Archive for July, 2006

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Dangers of Duplicate Content

In Blogging,Marketing on Jul 24 by jason

Copying-n-pasting content is one of the quickest ways to get a new site up and running. However, duplicate content like this is also one the best ways to be delisted, ignored, or devalued by search engines. And I’m not even referring to issues of copyright infringement. Duplicate content is a common issue for many sites, and copy-n-pasting is not the only way to get it.

Duplicate Content Prevention

There are many sites that discuss the dangers of duplicate content. And personally, I think most of the “dangers” are common sense. So rather than discuss the dangers, the goal here is to educate you on a few methods to prevent duplicate content. Doing so may help you to improve your search engine rankings as well as reduce any confusion for your readers.

How content is duplicated

Duplicate content can occur “accidentally.” In other words, they can happen without being an intentional content spammer. Here are a few examples:

  • Multiple domains that point to the same website
  • Printer friendly pages
  • Inconsistent linking (www or directory names)
  • Syndicated or republished content (see Richard Keir’s article on this)

Solutions to duplicate content

These solutions do not necessarily correspond to the issues above. If you have additions or other ideas, please feel free to comment or email me.

Write unique content
Obvious, but thought it should still be here.

Use a Robots.txt file
Use a robots.txt to let spiders know what files are okay. If you have print-friendly pages, disable them from being indexed.

Use 301 Redirects
A permanent redirect will let search engine’s know where the “original” content is. This is particularly good to use when you have multiple domain names that point to the same site.

Link consistently
Be sure to always use the www in your domain or never use the www. Choose one or the other. The same goes for directories. Either always use trailing slashes or never use trailing slashes.

Resources

Post inspired by Kristal’s Comment.

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Qualified Buyers via Photos

In Marketing,Real Estate,Technology on Jul 13 by jason

Wouldn’t it be great to have a face recognition program on your website that enabled you to determine which buyers are the most likely to buy? or, at least, determine the seriousness of their inquiry?

Millions of leads (stats are a total guess here) are generated everyday by real estate lead generation websites. But by the time they make it through the system and reach the buyer’s agent, just a small percentage of leads actually turn into bonafide buyers.

Truth be told, I don’t really know of a way to qualify leads through any amazing new Internet technology. However, the Technology Evangelist proposes to simply show more photos.

Check it out.

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Internet better than REALTORS®?

In Blogging,Marketing,Real Estate,Technology on Jul 05 by jason

Self-proclaimed Niche Marketing Extraordinaire, Charles Amith, posted about how his house for sale blog (actually just a one page website) was the key to his home selling success. (Thanks Richard). He mentions that typical real estate sales techniques resulted in “waiting and waiting ….with 0 guests.” By changing his marketing, he was able to sell his home in “less than a 1/3 of the average time”.

At first read, I was inclined to nitpick some of the flaws in his initial home selling marketing strategy. But you know what? He probably marketed his home like the majority of REALTORS® and FSBOs do! You know, put in a couple of newspaper ads, have a few open houses, and hope for a bite.

Not so new property marketing strategy

What you need to know is that his “new” marketing strategy is, in fact, old (old in Internet years). Not old as in decrepit, rather, it’s tried and true. If you’re not doing what he did and you’re not generating tons of good buyer leads, you may be doing your listing clients AND your business a huge disservice.

Here are two steps to harness the Internet and ADD to your current marketing strategy.

  1. Setup a unique property website
  2. Drive traffic to the site

Yeah, I like making things easy. :)

Unique Property Website

You could do like Charles and create a free blogger account or other and get a website that way. Or if you really want to look professional, consider something like an Agency Logic PowerSite. I think the latter is much more effective since it is professional, comprehensive, and can have its own domain name.

One note, however, about using a blogging system… It provides an easy way to establish an RSS feed. This can give you the ability to frequently feed your info to other sites so that you will show up higher in blog search engines. This is just a side note for you to consider. At this point in the game, I doubt many people are looking through blog search engines to find their dream home. But I thought I should mention it.

Update: Charles provides a good argument for the power of RSS in ALL search engines (not just blog search engines).

Drive traffic to your property

There are a number of ways to do this both on and offline. Since we’re talking about Internet marketing of a property listing, I will not go into offline marketing such as newspapers, flyers, etc.

You can do one or both of these strategies. And of course, the more the exposure you can get, the better. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) costs cash, while most classifieds will be free. So here’s your simple check list.

Establish Your Internet Strategy

In my personal experience and opinion, and of course it depends on your market, many REALTORS® still do not have an effective Internet marketing strategy for their property listings. By establishing a web-based strategy for your homes, you can easily improve your ability to be the best agent for your clients.

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Real Estate Podcast SEO

In Blogging,Marketing,Real Estate,Technology on Jul 01 by jason Tagged: ,

If you’re keeping up on different real estate marketing strategies, you’ve surely heard of podcasting. I won’t discuss all the benefits, at least not for this post, of how real estate podcasting can strengthen your market presence or improve relationships with customers. Rather, I’d like to hit the debated topic of optimizing podcasts for search engines and show you how it can be done.

Like I mentioned in Free Real Estate SEO, search engine optimization is hard work. Doing so for podcasts is even harder. If you’re willing to put in some elbow grease, read on.

Podcast SEO

Most search engines can’t extract information from podcasts. After all, it’s just an audio file. So here are a few SEO tips to help your podcast move higher up for its topic.

  • Use Good Metadata
  • Write Transcripts
  • Optimization on-page text
  • Submit your podcast feed to podcast search engines (especially Podscope)

Good Podcast Metadata

For HTML documents, metadata is slowly going by the wayside. The information is frequently inaccurate and some search engines completely ignore it. However, for podcasting, metadata is still helpful.

Metadata (or ID3 tags) is extra information embedded in your podcast to let search engines and listeners know what it’s about. Whatever software you are using, look for a place to add ID3 tag info like:

  • Title
  • Genre
  • Artist
  • Album
  • Description

These terms may not make a whole lot of sense when you’re doing real estate commentary, but they’re the standard fields used by the different systems and aggregators. These fields will frequently be indexed, so be sure you fill them in. Oh, and make sure they’re accurate too.

Tip: “Album” is good for categorizing your podcasts. You can use it to name your series on Buying a New Home or keep all financing podcasts grouped together.

Transcripting Your Podcasts

This one is huge. It’s time consuming, but extremely important to be sure that search engines get your content. Just type the whole podcast out and you’ll be good to go. If you really don’t want to spend the time, there are many transcription services that you can hire, too.

Optimal Podcast Environment

I don’t think this header really says what I want, but it was a choice between “optimal podcast environment” and “Hug your podcast with optimized text.” Anyway, the idea is to be sure that the link to your podcast is surrounded by a keyword rich summary of your podcast’s topic. Search engines will see these extra on-page factors and appropriately deduce the topic.

Podcast Search Engines

This is where people search for podcasts, so be sure you submit your feed to all the podcast directories out there. And don’t forget Podscope. You also want to ping services such as Weblogs Audio.

Get Podcasting

If you’ve read this far, I’d guess you already have a podcast or are very close to starting one. Again, this stuff isn’t really hard. It just takes a lot of work. If you have any questions on how to move forward with any of the things I mentioned, let me know. Also if you have other ideas on how to optimize your podcast, I’d love to hear it!

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