Every once in a while I come across a new SEO tool that works exactly how I want it to and it opens the door for a lot of great ideas.  This is one of those tools.  The people over at TagCrowd.com have put together a simple way to convert any webpage, copied text, or document into a visualized tag cloud.  Tag clouds are really just a visual depiction of the word content of a site, the more times a word is repeated the larger the word appears. 

 

What this allows you to do is take a large body of text, or an entire website at a time, and instantly generate a visual representation of all the content.  Generate a tag cloud of your own website to analyze.  When optimizing for a specific search term it’s important that those words show up prominently in your tag cloud.  Notice in the tag cloud to the right of our website the most prominent words are “real”, “estate” and “SEO”, we are actively optimizing for the search term “real estate SEO”.  If your desired keywords aren’t showing up prominently, reworking your content for a higher keyword density (Using your keywords in your content more often) makes sense.

 

Generate a tag cloud for your top ranked competitors websites.  Are there prominent words showing up that you haven’t thought about optimizing for?  Hope you have fun with this tool like I have, the usefulness of it extends even beyond SEO.

 

Related posts:

• Keyword Density and SEO
• Keyword Research – More Tools – Google Sets
• Tools for the SEO Trade

Labels: blogger, Blogging, Content, SEO Tools

A couple of days ago I mentioned SeoDigger as a way to evaluate what keywords your competition is ranked for, the amount of traffic those keywords are driving to their website and the ranking of those keywords on Google.

Labels: Content, SEO Strategies, SEO Tools

Having worked with a number of blogging platforms over the years including Wordpress, ActiveRain (for Real Estate Blogging), and Blogger which is the back end for the blog here on Working The Magic I am blown away at the difference between using Blogger vs. ActiveRain.

Now ActiveRain is awesome for the amount of actual readership and commentary on posts in relatively short order so as a social network its very powerful and very targeted, but in terms of the blog posts in AR getting cached by Google I've found it to be very unsatisfactory. There are probably a number of reasons for this, not the least is the shear volume of posts taking place on AR. Google will only dig so deep into a site before it moves on to another site, so unless you are a featured agent or have a featured post I suspect that Google will not have a good way of getting to your post to cache it in the first place.

I've blogged a bit on ActiveRain for a couple of years and most recently this past week as part of an overall PR campaign to launch our Real Estate SEO Company and have received some great responses from AR participants on our business, so that part has been a success, but looking back at the posts that I've put on since I started blogging on AR I noticed that none of the blog posts have been cached by Google in the conventional way. Meaning I normally can't go to the post and then pull the cache from my Google Toolbar. What that ultimately means is that AR is not as effective in getting my keywords into Google and for my SEM (Search Engine Marketing) efforts.

Now if you contrast that to the blog on Working The Magic, what is quite interesting is that using Blogger we are getting our posts to show up in the Google cache within a few hours to a couple of days. Even though the blog itself is hosted on our own website, we use Blogger to ultimately generate the blog and ftp the blog with all the navigation up to our website. Since Blogger is a Google company the blog posts go immediately into the Google cache or in relatively short order which is what we ultimately want since many of the long tail searches that result from the blog post will bring potential clients back to our blog and hopefully learn about how we can help them achieve top rankings in the search engines.

If you check out the post prior to this one which is CMS for Real Estate... Blog for Opinions... and then look at the Google cache for that post you'll notice that it has already been spidered by Google. This is way cool since as a brand new site (less then 40 days old) much of the rest of the site has not been cached by Google however by using Blogger we are able to get a lot of keyword rich content into the Google cache which means when Google chews it all up and is searching for somewhere to send their visitors we have a reach chance of getting that traffic.

Obviously once we have done a lot of our SEO activities on the site this content will be valued even more highly in Google and then watch out traffic.

Labels: Blogging, Content, Google, SEO Strategies, Website Design

CMS - Content Management System vs. Blogging for Real Estate

Okay... I'll let you in a little secret... It's much easier to blog on SEO then it is to blog on Real Estate. First of all blogging is about having an opinion, making an argument and backing it up with content. It's hard to take a controversial position on real estate. I know. I've tried. Now that's not to say there aren't agents who have a particular bent and can find something worthwhile to blog about in real estate however generally speaking when you blog about about a home you don't want to alienate potential clients in your marketplace. No matter how much of a dog a property might be or how overpriced it might be its hard to put that into a blog online. It's not that it isn't true, its that the seller might get bent out of shape and to some extent go after you and/or your office. Who wants to justify with their broker their opinions especially if the broker was hoping to get that listing in house with another agent? I know I don't and I didn't.

So blogging is a bit difficult for real estate other then stating the facts... That's where a CMS comes in. Instead of taking an opinion why not simply build out a site which essentially acts as an alternative to the Chamber of Commerce website. Publish photos, events and activities, polls about stuff going on in the area and generally be a ambassador to the world for your community. If you take a look at our Birch Bay Washington Community portal website you'll see a lot of content relating to the community at large. In fact we have been so successful with the portal that if you search Google for "Birch Bay" you'll find that our site ranks #1 above the chamber of commerce... Believe me the Chamber wasn't happy about this and probably still isn't, but quite honestly I'm just better at internet marketing then the volunteers at the Chamber. Though not ranked quite as high our Blaine Washington portal is also ranked above the local chamber in Google as well. I remember a few years ago the Blaine Chamber actually called me in and they tried to strong arm me into giving up my domain name Blaine.net to the Chamber.

Back on topic though, a community portal that is well designed will give you an authority site which can then link to your real estate website. In addition its much easier to post on local events and activities then it is to blog on real estate topics generally speaking... Blogging in real estate can sometimes feel like cutting off the hand that feeds you, so in lieu of blogging building out a community portal with a CMS makes more sense. You might even be able to sell some advertising on your CMS as well... It's small money compared to the real estate you will sell, but it may offset or pay for someone to write content for your site.

We've tried a lot of CMS platforms. I've used Joomla, phpNuke, phpWiki, phpWebsite, Wordpress (technically a blogging platform), Xoops, and what we are using here (Blogger). Ultimately phpWebsite has really been the platform which we like the best. Out of the box it does most of the functions that you would expect a CMS to do including events calendar, photo albums, content pages, sub-pages, search, registration etc... What it doesn't do well that some other platforms do better is SEO friendly URLs, however the search engines have cached the results of many of the pages just the same...

The portal that we have done the most work on is for Bellingham Washington and that is http://www.bellingham.net/ . Check it out... I hope this gives you some ideas... Back to work!

Labels: Content, SEO Strategies, SEO Tools, Website Design