Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

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!

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

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.