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How To Make Searchers Click – The Meta Description Tag

08-Gabe-76

I was recently asked how to control the text that gets displayed along with each link in the search results.  This is a good question, this text is your chance to tell searchers exactly what to expect from your site and entice them to click on the link and visit your page. The highlighted yellow text in the image below is an example of this text at work:

 

phoenix-serp

 

So how does Google generate this text?  One of two ways.

 

1:  Most often, Google grabs this text from the meta description of the page.  The meta description is a snippet of code placed in the <head> of your website.  You will have the best results from writing a clear sentence or two that accurately describes your page or article.  Keep the length of your meta description short since there will be a limited number of characters displayed in the search results and adding additional keywords to the meta description wont give you any extra value.  Each page of your website should also have its own unique meta description.  Here's a snapshot of the highlighted code showing the meta description of this Phoenix page:

 

phoenix-code 

 

To add a meta description to your website, insert the following code into the <HEAD></HEAD> section of your website:

<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Your descriptive sentence or two goes here.">

 

2:  Google will sometimes display 1 or 2 sentences directly from the content of the website.  This will happen when a website either does not have a meta description OR if the keywords of the search phrase are in the content but not the meta description.  At that point Google will grab the text from the sentences surrounding the keywords in the body of the website to display.

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posted by Gabe Hoggarth @ 2:01 PM   0 Comments

Linking for SEO - Tips and Secrets

Some Google History
Google began in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page, who was soon joined by Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California.  They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page. Their search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine.
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Links are the highways that Google and other search engines travel in an effort to determine the popularity, relationship and relevancy of every page and website they come across.

Very generally speaking if a website has a large amount of links pointing to it search engines can assume that others will also find that resource to be valuable. Search engines have evolved from simply counting the number of links (They now look at quality of links, originality of content and other trust factors) but this basic idea still exists.

There are two types of links; "external" and "internal"
An internal link is a hyperlink that links to another page on the SAME website.
An external link is a hyperlink that links to another page on a DIFFERENT website.
External Links SEO
Internal Links SEO Internal links will generally make up your navigation, links to your articles and blog posts, and all the pages on your website. An optimized internal link structure helps search engines efficiently index your content and check for updates, along with ranking your pages for the best keywords.

Optimizing your internal link structure includes having proper categories and search friendly content, featuring your best pages by linking to them more, and taking a look at the anchor text of each link.

Anchor text is the visible text that you click in a link. In this example link: Real Estate SEO, the words "Real Estate SEO" are the anchor text. Search engines associate the anchor text of a link with the page the link leads to (In this example our SEO website WorkingTheMagic.com) and will begin ranking our site for those keywords.

External links on your website send visitors to other websites.  External links on other people's websites to yours are called "backlinks" for you, also called incoming links, inward links and inlinks.

To improve rankings in the search engines the key is to get relevant, quality links from respected websites to yours. The more relevant backlinks the better, especially if those backlinks contain the keywords you are trying to rank for in the anchor text like "Seattle real estate" or "Phoenix homes for sale".

I'll cover some effective linking strategies in future posts and for now subscribe to this blog.

Related Posts:
Evaluate Your Google Competition
8 Tips: Online Lead Capture
SEO to Capture a Major Metro

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posted by Gabe Hoggarth @ 11:21 AM   3 Comments

8 Tips: Online Lead Capture

What are you doing to capture leads with your website right now?
Your website should be using 3, 4, 5+ ways to capture leads and convert traffic into contacts and ultimately closes. Assuming you are generating some traffic through your site, these are some of the best practices in online real estate lead generation that your competitor is already using.

1. Solid IDX Solution - IDX stands for Internet Data Exchange and is a property search site which allows the public to conduct searches of approved Multiple Listing Service properties in a certain area. For every client I have worked with their IDX platform is their #1 lead generating resource. There are quite a few IDX options out there and not every product is available in every city so finding the right solution for the right price may take some time. What I look for besides availability and price is a usable intuitive map search and the ability to integrate the product seemlessly into a site. Here are a few platforms I have had good experiences with:
2. Property Request Forms - Not every visitor has the time or desire to browse all the listings and search the map. Some people just want to tell you what they want and have you get back to them with the details; property request forms are great for this. You, or your web guy/gal, should create a simple website form asking for their desired type of property, time frame for purchasing and current state in the buying process along with contact information. Put some links on your site to this "Property Request Form". You know what types of property area desirable in your area, create multiple similar forms for "Waterfront Property Request Form", "Condo Request Form", "Commercial Request Form", etc..

