Real Estate Marketing Blog

How You Link Matters to Google

We already know that links to your website help get your page ranked in Google right?

The value of that link is measured by at least the following:

• Page Rank-This used to be the be all to end all of getting high  in the SERPS. It is not as important anymore as it once was. I still think it does carry weight, but it is nearly impossible to measure it. If you use that green bar in the Google Browser tool bar it is a lie. So turn it off it is a worthless measure.

• Reputation/Anchor Text-The words in the link matter. Click here is worthless. Use a targeted keyword in the anchor text of the link coming at your page. This creates a reputation for that page. This is what a keyword link would look like.

• Age-The age of the page where the link to your site resides helps lots.

There are others minutia that can help and is worth getting if you can. If you can get the title, h tag, and words to match up to the targeted keyword on the page that links to you this can help your link be more relevant. 

Related SEO Posts:

• On Link Exchanges

• How Many Back Links Do You Have?

• "Yahoo!?... Where R U?"

• Do Links Even Matter Anymore?

• A Confession

• Page Rank Update & What It Means to You

• Will You Link Bait For Me?

• Page Rank is Dead

How to screw up your linking: How You Link, Matters to Google ii

Part 2 from How You Link Matters to Google

 Did you know that you might be diluting your link?  

In this post we will discuss two way to totally dilute your linking efforts.

I. Reputation/Anchor text: We can use our exact targeted keyword in our links, but that may get somewhat redundant and unnatural looking to Google. So by varying the link text to your page (Google ranks pages not sites), you can stay more natural.

II. Deep linking: On that natural theme, does a site really only get links to its index page (home page)? Or would a site get links to a number of internal pages? Well so long as those pages are worthy of a link (meaning it has decent content) it most certainly would get links.

III URL Dilution / Canonical url:www.url.com,http://url.com,http://url.com/index.htm are technically all different websites, even though to us the viewer they are the same.Thus if you spread the links evenly amongst all three of the above you would be diluting your link juice. So pick one and try to link that way.

For instance I like to keep it a rule that we link to the www.url.com version. However, if you have a site like birdview all their urls are so: http://url.com/index.htm,so you would link to that version. Same with internal links. Keep your internal links consistent. In this Case my favorite version would be http://www.url.com/internalpage.htm.

For you folks who can get at your server level you can get your site to 301 redirect all your page variations to the version you want. So Google, Yahoo and Bing would see your versions as just one.

You can also use a new tag that Google, Yahoo, and Bing say that they support. The tag goes in your header section of your html on your page of your site. It would look like this:

REL="CANONICAL" href="http://www.url.com/page">

However, based on the track record of engines supporting a tag, then not, I would take the aforementioned linking advice very seriously.

Related SEO Posts:

• Coloring Your Google Bar Green

• The Secret to More Traffic and Leads?

• Hotbot

• SEO Myths

• If it Ain't Making Leads, Then its Just an Expensive Brochure

Your Long Road From Google to Escrow

Majoring in Minors

• Your Search engine ranking positions are always what might be.
• Your server logs/analytics are what are who might be interested.
• Your lead counts are who would like to get to know you better.
• Your Signed Contracts are only a potential sale.
• Only a closed escrow puts food on the table.

So often the online webmaster community is taught to look at each of these as one singular event. Without acknowledgment of the larger picture. And of course each of the above bullets represents a whole body of disciplines. We are taught to obsess over small singular actions such that our online marketing is nothing but a series of short lived, poorly executed tactical executions.

Some major minors:

Search Engine Positions: Search positions are nice. But a top position and fifty cents will only get you a cup of coffee (well maybe in 1976, I just paid $1.75 for a large at Mickie D's yesterday). A position is only implied traffic.  Folks worry about 1 ranking phrase while my clients and I rank for hundreds. Folks worry about keyword density or proximity. They matter, but not much.

Server Analytics: Look at your visitors. Who are they? How many of them are there? Well analytics do not give names, but they give numbers and behaviors based on keywords. So if you are majoring in just one keyword phrase (everyone loves to major in "city + real estate" ) phrase look at your server logs. You will find you can attract a much larger audience by considering your keywords that people use to find you.

Lead Counts: Conversion. Think of the "tootsie roll pop" ratio. This is where you get into visitor values. How many visitors do you need to get to a lead? If a visitor is worth $20. Then, theoretically you can spend up to $19.99 to get that visitor as a client. But you will not know that unless you track.

The above are what lead to sales and closed deals. Within each are mountains of knowledge bases that can easily waste a lifetime.

However, when you start with the end in mind. That is your business plan calls out for x amount of sales, and y generated online balanced by your own values and objectives. Then you have a start. A target.

