The best way to think about a link is as a recommendation between websites. When you link your site to another website, search engines count it as a recommendation of that site by you. As with any recommendation, its importance is totally dependent on the source of the recommendation. Online, this all breaks down to what Google calls Page Rank. Page rank is tabulated from a complicated algorithm involving a multiplicity of factors but that can be effectively represented by a number between 0-10 with 0 being the worst and ten the best. [Note: Don't confuse Page Rank with SERP rank. The former is a quality index which impacts the latter. The latter (Search Engine Results Page rank) is the position of your site's link on a search engine results page.]  If you spend lots of time on your website adding pages and pages of unique keyword rich content, it is updated frequently, and other high-page-rank sites link to you, then Google is going to rate your site towards the top end of the scale. (To give you some context, whitehouse.gov and harvard.edu each have a page rank of 9. Most Real Estate sites are a 2, 3, or 4 although a rare few rank higher.)  A favorable page rank will inspire other sites to want to exchange links with you because a link from your site will really help their own Google Page Rank. There are two factors that you need to be aware of in this situation.

• First, you want to make sure that the site you are linking to has good content that will add value to your client’s experience. For example, if a client follows a link off your page and it leads them to a bogus website it will not reflect positively on you. On the other hand, a recommendation by your site that proves useful will encourage people to come back in the future and trust your opinion.
• Second, you need to be aware of whether the reciprocal link from this other site will do you any good. This is where page rank comes in. If your page rank stands at 5 and the site you are linking with is at a 2, then the link will really not help you in the eyes of Google and thus you should not waste your time with it.

Of course, this second consideration can be overlooked if the site to which you are linking has information that will be useful to your clientele or you have some other motivation such as a close personal or business relationship. However, if you are purely linking for linking sake, then you will want to be discriminating in you choices. There are many free online utilities that check page rank but the best of the bunch is a plug in for Firefox called The SEO Toolbar. This little toolbar sits below your other toolbars in Firefox and can give you immediate data on any site you happen to be visiting. By using these tools to evaluate the quality of the websites that are contacting you, you can make informed choices about which you want to link to and which you want to ignore.

Link building can be a very good avenue to pursue in your ongoing work to optimize your site. But like all decisions you make about your website, it is imperative that you utilize the tools that are available to you and make sure that your decisions are based on data.

• On the human side of things blogs, offer a way for a business to show their clientele a more personal side with minimal time commitment. When writing copy for a business website, the author needs to think about maintaining professional voice and assuring that the piece that they are writing is consistent with the subject of the page they are posting it. The beauty of a blog is that by their very nature people expect blogs to be more informal and cover a variety of subjects. On a blog you can have two posts one after the other about completely opposite subjects and it is completely acceptable.
• As with everything on the Internet, you are writing for two audiences: people and search engines. There is lots of fancy language involved in Search Engine Optimization, but the keystone of SEO is “the keyword”. If, as you blog, you do so with an eye to your site’s primary keywords, you can turn your blog into a treasure trove of unique, keyword-rich content for search engines. The SEO value of blogs does not stop there, however. Because of the nature of blog software, every time you write a post, the software notifies Google that it has new content and the blog is re-indexed. The more frequently the site is indexed the better your placement in Google will be.

These are pretty standard, as long as you blog frequently on you own domain you will reap these benefits. Quality of writing and pertinence of subject also can provide their own benefits. Take for example our client, Brad Dinsmore, a Southern New Hampshire Realtor. Brad had us build him an on-site blog a few months ago and started blogging about subjects effecting his market area in and around Windham, NH. He was doing a great job, titling his posts with keyword rich language, blogging frequently and linking to the rest of his site. Because of this, he was receiving the benefits listed in the bullet points above. Because of the quality and originality of his posts, a reporter from a local paper called the Eagle Tribune came into his office last week with a copy of one of his blog posts titled Southern NH Home Sales: 1st Quarter 2009 the reporter wanted to write a feature article for the Sunday Edition based on Brad’s post. The end result of this was that on the front page of the Sunday edition of the Eagle Tribune were two large color photos of one of his office’s agents Debbie St Jean and two, first time-home buyers as part of an article entitled First-time buyers a ray of sunshine in dismal N.H. housing market. This is publicity that you cannot buy and a perfect example that when you put your expertise out there you will reap the benefits. If you know your market better than anyone else then let people know. Add content to your site and blog regularly. You may not get a featured article out of it but you will start to gain the recognition that you deserve.