3. Visible Phone Number and Email on Every Page - This is self-explanatory but I am always surprised when I have to click around to find contact information for an agent on their website. Don't make it hard for your visitors to contact you. I'm not saying to put your photo on every page, but a phone number and email should be easy to find.

4. Contact Form's' - There should be some sort of lead capture on every page. On your content pages make it easy for visitors to get in touch with you about questions or comments. Contact forms (short ones asking for only a name, email, phone and question/comment) can easily be added to your side navigation or at the end of articles.

5. Relocation Packets and Baited Content - Relocation packets, neighborhood resources, in-depth school reports, and useful area information like maps and tourist information area great offers to entice visitors to fill out a contact form.

7. Available Online Agent - We have experimented with this in the past with mixed results but it is another avenue to explore. A Google search for "live chat software" brings up a mix of different options that allow your visitors to engage in a live chat or click to call features directly from your site.

8. Newsletter Email Capture - If you are an expert in your area on something it may make sense to begin building your email list for a weekly/monthly newsletter. This can be a great way to reconnect with past visitors and bring them back to your site month after month which can be helpful to increase your site traffic and search rankings. If you are blogging already, the blog posts you are already writing make a good base for your newsletter without the need for much additional content.

For more information on driving substantial amounts of traffic to your website by ranking at the top of the search engines visit WorkingTheMagic.com, a Real Estate SEO company.

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posted by Gabe Hoggarth @ 3:32 PM   2 Comments

Flash Websites and SEO

Adobe Flash is one way to add media and rich Internet applications to a website. Done right flash is visually appealing and encourages a high level of interactivity with visitors making a website "sticky".

The problem with flash is that search engines like Google and Yahoo choke on understanding what content and links are contained within it. Because of this limitation, when incorporating flash into a design my recommendation is to do so sparingly to enhance an already search engine friendly website. Websites designed entirely of flash and not optimized correctly are completely invisible to the search engine robots whose job it is to determine what a website is about (To get a better idea of how search engine robots "see" a page try the Search Engine Robot Simulator). Being invisible to search engine robots will have a negative impact on a websites search rankings.

Optimizing Flash Websites
So we know that search engines cannot easily understand website content and links contained in flash. To optimize around this problem, code specifically for search engines to read must be embedded on all pages containing flash. This requires a bit more work and some technical skill or a designer/SEO professional with some JavaScript knowledge. Embedded content should contain identical information to what is already contained - hidden - in the flash. I won't get too specific on the technical details of doing this but more information can be found on the Google Code website under SWFObject as a standards-friendly method to embed and optimize Flash content.

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posted by Gabe Hoggarth @ 4:13 PM   0 Comments

Blogger vs ActiveRain for SEM

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.

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posted by Glenn Sanford @ 9:42 AM   0 Comments

CMS for Real Estate... Blog for Opinions...

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!

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posted by Glenn Sanford @ 5:19 PM   0 Comments

Who Visits Your Website? Use Google Analytics

How did your visitors find your website?
Who stayed and for how long?
What pages are performing the best/worst?
These are a few important questions to ask yourself about the ongoing health of your website and Google Analytics has the answers. Best of all, it's free.

Below is a recent screen shot of the Dashboard of one of our Google Analytics accounts for May 17th - June 16th. All data can be viewed specific to any time period (Hourly, daily, monthly, yearly) and then compared against historical data.





