In any SEO campaign, whether for real estate or anything else, best results correlate to best practices and what’s demonstrated here is poor practice indeed.

This removal of the Yahoo link checking tool and a host of freebie tools and sites that depended on it means that white hat SEO and building of a site [...]]]> Today the lights went out on Yahoo Site Explorer and the free alternative to analyze and evaluate back-links. This may come as bad news to a lot of DIYers but the quality of this method of evaluating the SEO clout of a website leaves a lot to be desired as Google continues to scale down the influence of links to make room for other ranking signals. 

This removal of the Yahoo link checking tool and a host of freebie tools and sites that depended on it means that white hat SEO and building of a site by contextual material that isn’t lame becomes even more the standard of website promotion and ranking. 

There are still tools available to evaluate links that are of good quality but the valuable data you should be extracting from the links to a website is not given out free. Subscriptions pay for the crawlers that have to perform the job of indexing billions of pagea and links. It’s no small, or cheap, task.

Everyone in SEO knows that a link from a quality, high authority site means exponentially more than thousands from link farms and forum profiles, etc., yet the temptation to indulge in link quantity remains for the SEO neophyte.

I recently evaluated top competitors in a real estate market where the #5 performer had 10 times the raw count of links that the #1 website had. Quality of all the ranking factors- best quality links included, determine where a website ranks in Google.

In the above graphic, I used three top competitors and two benchmark sites to analyze competition. Note that the leftmost three columns reflect top middle and lower positions of competitors for a keyword on page one of Google. The winning combination on the lefmost (#1 spot) column were on-page quality, link quality and a better social media score than competitors who had none.

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I’ll tell you a story about a house I bought. It [...]]]> Buyer intent. Commercial intent. Those kind of terms are tossed around marketing circles like dwarves in a 1930s circus. It’s regarded as just a tired trick by some who know that SEOs like to use the long tail in their marketing. What they completely miss is the power of the story and emotion that, in the right kind of message or presentation, converts the one or two or few leads that find your long tail keyword web page into a where do I sign? customer.

I’ll tell you a story about a house I bought. It was raining that spring in a record year of precip. Everything was as green as the hills of Maui here in Southern California. It was 2005 and we were looking around Yorba Linda for a home and looked at several that just about, well didn’t meet our wishes at all, really. Too many houses had fancy pergolas and nifty architectural features that we liked but things like having the neighbor’s house on the slope behind you so that they looked down into your back yard and windows were really just unappealing.

We were headed home to come back another day, maybe when it wasn’t raining so much.

There was one more open house sign at the bottom of the hill we were coming down and we decided on a whim to just have a peek at what was in this enclave that we had to make a U-turn to even drive into it. We came to the bend in the curve and there was the house kind of tucked in the bend of the curve- farther back than its two neighbors, really tucked away.

We walked up to the gate. There was no actual “front door.”  You had to pass the garage and go through the gate where the front door was on the side of this home. When we walked through that gate… Paradise greeted us. A tropical paradise in this yard that wrapped around the house. In back was a two level jacuzzi and pool with a little waterfall, an over-arching coral tree and 30 foot mature queen palms everywhere. A high wall surrounded the perimeter of the yard to block noise from the street on the other side. This was a little piece of Hawaii tucked into the back of a very private and secluded back yard. It was absolutely breathtaking. There was even a little sliver of view when you sat by the jaccuzi that had hills that looked just like the West Maui mountains in the distance.

Our emotional decision was made even against our better judgement. Everything else in viewing the home was about determining if we could get it all to work with our wish to have that secluded home with its little stolen bit of Maui. A month later we moved in.

What would have gotten us to that house earlier? Any media that said, “A secluded Orange County home with a back yard that’s just like Hawaii in Yorba Linda.”

It’s an interesting concept. What would a search like Orange County homes with Hawaiian Style Back Yard mean? Certainly it would mean that someone knows what they want to buy. If they really feel strong about how much they like Maui like I do, then you may have yourself a sale with minimal effort!

Learn more about commercial intent marketing with emotion. My Houston home with pool example for River Oaks.

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October 18, 2011: Announcement on the Goog-O-Blahg-oh in the name of “Making search more secure”:

We will stop all third party tracking services in their tracks, or more mildly put, “we are encrypting search for signed in users and websites won’t be able to see the keywords that brought them there, but don’t worry, we’ll send you a summary if you register your site with our Webmaster Tools where we can control your behavior.”

Google will use SSL technology to [...]]]> Google Will Break A Lot of Tracking Tools and SEO Hearts With This One

October 18, 2011: Announcement on the Goog-O-Blahg-oh in the name of “Making search more secure”:

We will stop all third party tracking services in their tracks, or more mildly put, “we are encrypting search for signed in users and websites won’t be able to see the keywords that brought them there, but don’t worry, we’ll send you a summary if you register your site with our Webmaster Tools where we can control your behavior.”

Google will use SSL technology to further obscure the process by which people find your website, just in case you were trying to figure that out and optimize your content in any way to rank for a particular term, something Google kind of dislikes unless you’re a big brand name like Nike. Then you can rank for shoes. If you’re a shoe store selling shoes in Westbury you can go to SSL encryption purgatory. Sign up, let Google babysit your website and you’ll get a summary if they don’t come up with a penalty program for everyone selling anything or promoting anything they don’t pre-approve.

