An SEO Update…

My guess is that there is still a lot of interest from real estate professionals on how to use SEO (search engine optimization) to drive (free!) traffic to your site. With that in mind, I thought I’d keep people updated on the little SEO experiment I started a week ago. As you’ll likely see, the results so far have been somewhat mixed.

First the worst news: Google dropped RCG out of the simple search [Seattle Real Estate] (at least on the first few pages). RCG has been in the top 10 for at least a year, so this is quite surprising! (Over the past year, this term has driven about 3% of the new users to RCG, which might not seem like a lot, but it is the most dominant driver of traffic to the site. No other phrase even comes close.

Better news is that after eliminating some of the pages and focusing on only a few tabs on the top of the page, the results for searching like [agent recommendations] has been much better. (RCG is #1 on Google!)

Also of interest, it took less than a week for RCG to now appear on the front page of some obvious searches like [Seattle Real Estate blog] on both MSN and Yahoo. I think this bodes well for the future as these sites do a better job indexing RCG thanks to the keyword and title changes I made.

For comparison purposes, I’ve decided to see how the site has changed using these days:

  • Pre SEO changes: Nov 12th through the 16th
  • Post SEO changes: Dec 10th through the 14th

Considering the changes in the status on the big search engines on the big search terms, not much as changed in terms of overall traffic:

  • Google. Pre: 1738, Post: 1568
  • MSN. Pre: 41, Post: 42
  • Yahoo. Pre: 28, Post: 25
  • Ask. Pre: 22, Post: 15
  • Technorati. Pre: 21, Post: 34

The overall Google traffic decreased 10%, while there was virtually no change from the other search engines. I included Technorati thinking that would be the “control” that wouldn’t be affected by SEO, but of course, that is the ONLY site that increased substantially! Go Figure!

Permeating Self-Promotion

Here’s a few stories from around the real estate blogsphere I found interesting…

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Phil is obviously have some fun in Boise, although others may find his anatomy of a listing he won’t take more relevant to recent RCG conversations…

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Jonathan sends out a blogger’s prayer and some really nice words about RCG.. Thanks!

Fortunately, I ran into Ardell DellaLogia, her blog, and the Rain City Guide. Between her advice and her blog, and the larger Seattle based blog to which she contributed, I got a sense of what a blog could be – articulate, meaningful, educational. And that’s what I decided I wanted and what I’ve strived for, with mixed success.

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The xBroker is clearly and definitely over-the-top. Yet, despite the self-promotion that permeates all of his posts, I really like this guy. In emails and blog posts, he’s come across as someone who is definitely informed and wants to communicate his knowledge… There’s definitely a there, there…

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Tech alert: Greg Linden turned me on to a very interesting post by Google’s Steve Yegge, where he looks at the management of Google through the lens of the Agile programming philosophy. The story would have been good enough, but then Microsoft’s Dare Obasanjo made it better by comparing the ideas to the (failed) management structure at Enron… All three posts are worth reading (but make sure you have some time!).

More Bed Hopping with the Competition

  1. Matt Goyer, of Urbnlivn fame, just accepted a position at Redfin. I wonder if he’ll keep up urbnlivn, or quit in favor of the Redfin blog like Rob. Just reading that article about Rob reminds me how much things have changed in the past six months…
  2. Anthony Allan put together a nice post on five steps to Realtor nirvana.
  3. Tim shows the Seattle Bubble is more popular than Rain City Guide! And wants a front-page link from RCG in the same post! I like Merv’s approach to giving site stats better (i.e. keep me out of it!) 🙂
  4. Meanwhile, the classic over-achiever (who happens to be a damn good writer) follows Tim’s lead today and shows me up by taking my idea (list of 10) and doing it better
  5. Niki let me know about the massive updates that he just unrolled at HomeThinking. He’s got a pretty comprehensive database of sold listings and my understanding is that he is attempting to get people to review agents for as many transactions as possible. It might sound unintuitive for agents to support a site that allows users to comment on them, but Nike (and Mike of Altos Research) seem convinced. Niki also mentioned a bunch of interesting features including a GeoRSS feed of his data so that it can be syndicated far and wide.
  6. I also noticed that HomeThinking is syndicating Real Time Pricing Trends from Altos Research in selected markets. Here’s their chart for Seattle:
  7. Prices for SEATTLE

  8. Osman writes about an interesting “green” development in Aurora, CO that would “encompass nearly 3,000 housing units, 1.7 million SQFT of retail, and 2.8 million SQFT of office space” if fully built out!
  9. Remembering Katrina.
  10. Google now allows you to download and print out old books that they’ve scanned from some of the nations largest libraries. Very cool. Not only that, but they recently introduced a news archive search that has scanned 200 years worth of news. Wow!
  11. Not only is Noah is off enjoying a trip in Europe at this moment, but he should be officially mawwied by now. Congratulations!

