While putting the polishing touches on my brand new website, I played with the cool wordcloud tool over at Wordle.net. If you want a “search engine” view of your website, with a little more organization and a lot more visual appeal, go make a wordle of your own.
Wordle's Word Cloud for WickedWriter.com
I was asked (by colleague and nature writer JJ Murphy) this weekend if a blog chain was good for marketing. She asked me several questions:
1. What is the marketing value, if any in a blog chain?
2. Does it make sense to reply back to a comment on your site?
3. Is there a marketing advantage to guest blogging?
4. Does any of this help in search engine ranking?
In addition to the Real Estate keyword help I offered in an article on WickedWordCraft.com, I also found this cool “right here, right now” tool from SEO Book. Give it a spin!
It’s been awhile since I’ve really “dug in” where SEO is concerned. Basically, I’ve been working under the assumption (a fairly good one, IMHO and in my humble experience online) that if you build good content, organize it well and use common sense when titling your articles, posts and web pages — that the readers will come.
For my own sites, and my client sites, it’s worked like a charm.
To be fair, I have spent a great deal of time studying SEO in the past and still try to keep abreast of any big changes. But mostly, I’ve determined that avoiding the “tricks” and the “blackhat” methods — and relying on offering a site of useful information and making it easy to find and access that information is the best long-term SEO approach. (I do keep an eye on well-crafted metas and always have an eye on local search.) (more…)
Recently, Forbes released an article about a company offering “reputation defense” on Google, the world’s most popular search engine.
By carefully promoting positive PR on Google via SEO techniques to minimize the impact of negative Internet blogs, reviews and articles, this company accentuates the positive (to quote a favorite Disney song.) Is this the latest business model? Protection from online publication (Google-Bombing-style) and negative pieces on the first page of Google? Hmmmm.
I’ll bet that Bush’s PR guy would have been happy to pay the $10K price tag for this service last year. (The company, Reputation Defender, also offers reputation monitoring services for a much more reasonable monthly rate.)
It continues to be a brave new world (tomorrow) for service businesses that we don’t even know that we need (today) resulting from the impact of online activity (yesterday).
Most of you have probably heard of — even played with — the new Yahoo! Real Estate Search Tool, but I’d be willing to bet that very few of you have seen a “sneak peak” of the new Google Real Estate tool.
It’s still in what I’d call “pre-alpha” — although I have no idea what the Google developers are calling it — and has been discovered via the back end by some people so geeky they make me look chic!
Hang onto your Page Rank and your search results as Big Daddy gives Google gazers big headaches. Google’s most recent update, dubbed “Big Daddy” has left the folks over at SearchEngineWatch.com complaining and comparing horror stories. And they are not alone…
I’ve had so many hits lately on searches for “Superbowl Adds” that hit this site since my blog on the local MSN video search entitled “Wanna Watch the Superbowl XL from the Sky?? Local Live Adds Detroit to the City List” went live. Since it’s so easy to hit that “d” twice on a keyboard, I decided to help those visitors looking for Superbowl ads. Here’s where you can view them online or… on your iPod (of course!)…
Your iPod can display mini-versions of the Superbowl darlings by subscribing to the Superbowl Advertisements PodCast or by going to iTunes and doing a search for that term in the podcast menu.
If you don’t “do” the iPod thing yet, it’s ok, you can still see your Superbowl Ads here: www.iFilms.com (just search for Superbowl ads — and spell it with only one “d”) *grin* You can also spend hours on the iFilms site just enjoying yourself — so you stand warned.
You guys probably like the Jessica Simpson take-off on the “These Boots” for Pizza Hut. Personally, I prefer the Miss Piggie version. Love the Fabio ad too. LOL. And the ad for the mobile phone with a personal defense system that I saw while at iFilms left me cackling. My son says it’s just plain violent. I find it more than slightly amusing. :O)
There, now you know.
People may not like change, but search engines love it! In fact, many SEs handsomely reward dynamic content, as witnessed by the popularity of the SEO darling: the blog. MSN and Google, in particular, are enamored with websites that provide constantly changing content.
But, if you don’t want to blog, how can you take advantage of this SEO fact? By carefully describing your latest listings! Want to leverage your listings for improved search engine rankings? (more…)
(… and request a “Full Monty” under the guise of protecting youth)
You gotta love it… the Bush administration is making another full frontal attack (pun intended) on American’s privacy — this time under the guise of protecting children from porn. The “federal government is trying to force Google to reveal all searches conducted in a one-week period, as well as records for 1 million Web addresses” according to an article released today by MediaPost.com.In a Search Engine Watch blog article, Google was the only one in the big four (AOL, Yahoo! and MSN) that said NO! The other search engines agreed to hand over the information. (more…)
As a Foxfire convert, I only open IE when I must — and I usually begrudge any website that requires me to change from Firefox to IE.