Instead, so often we live with the delusion that if "I just rank number one for Happyville Real Estate, then I will reach Nirvana."

Did You Forget Why You Came to The Dance?

So often I hear that I blog to give my visitors great information to enrich their lives or at least online experience. BULLSHIT!  You are there to make money. And the sooner you admit that the sooner you will make it. Otherwise stop writing it off as an expense as it isn't a business it is a hobby.

But learning this stuff can be fun and exhilarating. I get that. But you have to stay on focus or the web and vendors will steal your most precious selling time.

The web requires you to grasp the big picture or you will get lost. Not only your time will get wilted away but also your money. In order, to succeed on line you must develop a strategy first before jumping into the next big thing.

At http://www.realestateguerilla.com is an exclusive Coaching club where we will work with you on your top down success strategy. Or if you would prefer a private consult, contact Tim O'Keefe today. 310 533 9145. He consults at $500 an hour/minimum 2 hours.

->related blog post:
Are you trying to hit a home run with your prospects without even asking them out on a date?

How to Ring Googles Bells

Blog and Ping. It is what the blogging myth was built upon. There was a day prior to 2004 that one could post a blog every 5 minutes and ping a number of web services and they would get almost instant Google love. The blog would get indexed along with tons of duplicate content (post page, archives, permalinks, etc) .

The madness had to end as SEO's pressed posts thru automation machines that spewed out utter junk just to get some juice. Well actually lots of juice. Then the hammer fell as these ping services would not play along anymore and the engines got smart enough to not respect the blog and ping thing.It still works but not as dramatically, and more reasonably. Meaning if you post like two or three times a day they will trust you more than if you "sping" every 5 minutes.

So what is it specifically? and why does it matter today?

When you post a blog you can list ping services into your blog set-up and your blog software will do the rest.

This picture below is actually this post and how I set up the ping services in TypePad. This screen is my editing screen for this very post.

On Link Exchanges

One way to look at a link out of your site is to look at the value that you are receiving in return for your valuable link to them. The value may be direct or indirect as traffic or link juice (page rank), or indirect which is perception . Which I guess at best is an  endorsement type link say from an authority like the front page of a CNN news story.

The two are theoretically supposed to be one in the same but it often does not always work that way.

The most important aspect of a link is by far the traffic or link juice which helps to build the "worthiness" of your site for ranking in the eyes of the engines.

Why I do not like link exchanges:
1. It uglifies your site.
2. Algorithmically it has drastic diminishing returns when you stop trading.Almost rendering  months of work, worthless.
3. A link out is a leak of page rank. So it had better be a tremendous site that you link to. You will still bleed juice but perhaps the resource is worth it (I hardly ever find this to be true)
4. The chance of getting traffic from the other sites page which is usually buried and not of much interest to their visitors is extremely low.
5. It is very hard to monitor for cheaters. It is very easy to game you. No follow links & java script links look real to the human but do not pass any juice to your site.
6.When you are actively building your own 1 way inbound link juice, any links out are sure to help your partner more than you.

This is not to say I don't do exchanges but you will have to joining the http://realestateguerilla.com/  online coaching club to find out when I find it worthwhile. Notice that I did not mention that Google will penalize you for an exchange. That is an urban myth and I have seen too many sites rank well that still trade links.

How Many Back Links Do You Have?

Ever wonder how to figure out how many backlinks you have? It is not as easy as you may think because none of the engines actually will list them all. However, the best tool currently is Yahoo.

The No Follow and Linking

How important is link scultpting? Apparently the LA Times thinks so. Notice all the red marks on their internal links? These have the rel="nofollow" attribute.

What is the nofollow attribute? It was originally a plan from Google and the other engines to stop comment spam. Simply use the attribute in your blogs comments and the links are rendered worthless. Technically you place the attribute in your link html as so: a href="http://www.url.com/" rel="nofollow">anchor text </a

It was not too long before us SEO's figured out that this was a quick and dirty way to do what Leslie Rohde taught me years ago in his book Dynamic Linking. This technique was extremely complicated for most as it employed javascript links that were not able to be followed by Google.

Now with the nofollow attribute the same can be accomplished without the hassel of javascript. To see if a site is running nofollow on its links simply install the firefox plugin called Search Status.

"Yahoo!?... Where R U?"

For a few years now, looking at backlinks thru Google using the link:http://www.url.com query was all but a waste of time. Much like putting any credence into the Google Page Rank bar.

So thank goodness for Yahoo. And in fact, they put together a nice little tool over there called Yahoo Search. But alas a recent post has confirmed my own suspicions. The tool ain't all its cracked up to be.

It is in fact a bit inconsistent and as this post points out just plain wrong at times.

