Archive for the ‘SEO, Google & real estate’ Category

We are giving away $1,000 of free advertising at google courtesy of our friends at google adwords!*

Ever thought about giving pay per click advertising a go, (you know those adds at the top and on right of google search results window). Well, today you can give it a try with $100 to play with. We are giving away 10 google adwords gift cards.

All you need to do is hit like at facebook or share this by the link below and let us know your mailing address here! The cards will go out to the first 10 we hear from!

*These coupons can only be used for new google adwords accounts

 

Today google announced that it is to abandon its support for ‘older browsers’. Google are saying that if you are using IE6 to access: gmail, google docs, calendar, sites etc, you’ll start to loose some functions within them from August 1st.

How many people will this affect? Statcounter think about 17% of google’s current users will be affected by this.

Why are google doing this?

In May 2006, PC World rated IE 6 the eighth worst tech product of all time. However, at the time with 90% of the browser market its probably true to say that there was a fair amount of complacency  at Microsoft. This is demonstrated by the face that it took them 5 years to come up with its replacement IE7!

The fundamental problem with IE6 is that it did not fully support CSS or cascading style sheets.

Style sheets are a set of rules that dictate how your website appears on the browser. It controls things such as the position of all the sites elements, the typeface, the size and color of fonts, the roll over effects when your mouse hovers over a link etc. CSS is really the DNA of your website. When you have browser that doesn’t support them it leads to problems.

As a web designer, you are forced to essentially build one style sheet for all browsers IE7 & beyond, and one for IE6 which is essentially a series of hacks and work arounds to make your site behave correctly for those still using IE6. This was a major disservice from Microsoft to omit support for the most basic web design parameters.

Microsoft has also tried to get users to update to newer versions of IE, to some extent, but news that google is essentially going to start forcing their users to migrate to newer plaforms is only a good thing. IE6 has been broken for a long time, we’ll not miss it.

Download the latest version of Internet Explorer here*

Download the latest version of Firefox here*

Download google Chrome here*

*Uploading any software to your computer can exacerbate any existing problems or issues with your machine. We can take no responsibility to anything that happens to your computer during the installation of this software.

 

Want more love for your wordpress blog? One way to get your lovely posts more eyeballs is to make sure you are notifying as many ‘services’ that your blog has been updated.

It’s true that your wordpress blog already pings search engines when you post, but it doesnt hurt to make sure, and to ping more.

WordPress SEO

Click Settings from the left menu, and then click, Writing:

In the Writing page, scroll down to Update Services, you’ll notice that pingomatic is already there. However you can notify way more than the pingomatic services.

Click the Update Services link.

This will bring you to a WordPress.org page:

Scroll down to the bottom of this page where you will see a list titled: XML-RPC Ping Services

Highlight and copy that list. The paste it into your Update Services list on your Writing page, in Settings.

Click Save Changes to and you are all set.

**Check out our NEW  Wordpress Real Estate theme here!**

limeyboy.com helps real estate agents get more from the web! How can we help you?

(This is a post we meant to write a few months ago. )

.CO is a new domain name suffix. And it’s a good one, it may become a great one. There are many countries that use .co to denote business online. .co.uk for example is used in the UK for business websites.

We are not sure how readily .co’s will be used. Many are just being snapped up to add to the list of other ending versions people may already have, .net, .info etc . In those instances they may not ever really be used, choosing instead to promote their .com. However with any new suffix, the potential for new sites being built using them increases.

In those cases, the question really is, will it be regarded in a better light than .net, which has always been the poor cousin of .com

If your .com had gone, .net was the next best thing, or least worse, which of course is .biz

Today .com still holds top spot, but in 5 years who knows…

It may be that .co becomes widely used and adopted. If that’s the case you might want to pop along to your domain registrar and pick up the .co version of your domain names before your competition or a speculator does!

Buy the .co version of your domain today!!!

So we’ve transitioned to the google cloud. It’s something we have been mulling over for a while…and trying to figure it out !

You see what we’ve done isn’t simply got a gmail account & then started using google docs for:

• presentations
• word type docs
• excel type docs

We’ve actually moved our domain to their control.

Why? Well for a number of reasons. One of the main was because we wanted the benefit of cloud computing but didn’t want an @gmail address to be our main company email domain.

We want our @limeyboy.com suffix for our email. This means that when we send an email from our google apps gmail account (confused yet?) it actually comes from our @limeyboy.com domain. We are essentially signed into gmail and they are co-opting our domain to send our email for us.