Because it can be overwhelming at first to try to make sense of all the available information here are a few key terms to pay attention to.
  • Visits tells you how many visits there were to your page. A visit is defined as a page view when that user has viewed no other page on your site in the past half hour.
  • Pageviews tells how many times the pages on your site have been viewed.
  • Pages/Visit tells how many pages, on average, users view when they come to your site.
  • Bounce Rate shows what percentage of users left after viewing only one page on your site. The lower the better.
  • Avg. Time on Site shows how long each user spent on your site.
  • % New Visits shows what percentage of your users have not visited your site before.

How to start using Google Analytics

Step 1 - Visit the Google Analytics Sign Up page and create a new account.
Step 2 - Once you have an account, use your new name and password to log in at the main Google Analytics page. You will be shown a step-by-step setup wizard for configuring your new account.
Step 3 - At the end of the setup wizard Google will give you a snippet of code. Copy and paste the tracking code to your pages directly above the < /body > tag (Note: The code must be placed on every page that you want to track). Once the modified pages are uploaded, Google will start tracking your website's traffic.

This is just scratching the surface of the capability of Google Analytics, I will be posting on advanced analytic techniques including how to track and improve lead conversion in the near future.

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posted by Gabe Hoggarth @ 10:51 AM   0 Comments

Keyword Density and SEO

One of the first things I did when I first started to work on my own sites was to look at the sites that ranked at the top of the search engines for terms that I thought made the most sense. By using the Google Toolbar I was able to do a search for a term. Look at the result and click on the highlighter button on the toolbar and I would see how many times the search term showed up on the site that I was looking at. What I found is that the typical real estate site would have the city name and the term real estate strewn throughout the index page. In fact though keyword density is not an exact science I came to the conclusion that a term needed to show up at least 30 different times on a page in some combination of terms relating to the keywords that you were optimizing around.

Obviously Keyword Density is just one component in SEO, however its important to make sure that your content which should flow well for the reader should also have enough references to the keywords you want to show up for so that Google or any other search engine can be sure that they are sending readers to a site that is relevant to the search that they made. If you aren't sure about what keywords you should be optimizing around try using SEO Digger on your competitors websites and seeing what keywords they are optimized for as well as the projected traffic and ranking for those keywords. This will at least give you an idea of what keywords your competitors deem important and you might find some hidden gems in their keywords that you can use on your site as well.

So class, remember there will be a test on Keyword Density... It's a test that the search engines will do on your website to make sure they are sending their constituents to the right site. :D

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posted by Glenn Sanford @ 10:38 AM   0 Comments

Black Hat vs White Hat SEO

For the last couple of days I've been reviewing ActiveRain a bit and reading many of the SEO related blogs there. It seems that most of the SEO commentary is relating to blogging as the primary vehicle for generating traffic to a website. I did read a bit of a blog from Mary McKnight who definitely does a bit of blogging on ActiveRain as well as I'm sure other places as well and she had a post on Black Hat SEO. Anyway I thought I would post a bit on Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO.

First of all I wouldn't term it Black Hat vs. White Hat. I would look at it a bit more from an organic perspective of what works and what doesn't. Blogging aka Content is critical for any SEO strategy to be effective. If you don't deliver on the content relative to the ways people are finding your site Google and the other search engines will figure it out. The bottom line is make sure that your content matches the message you have given the Search Engines when you do your SEO work.

Backlinks is also a critical element however if your back links are from Casino sites or pharmacy sites and you are a real estate website you are confusing the search engines. Make sure that your back links back up your content. As a real estate professional you want links back from other real estate professionals. Also don't ignore local content providers as well.

Build up a newsletter following. By bringing people back to your site even if its from emailing out a newsletter this yields traffic and the Toolbars which Google and Yahoo provide give them valuable information relating to how popular your website is. If you can get people returning to your site time and time again you will be more relevant then your competition. I would recommend that any newsletter only tease the client while having the balance of the content on your own website.

Don't be a link farm. Now this relates to back links. However you don't want to hand out valuable real estate on your website for links to other sites that are unrelated. Who you link to reflects on you. As a real estate website linking out to a coffee website (no matter how good their coffee is) will reduce your relevancy. The only proviso is if it is a local coffee company which lists on their site references to the community both you and the coffee company are in and they are linking back to you.