Yahoo site Explorer shows the following stats for my blog site.

Indexed Pages: 3,673
Crawled Pages: 580
Known Pages: 3,673
Hosts linking to Site: 153

On click of the Indexed Pages link it shows me only ONE page indexed.

I use to have 220+ backlinks and 631 indexed pages till May 16th 08 and then it dropped to 0 the next week onwards.

Currently it shows 800+ backlinks and ONLY 1 indexed page whereas my blog contains 2370 pages till date.

This brings me to a couple points I would like to make:

1. These free tools are just that, and as such are only as good as the data that is feeding them.

2. Remember these engines have zero incentive to help us to figure out their positions. So do not be at all surprised when this tool goes away or becomes useless lke Google's green bar or link query.

   

Yahoo search allows you to check how many pages of your site are indexed in Yahoo. (see pages).  It alos allows you to discover how many links you have coming to your site or just on epage. It also will allow you to not count your own links from your own site. Additionally, you can download the report as a  TSV.

The Wizard Behind Googles Curtain

A story in the Register portends to expose Google's willingness to manipulate its own Algo generated results with people generated editorial.

..technology utopians began to herald Google as the conduit for a new form of democracy. Google was only too pleased to encourage this view. It explained that its algorithm "relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. "

For now that data is not being used to change overall search results, she said. But in the future it’s likely Google will use the data to at least make obvious changes. An example is if “thousands of people” were to knock a search result off a search page, they’d be likely to make a change.

But this is not anything new. Google has always used its human power to correct huge mistakes in its algo. However, it has also always preferred to see manipulations and tricks as algo errors and something that needed to be fixed not by its people but by its algorithm.

More interesting however, is the shift of journalistic power from the papers to Google as reporters follow Googles lead instead of leading the news:

...it's becoming all too clear at The Telegraph, whose online business plan seems to be centered on chasing hits through Google by rehashing and rewriting stories that people are already interested in.

So who is creating the news then? The Register says in the end it could be Google leading to a very Orwellian news feed.

Considering SEO as a Boost for Your Real Estate Brand

The following was inspired by an email thread that went back and forth between myself and the President of a Web Design House. the project mentioned is  in the very beginning stages of an SEO project that we are fulfilling for one of their clients.I thought you might find this of interest.....

At the start of a project brand increases because of linking. Often times a client thinks that this was built in, when in fact some of it may have been but Google does not necessarily care about your brand. They care about mentions and citations of your brand. Google cares only what links to the references of your brand across the web on your site or not. As your links increase to your pages of your site, your brand references (keywords) within your analytics should go up.

So what you get last month in your original, pre-seo campaign "brand traffic" spreads out to larger derivatives of that word and more searches as it gets links to the pages with brand words. And links that carry those branded words in the anchor text increase. In the case of brand it usually is not very competitive if at all, so a few links can really get the brand out there.

Reputation Management
This by the way is what reputation management is about. One can easily steal your brand by creating pages about your company on many web pages. It can even be done anonymously on free sites. Its easy to do because there is 0 competition for it until someone actually does it.

The idea being that you can get crowded out totally or partially from the SERPS (search positions) for your own name!Thats why it is important for companies to do more socially and thru syndicates to populate the web with references to their brand.

By the way we often will get an agent site to come up higher in the SERPS than a broker site online (if the broker is not our client). Its very easy if the broker isn't working for in bound links.

This reputation thing is not as bad as it is hyped up to be yet. I have seen few attempts by malcontents but not done very well. But I do think it will be a major problem down the road not just in the real estate business. But I see this playing out in how news and politics can be perceived.

For a glimpse of the future and managing reputation and perceptions, study how the Obama and McCain campaigns have run their online marketing for the past election.
Election Special: Whatever You Do, Do Not Vote For This Candidate
Even McCain used online Video masterfully. Obama used the web better than any one politician or business yet.

Confessing Your Sins Will Get You Traffic!
A site can be SEOd all day long, but if it does not have links it does not fully or even in some cases partially exist to Google. On many templated real estate sites there is not much one can do as far as onpage optimization.

So how does one get high rankings?

Links. Links make up for the sins of the site. They are the absolution from the priest called Google.

So right now a month into the project what we see is a start of a wider span of brand words. And even a small start at seeing real estate search words giving traffic.

We can do that by comparing the search strings from last month before the SEO launch to now. This month is almost double brand based visits. (names changed to keep the client private)
The list is longer (width) and many words are getting more visits compared to last month.
ie. TOTAL BRAND visits  are double last month
27         century 21 franchise name
26         url.com
19         century 21 franchise name realty
14         franchise name
6           century franchise name
6           www.franchise name.com
4           city century 21
4           century 21 in state
etc.....