Where To Sign Up For Google Apps

This has to be done by signing up here There is a fair amount of geeky stuff that has to be done, like changing the MX record (now there’s a joy) of your email accounts to point to google email servers. Ok so hat part wasn’t much fun, and I think this is probably where most people give up and figure that the option of the gmail.com suffix is the lesser of two choices.

The Advantages of Using Google Apps For Real Estate Agents & Teams

So what’s the upside of all of this? Why go through this?

For us it’s all about collaboration. The dream of microsoft and Bill Gates, was a PC in every home, on every desk. That happened. The problem is that all this local storage of files and programs has become really annoying if we need access to them when we are not there. We can link desktop to desktop in a network but normally this is local too. If two people are working on a project files go back and forth like a tennis ball, from one local machine to another. What google apps allow us to do, is to position the files at the center of that collaboration where both can access them.

As an account administrator of my limeyboy.com domain at google Apps, I can create an account for my team members. For each team member I can:

• create a new email account and assign privileges to each account
• have their own set of google docs which are sharable among team members, and they can see the ones others have shared
• create their own calendar and also see shared company calendars

Team members can create shared folders. For each client we have a shared folder to place documents  team members have created or received.

It makes team work, work.

The real beauty is that all of this is available anytime from anywhere. Waiting for a client at Starbucks…you can access your entire office documents, programs, calender and email from one place.

Google has recently made some great improvements to the little things that were annoying in earlier versions. Up until recently for the google business apps user there wasn’t the option to create an email signature…crazy.

The google docs have also be come much more robust tools. Graphically speaking there have been some huge improvements to the aesthetic quality of their documents which no longer feel like the weak relative of their desktop cousins.

We’ve also transitioned from our trusty dedicated fax line to efax. As annoying as the $17/month fee is, it’s much better than the $40/month our local telephone company was charging us for a fax line. We also have the advantage of the faxed coming into our email inbox which can in turn be stored in the shared client file.

Google also handle our office phones through google voice too!

So what does all of this cost? $50/year/user account. Which I think is nothing for the benefits it offers our company..although it’s a wee bit annoying to still get the ads!

Well it seems another day another google tweak. Is is me or is google stirring the pot more frequently these days, maybe I am just getting older/slower and the world is getting faster?

Google instant is had added preemption to search. Philosophically it feels a little odd, as you begin to type letters into the search box, suggestions pop up, that’s right starting from the first letter. (It’s true that google weren’t the first to do this). What’s odd about the experience is that as it’s so fast to anticipate what you are about to type in a fair amount of tangential chaos ensues.

Paradoxically, in the process of instantly suggesting what google thinks you are searching for, it’s really easy to get side tracked by the suggested sites.

Say for example you want to search real estate in Morris Plains, this is what happens now.

As soon as you type in “m” for morris the google splash page swaps to the search results page.

Formerly you would type your entire keyword phrase into the search box and hit the button marked”google search” to be taken to the results page.

This button has really become redundant now, the first letter being typed initiates the change to the search interface.

Funnily enough when I was thinking about Google Instant, I was wondering how they were going to get you to see their ads, if the instant results were to be displayed on the ad-less google homepage. I guess they figured that one out pretty quick!

So typing the first letter does a couple of things, it swaps the pages from the ad-less homepage to the ad laden results page, and also start to anticipate what you are searching for.

Hmm, I am searching for Morris Plains real estate, but it thinks I want mapquest…

Ok, the second letter, and google thinks that I want to look at Moma…

Adding the next of letters brings up some Morris options…getting there…

As we move to the final phrase I was initially searching for, it anticipates pretty well…

Though not totally new as a concept, google does feel responsive and refresh. However, what I am not convinced about is if this is going to same me much time, because I could have easily visited the Moma site, typing in “A” brings me to amazon, “E” to ebay…I don’t need more distractions! Perhaps when the novelty has worn off it will, in the long run save a few seconds here and there, and over our net lifetime that might be useful.

Serge Brin, one half of google’s founders said that he wants google to be the third part of your brain, for now, the anticipatory tangental nature of the suggestions feels more like my grandmother rattling through every name she can think of before she gets to actual one of the great grand daughter front of her!

Add a related posts section to the bottom of your articles

Here’s a good plug in for your real estate wordpress site. As you know, everything you post in your blog is categorized, it doesn’t have to be, you could always leave that section alone…what’s wrong with “Uncategorized’?