Internet marketing –  including organic search engine placement, Pay Per Click advertising and online social media  - has decentralized how businesses reach their target audience. With this decentralization has come many advantages. The advertiser can more quickly respond to market shift and trends while focusing marketing dollars on a targeted demographic. However, with this decentralized model lots of people are trying to manage their ad campaigns themselves rather than hire a marketing professional, which comes with many pitfalls. Advertising agencies had focus groups and opinion polls that they used in their process. With the new model people often bypass this step and base campaigns on what they perceive consumer interest to be in their market. By basing their efforts on their perceptions, they are missing out on many of the advantages that online marketing offers.

Why base your online marketing on a guess when you can base it on fact? Thanks to the analytic tools available on the Internet, you can convene a focus group of your own that is made up of your entire market area. At its best, online marketing is driven by keyword data, while everything else (design, functionality and products and services) takes second seat. You can have the most attractive site and the most cutting edge product on the market, but if no one comes to your website then you garner no benefit. This is why keyword data analysis has to take first priority in your online marketing budget.

To frame our investigation of the fundamentals of keyword analysis, lets take and example of a business — we will call it ACME. ACME is trying to decide what keywords to focus on for their new website. The first thing that they have to do in their decision making process is define their online market area (OMA). OMA is made up of every conceivable combination of keywords that a potential customer could type in when looking for ACME’s products or services. Humans are a generally imprecise species and thus there can be literally thousands of keyword combinations, including misspellings, that could relate to ACME’s goods and or services. Having defined this through keyword research, ACME chooses two possible keyword options, X & Y.

While ACME wants to lead with X or Y they also want to take as much advantage of their OMA as possible. However it would be inefficient, expensive and likely impossible to try and optimize ACME’s site for their entire OMA. Because ACME can’t effectively optimize its site for thousands of different keywords, it is necessary for them to focus efforts within some section of the OMA. This is the point where ACME might commit the cardinal sin of online marketing: they may look at their OMA and choose which keyword they want to focus on based on their perceptions of what will bring them the most traffic. To avoid this, ACME needs overlay two more sets of data onto their OMA.

The First set of data is search engine traffic. Getting hard data on the frequency that certain keywords are used helps to focus their efforts on more productive terms within their OMA. This is another point at which people make a classic online marketing blunder. For example judging by the keyword traffic data displayed in figure 1 Acme’s obvious choice would be X.

Fig 1

While selecting keywords from this set of data will be more productive than keywords blindly chosen from the entire OMA, there is still one critical piece of information in ACME’s decision making process that is missing, namely keyword competition.

Keyword competition is defined by the number of websites and pages competing for organic placement for a given search term. ACME makes the right decision and looks at keyword traffic and keyword competition data on the two terms displayed in figure 2.

Fig. 2

With this new source of data, ACME sees that while X has 30% more traffic than Y it has more than twice the amount of competition. To quantify this data we can generate something I have developed called the Keyword Benefit Index, using this simple formula:

Keyword Traffic / Keyword Competition = Keyword Benefit Index (KBI)

In this case, the KBI for term X is .005 compared to .01 for term Y. KBI is a simple tool to evaluate potential keyword benefit for a unit of investment. The actual KBI value is not in a high number — but in providing a scale upon which all the terms can be measured. Once a KBI has been assigned for any given term, the list can be sorted by that KBI value, identifying which keywords offer the most opportunity. When utilized in this case by ACME, they discover that keyword Y is a better keyword choice than keyword X.

This is a simplified version of the data analysis and decision making process necessary for selecting primary keywords for a website. If a company such as ACME is going to take full advantage of this new decentralized advertising model, then they owe it to themselves to utilize the tools – and most importantly the data – that is available to them in today’s online marketplace. To do so they need to develop in-house expertise or hire firms with a strong track record in Search Engine Optimization. Anything short of that is an improper use of their marketing budget.

