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.

1st letter...

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

2nd letter...

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

1st word...

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

2nd word...

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

Search phrase recognition

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!

]]> http://www.limeyboy.com/blog/2010/09/google-instant-hang-on-a-minute/feed/ 0 http://www.limeyboy.com/blog/2010/08/wordpress-related-posts/ http://www.limeyboy.com/blog/2010/08/wordpress-related-posts/#comments Mon, 23 Aug 2010 20:15:15 +0000 limeyboy http://www.limeyboy.com/blog/?p=442

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.

Wordpress related posts footer in action

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?

Fancy a slice?

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!

Does your website strategy compliment the recent changes to google's interface?

Google has updated their user interface this week, thats the bit you use, and a ton of stuff that you don’t see. You may have noticed a subtle change in the way it looks, (that always throws me, my first reaction is that i have some malware installed, which has redirected me to a scam site!).

Really, the update brings some of the features that were ‘snuck’ in last time to the fore.

Type in a search query and you get the same set of results in essentially the same format. This is google’s ‘everything’ set of data. What’s new is the left column.

At the top you have, ‘everything’, all normal so far. Below that, they have moved the Maps, Images, Videos, News, Blogs etc to a much more prominent position. This means that its going to be more likely that people are going to perform subsequent search variations, from their original entry search.

As a real estate agent, you should make sure that your online strategies try cover all of these bases. Make sure that your website and blogs are loaded with local images, town images, development images, videos of the above, (even quickies from your smart phone) and blog posts.

Below, the ‘everything’ navigation is another category, More Search Tools, this is where users can find the most up to date information posted to the web. You can sort your results by the time they were updated such as latest, past 24 hrs, past week, past month, past year. Latest may show your twitter tweets!

I’ll say it again, you have to be blogging!

To blog or not to blog...I think it's pretty clear, BLOG!

Still not blogging? Well, we’re not going to rest until you are. Are you blogging, but not really sure why?

Here’s yet another reason why it is such a good thing. It might get a little geeky here, but we’ll insulate you from the worst of it.

Ok, on a fundamental level websites and blogs are typically constructed using different frameworks. This is essentially because historically speaking they have been built of different purposes.

The Typical Website Model

Generally speaking websites, at worst, are rather like pretty fleshed out yellow pages ads. A series of pages who’s content seldom changes, (disclaimer: this is not the approach we approve of ), how many times does a Contact Us, or About Us page really have to change. So whenever a page changes or new pages are added, its wise to update your sitemap.

In short, a sitemap is a file that features all the links to pages on your website. When you have an updated site map, you notify the search engines that it’s updated and at some point they’ll pop over to take a look.

There is often a delay, of days if not weeks for search engines to come by and check out the changes. Frustratingly there’s not much that can be done to encourage them to by any sooner.

The Blog Model

Blogs are about being current, what’s happening now, or what’s just happened. Their MO is to get news out there.

The whole point of news is that it’s…that’s right, NEW.

When you write a new blog post and hit ‘publish’ something amazing (you might have to be a geek to use ‘amazing’ in this context) happens. Hitting publish, not only publishes your content to your blog but, importantly it sends out a ‘ping’ to the search engines to notify them that some news has just been reported.

Newness is what search engines crave.

By writing content on your blog you are giving search engines what they are looking for. Is it starting to become clear?

The Difference is Remarkable

Whereas it can be days if not weeks for search engines to find your new page on your website, you can get them to see (or index) your new blog post in minutes, which is frankly, astounding. Simply give search engines what they want and be rewarded.

See For Yourself

Click to enlarge

The blog post you are reading was published to the web at 9.15am this morning. It’s now 9.25am and google has already indexed or seen the post and this can only help our relevance in search results… That took 7 minutes.

Most Realtors call us to complain that they can’t be found at search engines. I think we both know what you can do to change that.

We can help you design and configure your real estate blog and coach you in your blog-craft.

Much like home ownership and the seemingly never ending list of projects, websites as well, are never really finished. There’s always another room to paint, something to tweak, or an addition to ponder.

Sure, at some point the initial build out of a website is completed but really that can just be the end of the beginning. Why, well search results are living, moving organism. There are always new sites coming along nipping at your toes.

This also makes your real estate website’s relative position within those results contextual.

What on earth does that mean? We’ll, the relevance of your website’s when matched against keywords typed into search engines is only part of the picture. Search engines also look at the other sites, and their respective contents to see where you site appears among them.

This means that things can change. Hopefully the changes are in the upward direction! Our feeling at limeyboy is to try and keep our agents ahead of these changes, rather than trying to respond to them after the fact.

One example of working with content to create improvement would be on Victor Dedvukaj’s site for Rye NY real estate. We were spending sometime doing our rounds of SEO, and saw that there was a trend of searches for waterfront homes.

We suggested to Victor that we cater for this demand on his website and now his site is on the first page of google for this niche market.

We at limeyboy are big BIG fans of the real estate agents we work with blogging. Why? Simple, search engines love them.

However we hear too often, and understand, that real estate agents simply don’t have the time to sit by their computer to write.

With a smart phone and a wordpress app installed you can now do it from anywhere. Like this is being done from my car now!

Real Estate Blogging Schedule.

Having been helping real estate agents with technology for the last 10 years, we know that if we suggest anything too time demanding it simply won’t get done. Actually this is something we are entirely in favor of. Your job is to sell real estate, not become a geek. That’s our job!

Therefore, our mantra to our blogging real estate agents is, write a little, and write often..

How little, look at this post. How long did it take. 5 minutes.

The simple answer is for their traffic driving power.

Facebook has passed search-engine giant Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN, and is among the leaders for other types of sites.
This trend is shifting the way Web site operators approach online marketing, even as Google takes steps to move into the social-media world.
Some experts say social media could become the Internet’s next search engine.

Astoundingly, Facebook not Google is the largest driver of traffic to major websites. This reminds us in a way of AOL, back in the early days of all this. AOL attempted to control the users online experience, from dialing up to the internet, (remember that?), to checking email, to surfing the web all within the AOL “experience”.

Stickiness.

Another great achievement of Facebook is the time people spend there. It has been said that currently people spend more time at Facebook than all other sites combined. This too is astounding.

If you have been putting this off today’s the day!

Facebook/Real Estate Action Plan

1. Get a facebook personal page.
2. Get a facebook business page. (Read our How to create a Facebook Business Page here).
3. Customize your Facebook business FBML. (Read See how a customized Facebook Business Page FBML looks here).
4. Get Leads