I am pleased to finally say there is a Wilmington, NC Search Engine Optimization (SEO) MeetUp group now in the Port City!
The other day I was asked what are my favorite plugins for Wordpress, especially for SEO. Well, although I posted this on another site, I thought I would also post it here. These are among my favorites for now, I am sure more will come out. Plugins are always evolving, just like the internet! Enjoy…
For SEO & Fun I recommend (And Use):
Cross Linker - Allows keywords to automatically hyperlink to other
sites (Anchor text to your other sites)
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cross-linker/
SEO All in one pack - Allows easy editing of meta info, permalink
edits…..This is to me a critical plugin.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
Sociable Plugin - By far the best plugin for social network sharing,
email and print buttons.
http://yoast.com/wordpress/sociable/
Comment Relish - Send an e-mail message to users who comment on your
website who have never commented before. The message dispatched to the
user is defined within the plugin’s preferences.
http://www.justinshattuck.com/comment-relish/
Dagon Site Map - **Important..This is by far the easiest to install
site map.
http://www.dagondesign.com/articles/sitemap-generator-plugin-for-word…
Feedburner Feedsmith - Access your original WordPress feeds and
redirects them to your FeedBurner feed
http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/topic.py?topic=13252
SEO friendly Images - Automatically updates all images with proper ALT
and TITLE attributes
http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/seo-friendly-images
Absolutely. With the nation struggling in real estate sales, please real estate people, please do not roll over and abandon marketing efforts. With online searching increasing 25-26% every year, now is the time to look to the internet more than ever before.
Well then, what opportunities are there to bulk up your web presence? Below I list several websites, and measurable products you really need to consider to keep a step ahead of your competitors. Take special note of the first one, blogs! I read an interesting article that talks about the wisdom of starting a real estate blog. In this article, it refers to a CNN article that gave stats that show leads and sales increased as a result of real estate blogs.
Ok, so lets get with the tips, and sites to advertise on. (Keep in mind this is a partial list, I will add to this as time goes by)
I wanted to bring special attention to Realty.com. Recently they advertised that you could submit your agent information, and receive a great backlink from them. If any agents are reading this, you need to get over there and get a link! If you have a website or blog, backlinks are critical for site to gain credibility with the search engines.
For example, I recently submitted a client of mine there, and the great thing is they let you choose anchor text. (keywords hyper-linked) Take a look at the free ad I made advertising waterfront communities in Wilmington, North Carolina
This is crucial for optimizing your real estate marketing campaigns, so do it! If you need help with any of these suggestions, please leave a comment, I would be happy to help!
Here you go…….
Need more help? Go to our website and let me know what you need!
If you are in the online retail business, and have an internal search engine, have you thought about ‘mining’ your own search results keywords & phrases? Let me tell you, you can strike gold with a plethora of qualified keywords, from human results, actual visitors to your site.
A couple of weeks ago while attending SMX, I was eating breakfast before the session and struck up a conversation with a gentleman named Ed Hoffman, VP of sales at Sli-Systems. This company is incredible; basically they utilize a patented search technology that actually “learns” from past site searches to your site by tracking visitors’ search queries and click thrus, then this system compiles data that gives you relevant search results based on popularity. I was shocked! I never even thought about doing this. This is a gold mine of targeted search results, in your own back pocket!
After researching this further, I found that when people use your search engine, they expect to find what they came there to look for on the first page, or they’ll abandon the site. Sli-Systems claims their learning search technology can help keep people on your site 95% of the time by learning behaviors of search terms, then making keyword adjustments to your backend, or content management system. I believe it!
One of my clients is a large e-commerce site, and as an experiment I got the IT guy to download its search engine data…GOLD! You would not believe the words, phrases, misspellings, part numbers; you name it, I found gold, gold, gold! Do you realize how valuable this is for PPC? SEO? When I compared some of these terms with their PPC terms, there were several ‘nuggets’ I never thought of! Goodness, I feel like I won the lottery…
However, I do not have the patented Learning Search advanced search technology that SLI-Sytems has, so it may not be long until I contact ED. If I were you, I would visit their site.
At SMX - Day 2 - , Ty and I were reminded of the importance of testing site content and it’s importance. (It is easy to forget some of these elements). Multivariate testing was stressed big time on day 2, to learn all you can about your audience and what combinations of site copy and images generate the most customer conversions, which is the bottom line.
You know about this free tool, we just forget sometimes to utilize it in our site analysis’. www.google.com/websiteoptimizer
What exactly is the golden triangle, and how do you get there?
The Golden triangle as explained is a new term attached to getting results in the top positions of the SERP but with a twist. What’s the twist?
Video, Images, Blogs!
Blended search has drastically changed the landscape of how companies and search marketers will want to proceed with their marketing efforts. Eye tracking studies have recently shown tremendous changes in how people react to blended search.
In fact, one speaker today showed that users scanning patterns changed big time when an image was shown in the results page, their eyes immediately dropped to the image!
You see, search engines (MSN is actually best) are now including blog articles, news items, images, and videos in the SERP’s, so if you want to be in the Golden triangle today, you NEED to start focusing on getting your blog articles, images, news or videos indexed so as to hopefully have a dominating appearance in this area.
Just to give you an idea of this new type of search results, notice what Google now includes in what’s called “Universal Search.”
They consider and blend results from news, videos, images, local, maps, and book search engines to appear in the SERP.
Here are some quick tips to initiate a blended search campaign:
How do you submit videos? They brought out some good pointers below.
For Videos, consider the following:
Why so much emphasis on video?? Check this out.
Stay tuned for the top ten list of tricks for blended search. Im out of blogging breath!
I wish I had the blogging speed of my colleague over at Hippo Internet Marketing….
[Addendum by Tim]: As Blended Search rapidly moves in upon us, some at SMX did question whether the “Golden Triangle” could become antiquated in the future as people viewing SERP’s begin looking for (and expecting) more universal and dynamic results. Many advertisers and marketers are already wondering if the “Golden Triangle” eye scanning pattern will be changing dramatically.
What does this potentially mean? 1) If your site is ranked on the first page for your keywords and blended search results are at the bottom of the page, you might actually lose traffic. At the same time, if you are at the bottom of the page and the blended search results are close to (or next to you) you might see a boost in traffic simply because of the visual association. Interesting! 2) For those on top of vertical search, we are in a unique position to be ahead of the game. With the use of video, blog or press releases, etc., this can help to get ranked extremely well, even if not at the top of SERP’s. If you haven’t been keeping up with vertical search, it’s time to start checking it out.
Enquire Research has a lot of information on eye-tracking, including some nice whitepapers that are more extensive on this fascinating subject. I look forward to learning more about this. Here is a link to their site to make it easy for you to find, let us know what you think.
http://www.enquiroresearch.com/eye-tracking-examples.aspx
Well, it’s just a few days away, and I can hardly wait. My brother (Tim) and I will be attending Search Marketing Expo West in Santa Clara California. Today I spent time reviewing the sessions I want to attend, so many good ones though!! I want to spend much of my time in sessions related to online videos, local search, and pay per click tips and tricks.
I will try my best to keep up on the blogging, I have several friends that want to hear all the current trends. A good friend and colleague Corey Creed at Hippo Internet Marketing wants me to key in on the latest talk of Web 3.0, and the secret search engine!
Are there any topics you would like for me to take special note of? Please let me know!