Image via Wikipedia

Sean Purcell nails it when he says “the premier ingredient in creating real estate success: lead generation.” Let’s look at how putting property search capability on your site can expand your reach and increase visitor engagement as part of your lead generation activities.

The search function on most real estate professional sites can be broken down into two types: integrated IDX property search and framed IDX property search. Since Union Street Media specializes in IDX integrated real estate web design, we’re often asked what the difference is and which is better.

Framed IDX is often cheaper. But if your real estate website is a part of your online marketing plan, there are significant advantages to an integrated IDX solution that should be considered.

Let’s start by breaking down the components of real estate search technology that matter most to online marketing.

Anatomy of real estate search technology

Search technology for property is a combination of four things:

• Data The MLS data can be hosted on a third party provider or on your site
• Search Interface Flexibility of the search interface to reflect your customers’ desires and your local expertise
• Visual Design Ability to keep your agent or office branding intact throughout your customers’ search process
• Technical Design The code used to display the listings and search results can have implications on your SEO and other marketing objectives

Understanding how these four elements interact can help you make an informed decision about what kind of search technology to deploy on your real estate website.

Your property search and Google

People looking for something will often start on a search engine. The NAR has said that over 80% of housing searches begin online (I bet you’ve heard this from every single technology vendor for the past few months). A fair share of those searches started at Google. You want your property search to be visible to Google in order to reach those people.

From a marketing standpoint, a big difference between integrated IDX and framed IDX is how they appear to Google. On an integrated IDX site, the property data is hosted on your website. That’s part of the integration. On a framed IDX site, the property data is hosted on a third party’s website and “framed” into your site.

Google doesn’t see visual design on websites. It only reads code and data. So while a framed IDX site might appear to be showing all the property data to a human eye, Google doesn’t recognize that the framed data is part of your site. This means that any SEO value from showing property on your site would be lost in a framed IDX site.

Your property search and your brand

Once people find your real estate search website, the next thing you’ll be wanting to do is provide them with an engaging experience. Engaging experience is web marketing geekspeak for “help them find stuff by making the search easy and effective.”

The design of a framed IDX search is often shared across a vast number of real estate websites. This can make integrating the design and branding of your office site with your search technology difficult.

Integrated IDX sites inherit the design styling of your site because the data is on your site. For this reason, it is often easier to maintain branding consistency on your site with an integrated IDX property search.

Widgets and other real estate tools

Integrated IDX sites also offer the capability to add widgets such as a quick search on every page of your website, easily configurable one-click real estate searches and other tools that you can use to promote property and encourage visitor interaction with your search technology. You’ll also want the ability to add extra information to your own listings on your site (if your MLS allows this) so that you don’t get a “duplicate content” penalty from Google. Some framed IDX searches offer these things and some don’t.

These extra tools and widgets have become more prominent and important in the past year as a way for agents and offices to differentiate their specialty knowledge in a geographic region, customer type or property type.

Some questions to ask your real estate search technology provider

Choosing the right technology for your real estate website will always come down to weighing the costs against the benefits. Here are some questions to ask your technology vendor (whether you’re using integrated IDX or framed IDX) so you can plan your online marketing efforts accordingly:

• Will Google and other search engines consider the property information part of my site for SEO purposes?
• Can I change the design and color scheme of the list and detail views to match my site’s branding?
• Can I set up one-click searches and provide links from anywhere in my existing site?
• What incentive do you have to improve your search technology in the future?
• Can I show extra information about my property that is only on my site (avoiding duplicate content issues with Google)?

If you found this article helpful, you may also be interested in the “Is your code hurting your website” post.

Image by Aaron Escobar via Flickr

Google just made a Beginner’s Guide to SEO. Check it out on the Google Webmaster Blog.

Image by plemeljr via Flickr

By now you’ve already heard about Google Earth coming to the iPhone. And yes, it’s awesome and fun and cool. But you’re a marketer at the end of the day so you’re looking to find a way promote your real estate or other business online using this newly enhanced tool. Before coming up with some internet marketing tactics that might be appropriate for the Google Earth-enabled iPhone, let’s look at a few concepts related to this combination of mapping and mobile technologies. Video after the jump.