Change up your content from time to time. Though not as critical as some of the other items above, changing up the content and the look and feel of your site will create a bit of buzz. Remember the GE study about making minor changes to the work environment. By making minor changes you can increase your stickiness and most likely your lead capture.

Things that can get you in trouble:

Hidden Content - Using content the same color as the background. You need to make sure that there is contrast between the background colors and the text color. I haven't seen a site get caught personally for this but you should be able to write content that you can display that will help you and not hurt you. One proviso is frames. Google suggests the use of the noframes tag and including content from your frames in that tag. You might get some heat from SEO people who call it hidden text, however I can tell you that it isn't penalized, however do make sure that the noframes text follows the content of your actual site.

Spamming Weblogs... Okay I've done this in the past and again didn't get in trouble for it. I've changed my way (basically I figured out how to do it better and faster ethically). However back about five years ago spamming weblogs was touted as a way to get a rapid amount of links. We had one site that we owned that got blacklisted by Yahoo for the practice. Obviously you don't want to get blacklisted by any search engine if you can help it... BTW: This is the only time we have been blacklisted for any practice and we've tried a lot of stuff over the years.

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posted by Glenn Sanford @ 12:31 AM   1 Comments

Template vs Custom Sites for SEO

A few years ago I was invited to be part of the Internet Mastermind in Austin Texas hosted by Gary Keller and Keller Williams International as well as subsequently being one of the three agent members of the Agent Technology Council providing input to Keller Williams on the technology initiatives being rolled out under the eAgency initiatives. One of the big debates that was going on at the time was relating to providing an infrastructure whereby agents would be able to generate a reasonable amount of business via their KW provided template websites. Essentially as a company Keller Williams is mandated through their consortium fees ($10 / month / agent) to provide websites and other tech services to agents. During my tenure on the ATC, KW decided it needed to provide a rapidly deployable web presence for agents as well as an IDX solution to agents as the basics for their business.

This is obviously a great first start for agents, however ultimately ambitious agents will need to look beyond what they receive for the $10/month and look at where else they can invest their monies to generate business online.

One of the ongoing debates which continues to take place is, "Template vs. Semi-Custom vs. Custom" website as it relates to a site that will be found via the search engine.

Ironically it's not a cut and dry debate. Most SEO experts in the real estate space will agree that a Homes.com site is not a great site to do SEO on, however if you do a search for "Southern California Real Estate" you will find a site franandrowena.com which ranks close to the top of the listings with a Homes.com site. In fact a few years ago they were #1 and I suspect that if they did a bit of work even with a Homes.com site that they could move it back to number 1.

Advanced Access tends to get a bad wrap as well however if you do a search for "Phoenix Real Estate" in Google you'll find a site of Eileen Roberson ranking #1 for that search term. That being said for Advanced Access and Homes.com both of these templates have significant limitations partially because the balance of their site is database driven and the customizability with regard to look, feel and the adding of widgets to the site is rather limited.

Of course with a template site your costs relatively limited and if worked properly with a lot of work you can in fact make it competitive with other real estate websites in your market however you are also to some extent locked in on a long term basis to the template. Not that you can't move, it's just that the indexing of the URIs in the search engines are of a unique nature that ultimately your traffic will likely drop significantly when you move from your template website to a custom website.

My preference is for a custom website. It may cost a bit more to develop a custom website, however your ability to create relevant pages, add content, add things like Blogs, YouTube Videos, Chat and other functionality is limited only by ones imagination. Young web designers are relatively inexpensive in terms of actual dollars spent for site generation however in many cases you'll need to write the copy and of course critique how the site is put together.

The real magic though is the SEO indexing of the additional pages on your website and your ability to redesign any page without losing the indexing of those pages as you would if you ever changed template providers. If designed properly these pages will be rapidly indexed in the search engines and if relevant to your real estate market with the proper content and functionality should result in decent traffic and lead acquisition even on these sub pages. Since it is likely that your site won't be database driven as far as the content part of your site is concerned the pages will tend to index better in the different search engines.
Check back often for more tips and insights on Website Design and SEO Strategies.

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posted by Glenn Sanford @ 1:32 PM   1 Comments

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