Do you ever get the feeling that Google is controlling a bit too much lately?

Could this tip the scales in the favor of Bing?

What does this mean for sites that receive clicks from Google search results? When you search from https://www.google.com, websites you visit from our organic search listings will still know that you came from Google, but won’t receive information about each individual query. They can also receive an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to their site for each of the past 30 days through Google Webmaster Tools. This information helps webmasters keep more accurate statistics about their user traffic. If you choose to click on an ad appearing on our search results page, your browser will continue to send the relevant query over the network to enable advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve the ads and offers they present to you.

In the name of privacy, Google sweeps away more of the competition just by throwing a switch.

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Every time I came by, that sign just nearly punched me in the face with “go away!” What this picture does not show is that for almost the entire time until about a week ago that this house was listed, the grass was 3 feet high and everything seemed to say, “Keep moving. Nothing to see [...]]]> This is definitely not the way to market a short sale. I have passed this house for several months on my morning walks and said to myself, this house is going to go into foreclosure. Today was the day.

Every time I came by, that sign just nearly punched me in the face with “go away!” What this picture does not show is that for almost the entire time until about a week ago that this house was listed, the grass was 3 feet high and everything seemed to say, “Keep moving. Nothing to see here!”  it may have not been intended that way at all but that’s the impression that I always got, and I’m sure that many others got that impression too.

All the SEO in the world can’t fix poor marketing strategies. It seems to me like some agents just don’t really want the listings they have. Maybe I just have a different attitude of being a little more hungry for business even if my plate is full because I remember so many times when there wasn’t that much business. I couldn’t bear to have this listing without at least going to mow the yard when it needed it if I had to do it myself. And that appointment only sign?  What on earth could be the benefit of that? Obviously, this home as it was marketed did not attract enough qualified buyers to get past foreclosure, did it?

Murrieta short sale agents

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Hubpages CEO, Paul Edmondson, says that SEO doesn’t work since Google’s Panda Update. He claimed that Google was harming innovation and that Hubpages has done everything to improve their SEO, their content…

It took me one click and one copy and paste into a Google search to determine that there is still duplicate content on the website. Content that is found on thousands of other websites- aaaand the source is not Hubpages, but Wikipedia.

Could the problem be that Hubpages is ignoring one of the basic tenets of SEO and that their content aggregator profile [...]]]>

Hubpages CEO, Paul Edmondson, says that SEO doesn’t work since Google’s Panda Update. He claimed that Google was harming innovation and that Hubpages has done everything to improve their SEO, their content…

It took me one click and one copy and paste into a Google search to determine that there is still duplicate content on the website. Content that is found on thousands of other websites- aaaand the source is not Hubpages, but Wikipedia.

Could the problem be that Hubpages is ignoring one of the basic tenets of SEO and that their content aggregator profile is getting exactly the kind of ranking Google intends?

Watch this video to see my observations as they happened.

Dave Keys, real estate SEO expert

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Chatter levels are increasing on forums like Webmaster World about yet another Panda update going on now. Right now. For those who like tracking by numerical sequences, this iteration would be panda 2.4.

According to Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz, what makes Panda revolutionary is that it is a learning machine. Perhaps considered by some to be not too unlike the Terminator, always gathering information about and better understanding human behavior. In terms of artificial intelligence, Panda’s view of the world was formed in a soup of months of study and opinion gathering from web activities [...]]]>

Chatter levels are increasing on forums like Webmaster World about yet another Panda update going on now. Right now. For those who like tracking by numerical sequences, this iteration would be panda 2.4.

According to Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz, what makes Panda revolutionary is that it is a learning machine. Perhaps considered by some to be not too unlike the Terminator, always gathering information about and better understanding human behavior. In terms of artificial intelligence, Panda’s view of the world was formed in a soup of months of study and opinion gathering from web activities of real human beings. Google has confirmed that extensive research was performed where people were presented with websites and were simply allowed to vote whether they like the website or they didn’t like the website. This could obviously include factors ranging from colors and appearance to images, animations and graphics to menu systems and of course, the text content and layout of a website.

Panda has since recursively crawled, not the web, but the Google index and evaluated the websites in the index and rearranged the search results based on its learning of what is in the index compared to its core learning algorithm from the research accumulated and somehow translated into the “Panda Intelligence”.

These recursive reviews of the index and subsequent rearrangement of the SERP (search engine results placement) seem to indicate that Panda comes back around each time, apparently about once per month, with a higher level of intelligence and understanding of the web. Whether or not this is the real-time result, it is certainly the theory and it is a theory that Google is so far sticking with.

I have a pretty strong notion that if I am reading content and feel like I’m being gamed with duplicate or rehashed content–and I don’t like that, Panda it is probably going to sense the same thing sooner or later and filter out the same things that I don’t like from search results. That is clearly Google’s intent and if you happen lately to type in a misspelled or incorrect word into Google search you’ll notice that Google has a pretty good idea what you are actually searching for and gives you results for that term first.

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