Local without the hyperbole

For some time, internet pundits have been talking about “local” and when no one seemed to respond then they started talking about “hyperlocal” (when driving gets dull try hyperdriving!). The concept of Local is about delivering results when knowing about location increases the relevance of the results.

The real estate industry is an obvious example where information is more valuable when it’s location-aware   than location-numb. If you know about the schools/neighborhood/employment/scene etc then you know something valuable to anyone looking to buy or sell real estate.

But real estate isn’t the only industry where local information or knowledge is valuable. Any physical-only business should be firmly woven into the internet representation of a locality. Think about restaurants, car dealerships, news outlets, museums and colleges etc etc. I could go on and on. But all of these things contribute to the quality of “local” and can benefit by being present in the digital representation of a locality.

Google is the de-facto digital representation of locality for most areas. When people want to know about a location they ask Google about it first. And Google has a variety of platforms for delivering that local information.

Good marketing is relevant

While “local” is an expression of information quality, “relevance” is perhaps more dependent on delivery. Are you getting the quality information you want when you can act on that information? If so, you’re getting relevant information.

The problem with relying on Google’s database for local information has been that local information is most relevant when we aren’t tethered to our computer.

If I want to gather more context from my immediate surroundings while I stroll down Church Street in downtown Burlington, I’m out of luck. With Google Earth for my iPod (Vermont still doesn’t have an iPhone… I know, it’s a real bother) I can pull in the WiFi, auto-set the location, and the resulting image will include Wikipedia entries and images by default. If I’m hungry I can search for a restaurant nearby and the search results will be overlayed on the map. If I’m looking for a condo… hmmm…

What about plain old Google Search or Maps? They’re already pretty much the same thing right? If I don’t care about physical space at all I’ll probably just use Google Search. Google Maps has the directions and streets for that specific sort of task. If I want a restaurant it will also show me the address. Google Earth doesn’t have the maps or direction-making capability. But it has photos and wikipedia for increasing local context. If I want to get somewhere I’m going to use Google Maps. If I want to know more about an area, I’m going to use Google Earth.

Using Google Earth, I can have local information delivered to me when I can act on it. It’s also a really fun delivery method so that helps too.

4 ways to use Google Earth in your Internet Marketing

Up to now I’ve focused on how individuals might be using Google Earth with their iPhone, concentrating on the concepts of Local and Relevance. How can you use this tool to market your business online?

Caveat: What follows are some nice untested tactics. Using these tactics shouldn’t hurt (in fact, you should be doing some of them already). But I wouldn’t replace a functional internet marketing strategy with the handful of tactics which follow.

1. Ensure that your Wikipedia entry exists and is up-to-date. Google Earth for the iPhone will show Wikipedia entries that are relevant to the section of Earth that is being displayed. A tip here: if you go in and create your Wikipedia entry with what sounds like a press release you won’t get very far. The editors are quick and thorough. Be certain to cite any and all claims you make and respect the Five Pillars.
2. Get your images of your business into Panoramio. By default, Google Earth will show little squares for images that are relevant to the section of Earth that it is displaying. Make sure your place of business is one of them.
3. Get images of your products into Panoramio. This might be easier for something like real estate, where the product might be a house or condo. But you can use this internet marketing tactic for other products as well. But keep to the spirit of Local when you do so: photographs of your product in relation to the landscape/locality. Show how your product is a part of what local means. Also, one picture isn’t enough. Lots of pictures. WIth tags and descriptions. And a Panoramio username/profile that also markets for you. This one will be hard for me as I’m a big Flickr fan.
4. Get to work on your plain old Google SEO. Google Earth for the iPhone or iPod allows users to perform a search that is limited by geography. Make sure that you are well ranked for the search terms that are relevant to your business.

These four tactics should tie into your existing profile-marketing, image-marketing, SEO and reputation management strategies. Any other ideas?

The tool is quick to install, but comes with a few caveats.

