Take Matt’s Advice. 5 Tips Your Real Estate Site Needs.

In case you missed the recent video interview with Matt Cutts at USA Today, it’s a must-watch . I’m happy to report that the advice our Internet Marketing Team has been offering to our clients is right on track. So, don’t just take our word for it, take Google’s search guru’s word:

1. Spotlight your search term on the page.

That’s right. Your keywords have to be prominently placed, but not over-stuffed. They should occur naturally in the content of the page. What Matt doesn’t say is that you want to make sure that keyword or keyword phrase is in your page’s headline, also known as an H1 Tag. Read more

Week In Review: 140 Characters or Less

In the spirit of Twitter, this week in review is done in less than 140 characters per item. Enjoy

Use Facebook as a marketing tool. Practical tips from Joel Burslem.

Seth Godin works the math of low hanging fruit. Don’t tweak the already optimized, fix the area which has the most to gain.

Chris Brogan talks about community, social networking and real estate. Read this for the comments (especially the non-real estate industry)

You’re jumping Twitter like it’s Friendster to MySpace. Jay Thompson gives you tools.

Transparency is more than a buzzword. Nick Bostic gives us examples.

Bad MLS Photo

Flash and SEO: Google now does Flash

Google just announced that they have made some improvements to how they crawl (i.e read) Flash content.

Some highlights:

• This only applies to SWF files, not FLV (FLV is a common video format used with Flash).
• Googlebot will read the text from the SWF (not images that look like text, but actual text content).
• Google will discover web addresses that are in the SWF file.
• Google will not discover web addresses inside SWF files that do not use text as the link

There’s a few more points so if you’re geekily inclined, read the Google Flash announcement.

Geeky but important: domain frontrunning

With many realtors and real estate agents starting blogs, micro sites, secondary sites and so on, the issue of picking and registering a domain name is pretty important. Here’s some current news on an important aspect of domain name registration: who do you choose?

Process of elimination: Network Solutions

For awhile now, Network Solutions has been involved in a controversial practice referred to as domain frontrunning. When you look for a domain at Network Solutions by typing your idea into their search box, they automatically register the domain. If you want it then you buy it from them… for significantly more than you might pay elsewhere. They hold on to the domain for a few days.

But even if you wait for a few days for Network Solutions’ lock to expire you may run into trouble. Many domain-name campers have the ability to monitor domain registrations and since interest is being expressed in your domain idea (Network Solutions tips off the campers when it “pre-registers” or engages in domain frontrunning with your URL idea). You will be competing against automated domain-name campers if you choose to wait out Network Solutions.

The obvious solution to the issue is to not use Network Solutions for your domains.

More reading on this topic:

Network Solution faces lawsuit over domain frontrunning

The group that governs domain name registration may ban domain frontrunning

Details on how Network Solutions engages domain frontrunning (complete with pictures

« go back