plugin and reactivated it.  That was all it took to restore the Lab to regular theme view on a computer and mobilepress theme from a mobile device.

I like this little plugin and as new themes are develeped and released it could be an even better tool in our arsonal to address the increasing number of mobile browsers being used to view our blogs.

Post Tags: blackberry curve , mobile devices , mobile press

Bounce Rate is usually considered something we can do little about directly.  But there is a plugin which might slow your bounce rate and keep readers on your site longer.

Landing Site Plugin for Slower Bounce Rate

We have all done a search on a term and found the results to be less than on target.  Sometimes instead of the information we are looking for we get sent to the home page of the site.  Nothing on that page has anything to do with what we are looking for.  If there is a search box we might try and search for our specific term to see if we can find what is there and why it was in our search results.

But how many users even know they can use a search box to refine there search. Plus there are a lot of blogs out there that don’t even have a search box on them.  This is where the Landing Site Plugin comes into play.

Landing Site Plugin

I’ve only just activated this plugin and run it through a couple of test searches to see how it works.  It wasn’t working.

Before I gave up and turned it off I went back to the plugin page in wordpress and looked around some more for details since I didn’t see any setup information directly related to the plugin or options panel for configuring the plugin.

Under the FAQ tab, not a good place to put this information, it was noted you had to add a code snippet to the index.php of your theme in order for the plugin to work.

<?php if (ls_getinfo('isref')) : ?>
   <h2><?php ls_getinfo('terms'); ?></h2>
   <p>You came here from <?php ls_getinfo('referrer'); ?> searching for <i><?php ls_getinfo('terms'); ?></i>. These posts might be of interest:</p>
   <ul>
     <?php ls_related(5, 10, '<li>', '</li>', '', '', false, false); ?>
   </ul>
<?php endif; ?>

Once I found this code and added it to the index.php file it was time to take it for another test spin.

If the search result is returning the pertinent post nothing happens.  It took several tries before I found a search result that triggered the plugin.

Tucson AZ food festival 2008 was the one that showed what a great plugin Landing Site is for keeping visitors on site and finding what they are looking for specifically.

Because of the the nature of data centers and changing results from Google searches you probably can’t reproduce the search by the time you are reading this, but here is what the site displayed directly under the title of the current post:

tucson az food festival 2008

You came here from www.google.com searching for tucson az food festival 2008. These posts might be of interest:

• Tucson Culinary Festival October 23 - 26, 2008
• Tucson Celtic Festival & Scottish Highland Games
• Sun Sounds of Arizona Fundraiser
• Things to Do in Tucson October 10 - 12 2008
• Tucson Ironwood Trees in Bloom

These are the five posts that come the closest to matching the search query. It is like having the search box built in and activated when the referring site lands on the home page and the search terms aren’t directly related to the results on your site.

For the little trouble to put the code in your index.php you can have the peace of mind that finally visitors have a really good chance of finding what brought them to your site in the frist place.

Post Tags: Bounce Rate , landing site

I took two of my blogs and merged them into one.  Tucson Real Estate In the News merged with Tucson Real Estate to form a single entity.  The story of the process is documented in Combining Two Blogs in to One A Geeks Holiday Weekend.

I’m not sure when or who but there was a comment asking me to get back on the results of combining these two into a single entity.  Some have asked me if I would do it again.  Here is an update on how it is going and where we are at 55 days later.

Deindexing Reindexing Three Minutes of Radio Silence

Remember the movie Apollo 13.  There was the three minute blackout period during reentry when there was no communication with the capsule and everyone was on pins and needles till the blackout period was over and communications reestablished.  I wish it only took 3 minutes.

This is what it is like to merge two of your blogs into a single entity.  Over 300 post on the News Blog, all indexed in Google had to be moved and reindexed to show up at the new site.

It wasn’t easy watching my traffic drop for both blogs to almost non existent during those early weeks of the merger.  Yes there was a redirect 301 in place, but it didn’t eliminate the confusion Google had with the merger.  Google suddenly saw more than 300 pages of content on the one blog’s sitemap.xml file and 300 fewer pages on the other one.  I thought the sitemap submitted to Google would be the key to Google quickly grasping what was going on.  It did turn out to be the key but not the way I thought it would.

Enter a conversation with Eric Blackwell

Eric and I had a catchup conference call one day to talk about the state of the RENet and RE-Blogosphere.  It was during that conversation I mentioned to Eric the frustration I was having over getting my combined sites pages to be indexed.  It wasn’t just the new pages that were effected by the merger, the existing pages were being deindexed as well.  I had over 300 pages indexed on the one and almost 200 pages indexed on the other.  A week after the merger I had a combined 101 pages indexed.  I was adding new content daily and submitting the sitemap by hand as well as hand pinging.  Nothing helped.  This is when Eric suggested I turn into the slide.

Huh?  You know how counter intuitive it seems when your car is skidding on ice to turn into the slide and not away from it.  That is what happend with the merger of the two blogs

Delete The Sitemap

Eric said, “Delete your sitemap.xml file submitted to Google and make the bots crawl the pages themselves”  I’ll tell you that was one solution that never crossed my mind nor would it have.  But I trust Eric to know what he is talking about (I also felt l didn’t have anything to loose at this point  : )

I deleted the sitemap.xml and within 24 hours I had 300 pages indexed.  It continued to climb.  Without me guiding the bots and Google with the sitemap they started crawling and finding lots of content to index.  It climbed to 1200 pages then to 1460, to 1600 and is currently 1820 pages indexed.