1. It’s only useful once you’ve collected multiple data sets. SeoBook suggests several days of data, but that would only be useful if you were tracking your work on a blog site that is indexed daily and therefore has a chance to improve daily. More realistic for a real estate web site would be monthly data. You can put Rank Checker on auto-pilot and then visit the data in a few months.
2. Your .csv data files need to be named carefully, with only the date as the file name in one of these file name formats: MM-DD-YY, M-D-YY, MM-D-YY, or M-DD-YY.
3. You can’t muck with the data that came from Rank Checker. Make a copy of the original file If you want to play with the data in Excel.
4. The .html format of the data that you can save is nicely styled and saves you time from formatting the raw data in Excel.
5. It’s not possible to save the graphed data unless you take a screen capture. And that graph is not labeled with the keyword — it’s displayed above in a list field. To make the visual representation more useful, I hope the developers will develop an output that is labeled and can be downloaded as a .gif file. That way, the file could be included quickly in a PowerPoint or other report to the folks who are footing the bill for all that search engine optimization!

The folks at SeoBook have made our lives easier with a fantastic Firefox plugin called Rank Checker. I’ve been using this tool since July and couldn’t live without it. Even though it’s easy to install and use, SeoBook’s Aaron Wall has made it even easier by creating a 5-minute video to tech you how to install and use it. I highly recommend taking the 5 minutes to view it.

Five Tips to make Rank Checker even sweeter

1. You can cut and paste your list of keywords out of a spreadsheet and add them all at once, or you can type them one at a time.
2. Be sure to save your list of keywords to the preset folder. That way, you can run it any time you like with almost no effort.
3. You can simply view the results on-screen, but even better is to download the .csv (comma separated value) file.
4. Save that raw data file to it’s own folder as simply MM-DD-YY, M-D-YY, MM-D-YY, or M-DD-YY. (see tomorrow’s post to see why this is so important!) feel free to open the file in Excel and save it as a .xls file so that you can format and play with the information. Just don’t mess with the original CSV.
5. Plan to run this once a month for three or four months so that you can observe the impact of your SEO efforts (changes to content, meta data, and inbound link building).

This is the second in a series of five posts this week on cool FireFox plugins to assist in optimizing your real estate web site. Yesterday’s post featured a Firefox plugin for easily adding images to your real estate blog. Tomorrow’s post will examine a cool (but somewhat tricky) plugin that helps Realtors visualize and report on the data they get from Rank Checker.

There are a lot of questions and concerns about syndication of mls listing data in the real estate internet marketing space. Let’s start by looking a little bit at a listing and then approaching two potential strategies for using that real estate listing help market a property on the internet.

A real estate listing is structured content

A real estate listing is pretty much a data set that describes a property. Usually this includes pictures, some quantitative data about square feet and bedrooms etc and some “remarks” field narrative description.

But when the dust settles a real estate listing is just a collection of facts and narrative about a specific property. There’s no real difference between a real estate listing and any other type of marketing content on the web. And the phrase “marketing content” is key here. Ultimately, people don’t buy the content itself, they buy the thing the content is describing: the house.

Perhaps, if some of the listings are much better written then someone looking to list their house might choose to list their house with the agent that did such a good job. But for now, lets focus on listings as strictly marketing content.

Two approaches to syndicating real estate listings

One of the great things about online marketing is the ability to quickly and easily spread your message around the world. And since listings are already highly structured chunks of content, spreading listings is even easier than other kinds of content. You can easily get your marketing message out there.

Since, traditionally, the listing data was a lure to bring in customers (you couldn’t look at this marketing content unless you were doing business with someone who had access to it) some people prefer to maintain tight control of that marketing content to bring in traffic.

Each of these strategies are useful, but for different objectives:

• Spread your message around: primarily increase human exposure to your marketing message
• Maintain tight control: primarily leverage SEO value of your marketing message

I’m going to outline both of these strategies and give them fancy names.

The Flagship and the Fleet

Image via Wikipedia

This is an internet marketing strategy to gain qualified human visitors to your site by syndicating your real estate listings. You have a primary site where you might gather information so you can sell the person the house (your flagship). Then you’d get your content onto as many other sites as possible (your fleet). All those places where your content is syndicated need to point back to your site (so people can get from your fleet ships to your flagship).