So, you have categories of posts, and you can view them all by category, but wouldn’t it be really nice to be able to see that list of ther ‘in-category’ posts at the bottom of each article? Right?

WordPress Related Posts

This is where the WordPress Related Posts plug-in comes in very handy. It’s does all the linking for you and places these related posts beneath your article. Easy and quick, and all done for you.

This may also help with the SEO of your blog posts!

Found this useful? retweet it?

Ok, so first off. What is google analytics? Remember a website stats counter? That small line text on the bottom of webpages showing you how many visitors your site has had? Well it’s like that,…but on steroids!

Google analytics offers you an invaluable insight into your website’s performance. For example, when you send out a mailer, you can count the number of calls you get on your phone. But did it bring any more visitors to your website?

Which are your most popular pages on your website? Which are the least popular?
Which pages are the most common entrances to your site, which pages are the most common exit pages. Can you improve those?
Do you get more hits on your site from a postcard than a local newspaper ad?
Where did your visitors come from?
What keywords did they type in to find your site?

Google analytics answers these questions for you, and more.

Real estate website as a tool for your business

By tracking and analyzing this information, your website becomes a tool for understanding the effectiveness of your offline and online strategies.

If you can measure where and when you leads arrive you can begin to figure out where best your marketing $$$ are being spent. Say for example you were thinking about doing a series of offline marketing pieces. You where going to a regular postcard mailer, and an ad in a newspaper. By staggering the launch of each campaign, say by two weeks, and following the spike, or not, of hit on your site, you can compare the effectiveness of both methods.

Where are your are you visitors coming from?

Google analytics has this really nice pie chart that shows where visitors to your real estate website came from. They are all grouped into 3 categories: direct, referral, search engines.

Direct hits: these people came to your site by typing in it’s full domain into a browser. We can assume that they probably received an offline marketing piece, a post card, a mailer, a market update flier, a business card.
Referrals: these show the which websites feature a link to your website. These maybe self generated from your blogging, facebook, twitter account etc. Ideally they would be from other sites that link to you and your real estate website because they think you are fabulous!
Search engines: these show which hits came from search engines.

Ideally we like to see an even distribution between these 3 main sources.

Look out for the up coming “HOW TO…” on setting up analytics on your website.

So, you’ve waxed lyrical, you have created, another, informative, succinct, original blog post. You hit publish, and you can see it, live, online. Feels good huh.

So what’s next, sit back and await the comments? What if you could encourage more search engines to come and take a look too, rather than simply waiting for them to come by.

Though, it’s certainly true that your blog may well be already pinging, or notifying search engines of your latest post when you hit publish, you can be proactive about it also.

Here’s how, visit http://pingomatic.com/

There you can ping multiple search engines that your blog has been updated. Here’s how you do it…as usual in just a few clicks.

Goto http://pingomatic.com/, you’ll see this page:

Type in your blog name, your blog’s home page, and your blog’s feed address, (normally your blog address followed by /feed

Then simple hit ‘check all’ to check all the blogs you want to ping:

Hit, send pings.

Ok, so now you are done!

It seems as though your linked-in profile is starting to gain better traction at the major search engines…which, lets face it, means google.

We have always thought that it makes sense to have a linked-in presence, primarily because it gives a perceived level of legitimacy for testimonials. We very much like their ‘recommendations’ section for this. Occasionally we are presented with scans of handwritten testimonials by agents wishing this to be on their website. This image file is very cumbersome for the viewer and has zero value from a search engine’s perspective as its an illegible image to them.

However, ask your customers if they would be happy ‘recommending‘ you through Linked-In. This also has the benefit of someone else providing you content for you, which is always a good thing.

Up until now, the best case is that google would pick up your Linked-In account for someone searching for you. The good news is that with a few tricks you can also start to optimize your content to enable your Linked-In page to start showing up for real estate niche keywords.

Here’s how to do it in 5 easy steps.

Before you begin, think of one or two keywords that sum up your niche. Just as with your website, focus on being narrow, rather than broad. Remember you are not a Broker. You are a single agent. So for example: pick one town name and a style of home, eg. “Princeton Townhouses”. With that settled simply do the following, add your keywords in a natural sentence to the following 5 places:

1. Headline
2. Current Work
3. Past Work
4. Your Summary
5. Your Specialty

Let us know how you get on!