With that said, I’ve also missed the opportunity to see the alt tags with a mouse “rollover” on websites using Firefox. To see the alt tags on most sites when using my FireFox browser, I have to right click on an image and select “properties” to see the alt tag text.
But, today, I tripped across a design approach that will fix this problem. Adding a title tag to the alt tag will create a mouseover text for FireFox. If you want to add this to your own website to invite in the FireFox crowd… add the following code (using your own jpg name, title and alt tags, of course!):
<IMG src=”InternetMarketingImage.jpg” ALT=”Internet Marketing Plan Flowchart” TITLE=”Flowchart Plan for Small Business Internet Marketing”>
After all the hubbub over Google’s satellite earth imagery product… MS has launched the beta of their own local, imagery product in certain locations (one of which is right here in Kentucky… in Lexington). I used the bird’s eye view to zoom into my past — and found the apartment where I lived when I met Wayne (we met back in college) just off the University of Kentucky campus on Conn Terrace. (more…)
Well, it’s finally started to happen. I’ve been telling my clients for many, MANY months to be more careful with their use of gratuitous links and spamming the search engines (in particular Google) through these methods. I’ve been expecting the blast to happen in the last three or four rounds of algorithm changes for Google, and I’m honestly disappointed that it hasn’t happened sooner. But, that tide is now turning, finally.
Real Estate Business Magazine published my article “Diving for Pearls” in the November issue. A client picked up a copy of the magazine while at the NAR conference in California, and sent it to me this week.
The article discusses the five steps you need to take to get listed in the local search engines and even discusses the importance of including GPS information in metatags.
I’ll be writing more on this topic in the future, since the importance of local search in increasing daily.
In the meantime, if you would like to read a PDF of the article, I’ve uploaded it HERE.
My son called me today to show me a demonstration of “Google bombing” that he knew I’d enjoy.
If you would like to have your own fun (and especially if you aren’t a fan of our current President) you should go to Google and… (more…)
As the competition increases for marketshare on the world-wide-web, the local folks are carving out their own piece of this pie. How about your website? Does it compete on the local level? It should.I’m working on an article right now for one of the Real Estate glossy mags on the impact of local search betas and why this matters to real estate agents, brokers and Realtors.
In case you had any question, it DOES matter. The local results are topping national ones at a quick clip. Some engines, like Google, are tracking IP addresses to serve up local content on top of other less-targeted results. (more…)
Warning… the following is a RANT… with a few useful tips.
Overall, I love working with real estate agents. They are great clients, willing to try new things, and my own clients tend to be rather tech-savvy — or they want to be tech savvy — and are willing to learn. That’s all well and fine. It makes me happy. (more…)
Apparently the general public is beginning to get concerned that the current trend in real estate will come to a dramatic end in the near future, leaving them holding an expensive property worth less than they paid.
I heard a radio show a couple weeks ago (I think it may have been NPR’s Market Place) discussing how far above the current rate of inflation the values of properties have climbed. And suddenly after scrambling for houses because of the low interest rates, people are beginning to worry. After months of making offers well above the asking price in many markets, people are beginning to rethink the wisdom of the “gold rush” mentality on the housing front. An apparent shortage in available housing for sale in comparison to the public demand caused a bit of nutty behavior in some markets. And it all leaves me asking — where are all the people coming from that are buying houses now? How can we possibly have a shortage when I see new developments whenever I take a short drive?
My real estate clients say that it’s because more people who were renters are now buying. That makes sense, but around here, even rentals are in high demand and low supply!
Anyway, the Internet trends company Hitwise.com says that the data on search trends and consumers’ online behavior indicates that not only the pundits are concerned. Your neighbors are worried too (those that still live in those houses). (more…)
Just last week, my blog was coming up on the first page of Google for, of all things, “mean things to say” as a search term… and even before I could determine if I was happy to be at number three on Google or merely alarmed to be “made famous” for that particular phrase… it was gone…Marketing on the web is always a challenge – ALWAYS. But the changes going on at the big boy search engines right now are making those of us who keep an eye on such things, nuts. NUTS I tell you! (more…)
According to a recently released study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project (www.pewinternet.org) search engines are popular, but ads and paid results are confusing for most searchers…According to the report (available on the site in PDF format), 92% of those individuals polled felt confident about their ability to effectively use the search engines with over half saying they are “very confident” in their skills.
The study compares the Internet to television, stating that although most consumers can tell the difference between regular programming and infomercials — and they can tell the difference between reported stories and ads in traditional print media, that just over a third could differentiate between paid listings and the “organic” listings in search engines.
So, as much as I work with Internet marketing and as much as I watch the trends as they constantly change and remain in flux… (more…)
My Discoveries on StumbleUpon