Flagship and Fleet might be right for you if:

• You can identify other sites where your target audience exists.
• Your content could fit in well on those sites.
• Your content can link back to your main site.
• There is a potential audience visiting other sites that currently does not visit yours.
• You care as much or more about “quality” visitors as you do about overall visitors.

Process for deploying Flagship and Fleet

1. Identify your syndication media (GoogleBase, Trulia, Zillow, a guest post on a blog, whatever).
2. Get your listing content in order so it fits the requirements of your syndication medium (your listing needs to be compelling enough to get real humans to follow you back to your site).
3. Put your listing on the external sites
4. Identify which syndication sources are performing well and find more like them
5. Repeat

How does this listing syndication strategy work?

The main concept here is to put your listing in front of more people than you would if you kept your listing to yourself. The people who read your listing information on another web site and then click through to your website should be more interested in the property and/or your services (they’ve already consumed the data and are more likely to take action).

If you’re interested in magnifying the effects of this listing syndication strategy, Vincent Socci has some thoughts on using the advertising platforms of the aggregation sites at the Geekestate Blog.

One of the drawbacks is that you limit the search engine optimization potential for the listing. But the quality of the leads should be better than general web surfers (assuming you’ve done a good job of identifying good web sites with whom to syndicate).

In your analytics you’d want to see a general increase in referral traffic and you might suffer a nominal drop in search traffic.

If the search traffic is better for you, then read on about The Whirlpool.

The Whirlpool

Image by MShades via Flickr

If your content is unique and well targeted for search engine optimization (SEO) you may want to bring visitors directly to your site from search engines. This internet marketing strategy is aimed at increasing your traffic from search engines. As before, you’d have a primary site where you do business (your Whirlpool), but your visitors will come directly from the search engines instead of from targeted syndicate sites.

The Whirlpool might be right for you if:

• You know what keywords are valuable for your niche
• Your content is unique and not duplicated elsewhere online
• You have the ability to create extra-engaging landing page designs for your listing
• You don’t mind having a high bounce rate

Process for deploying the Whirlpool

1. Identify your valuable keyword(s)
2. Write your listing to include appropriate amounts of your valuable keyword
3. Prevent your listing from being anywhere else online or
4. Make sure your listing is sufficiently augmented on your own site if it’s listed elsewhere (your MLS’s site, for example)
5. Include immediate conversion tools on the listing page (If done correctly, your audience will land directly on this page)

How does this real estate listing SEO strategy work?

The main concept for this internet marketing strategy is that you protect the originality and uniqueness of your content to draw in specific visitors who can only get that content on your site. I’ll be frank and tell you that this is not very easy in today’s world of syndicated, aggregated and shared content. But if you’re willing to work very very hard you can accomplish it.

One of the drawbacks of this strategy is that you may miss out on potential visitors who are looking at other aggregate sites (Realtor.com, Trulia, Zillow etc).

If you are executing this strategy well you should see an increase in your search engine traffic for your pre-determined key words. Ideally you’ll also see an increase of landings on your listing page.

Strategy vs Strategy

Though I prefer the Flagship and Fleet approach myself, there are times when The Whirlpool is appropriate as well (exclusive listings, for example). And you can mix and match on a case-by-case. You can also run both strategies (on different listings, of course) and test them out to see which one works better for you. Here are some items to consider:

Visitors and Quality:

• Flagship and Fleet may deliver less total visitors of higher quality
• The Whirlpool may deliver more total visitors of lesser quality

Listing Competition:

• Flagship and Fleet listing syndication will put your listing in direct competition with millions of other listings on a aggregation web sites like Trulia, Zillow etc.
• The Whirlpool listing site will be in direct competition with millions of other sites on the search engine results pages.

Primary Audience:

• Flagship and Fleet requires listing content that is compelling enough to get human beings to leave their trusted syndication/aggregator site and visit your marketing site.
• Whirlpool requires listing content that is sufficiently search engine optimized so that search engines place it near the top of searches for your valuable keyword.

Hopefully, you’ll start with your objective clearly defined and be able to use this to help craft the best strategy for your listings.