The bots on their own started indexing tags as well as categories, achive pages, pdf files.  Name it if it could be seen as a page the bots were indexing it.

Traffic Increased

The Hittail traffic for the combined site gradually picked up.  It is now more than what the two sites were before.

I ran random searches for main posts I knew were indexed on the old site to see if they were coming up under the old URL or the new.  Two weeks after deleting the sitemap it appeared all the posts were reindexed under the new site.  (I was having a similar issue with another blog of mine from errors being generated in the sitemap.xml by the Google sitemap plugin.  There was an error in the code (since fixed) wihch left the category out of the post URL on a blog using a custom permalink structure.

Moving UP in the Organics

The combined site is now moving up in the organics.  It is #1 for quite a few targeted keywords from the News blog merged into the TAZ blog.  The move for the most desired keywords has been gradual.  It is hard to compete for some of these especially when there are long standing sites already in those positions.  (Some have age on their side, some have deceptive practices, some both)  Not easy to make a move on a search term with real estate in it, unless it is a long tail term.

It has only been a couple of weeks since getting the sitemap deleted and the majority of pages indexed.  I hope to get a bigger boost in the organics in less than a month.

Would I do it over again?

Yes I would.  It is easier to manage a single site.  But there has been a diluting of the message of the news blog and integrating the content changes to “Voice” of both.  It will take a little while for it to find a combined audience.  I keep tweaking the content and sidebars to provide a good experience for both sets of readers and those finding the blog through search engines.

Continuing to add quality content is one of the most significant things you can do to increase both readership and lines in the water for those searching for information you provide about your community and market.

There is no substitute for good planning and layout of your blog.  But, there are few bloggers that have the knowledge and experience to “get it right” from the beginning.  It is great to know that it is possible and profitable to take two existing blogs and merge them into a single entity.

Post Tags: combining two blogs into one , Organic search results , tucson-real-estate

Graphics are the little touches that make your theme special

Graphics is another place you can really change the look and feel of a blog theme. In case you didn’t know you can replace or tweak those graphics used to trim out a theme. Closely associated with the style.php are the images for the theme. Here to is where you can work some magic to make the theme your own. I often change the images associated with things like buttons, blockquotes, RSS, Dividers, (sidebars, body, header, footer, etc.). The images are stored in a directory inside the theme folder; usually img or images.

Theme graphics can be changed

This is probably the first real directory I open once I download and unzip a theme. I can learn a lot about a blog by looking at the image folder contents.

I will often make a screen shot of this folder opened so I can see the images and their file names. This does two things for me:

1. When I’m reading through the CSS Stylesheet I can see what images are being used where which helps me get a better mental image of what is going on in the theme.
2. I make a list of the ones I want to keep, the ones I want to delete and create my own, the ones I want to modify just a bit.

Then while going through the style.php learning the layout in CSS I make note of those image files and where they are called in the formatting of the blog.  You can make some small changes and additions to these graphic files creating some dramatic changes in the look of your blog.  It is a quick and fairly easy way to customize the theme to your personal taste.

Adding a Header Image

If I’m going to be adding a header image to the theme and one doesn’t exist I’ll put it here or install the rotating image header plugin.

If you are adding a header image to a theme that has one, it is pretty easy to replace if you keep the same dimensions as the one originally with the theme.

As you get more comfortable with CSS Style sheets you will find it easy to add a header image to any theme and even change the size of the theme width to accomodate your image.

Here there is a fine line to be walked.  I’ll cover Header Images in a separate post.

Post Tags: Add new tag , background images , graphic files , image header , theme background , theme image files

A Blog Lab Nugget

You think you have a catchy title for your blog post; keyword rich and sure to be indexed in the first 20 minutes after you publish it.  It is a killer post and a killer title.  You proof read it, honed the sentence structure (Okay I’m kidding).  But here is one more thing you can and should do to make sure your great title doesn’t get lost at sea in the Google Universe.

Do A Google Search For Your Title

Wall Street a Shadow of Itself

Do a Google search on the title and see what comes up.  You might be amazed at what other things might already be indexed with your “Catchy Keyword Rich” Title.

See that image to the right.  It was inspired by the shadow being cast on the paper while I was sitting in a waiting room.  I was waiting.  When I got back home and processed the image.  I could see words peeking out around the shadow about the Wall Street meltdown.  LOL that means it could have been from any day this past week.  I thought a catchy title would be Wall Street A Shadow of Itself.  Short and sweet with a few words and up it went.

I published the post and when I got word from my Google Alert the post had been indexed I did a search on the title of the post.  It turns out 60 Minutes had a story with the phrase Wall Street’s Shadow Market.  There were two pages of organic results with those three words prominent in the results.

I’ve had this happen before.  I thought I had a great title, good post, nice picture to draw the eye and hold the reader, only to find my post would never be returned in the organic results because of the frequency of some of those keywords.

Run a Google search on your catchy title.  If there isn’t anything like it coming up in the results you should rank quickly for those keywords.  If you are going to be buried on page 5.  Try another title till you find one you think will get you on page 1, preferably #1 on Page 1 of Google organic search results.

Sometimes someone else already thought of your Catchy Title.

Post Tags: google search , keyword rich title