10 things I learned from my stats tonight

It’s been a long while since I posted about traffic on RCG. Two reasons come to mind… One, I’ve been swamped in starting my new job and never got around to updating my excel sheet and two, I knew we weren’t seeing much growth, so what’s the point 🙂

However, I took a little time out tonight to play around with RCG stats and I was actually surprised (in a good way!).

First I’ll give two charts and then I’ll explain what I learned from my research. The first chart looks at visitors and the search engines that they are coming from, while the second chart compares the growth in unique visitors to the total visitors to give an idea of how many people are returning to the site on a regular basis…

[photopress:unique_visitors.png,full,centered]

[photopress:visitors_per_month.png,full,centered]

  1. While traffic may not be growing exponentially any more, we’re still gaining new unique visitors at a relatively healthy clip. (If you take out all the Zillow-hype related traffic in February of this year, then the chart would look a lot more like exponential growth! 🙂 )
  2. Google provides a majority of our unique visitors (almost 15K hits last month alone) and far outweighs any other traffic source (it is all organic traffic as I don’t spend any money on AdSense).
  3. MSN and Yahoo still have not figured out how to parse through the glut of Seattle real estate content in order to drive more traffic to RCG! 🙂
  4. The ratio of total visitors to unique visitors has always hovered between 3.0 and 4.0. This tells me a fair number of people continue to return to RCG and it increases as we attract more unique visitors. It also tells me we haven’t found the viral “secret sauce” that causes either a ton of unique visitors (who could care less about a majority of our content) or a super sticky feature that causes new visitors to come back at a higher rate.
  5. 61% are using Internet Explorer, 23% are using Firefox. The rest go using “Unknown” (8%), Safari (4%), and others…
  6. The top 10 search phrases (like [Seattle Real Estate] and [real estate blog] account for a combined 7.2 of all search engine traffic. The other 92.8% of search engine traffic comes from more obscure phrases. (Think Long Tail!)
  7. Traffic is highest around lunch (between 11am and 2pm).
  8. Mondays get hit the hardest while Saturdays are the slowest days on RCG.
  9. Seattle Bubble (404 hits), Ardell (399), and Bloodhound (384) are the three blogs that sent the most traffic to RCG in August!
  10. Google analytics tells me that of all the unique visitors in August, 1,333 had been to RCG more than 200 times!!! (4,710 unique visitors have been to the site over 25 times).

Microsoft vs. Google a real estate perspective

[photopress:mac.jpg,full,alignright]On a side note, nothing to do with the topic, isn’t that MAC advertising campaign fabulous! Doesn’t everyone want to run out and get a MAC when they see that commerical? Of course I can’t get the mls on it, or at least not easily, so I hate them. But that has got to be the best advertising campaign I’ve seen in a long time. Doesn’t everyone want to be that guy on the right? Heck, I’m a woman and even I want to be that guy on the right.

On to Microsoft vs. Google. So far my Google clients have been able to negotiate significantly higher savings in real estate transactions than my Microsoft clients. Of course I’m dealing with a very small portion of the Microsoft poplulation, even though I have more Microsoft clients than Google clients.

Microsoft has a contract that kicks back 35% of the real estate commission when a new employee is hired, even if they don’t buy a house for a year to 18 months after they are hired. Perhaps Microsoft doesn’t get all of that 35%, but the agent who has to pay it is still unable to negotiate with the buyer, nor are they as able, at 65%, to resolve issues in the transaction using commission dollars. This agreement that the agent pay 35% to Microsoft also limits the employee with regard to agent selection.

I recently had a call from a Microsoft employee’s wife who is being transferred. She was checking online and trying to pick an agent she felt comfortable with and happened upon me. I told her that she really needed to check with her husband and his employer, as I didn’t think she was totally free to pick an agent of her choice. I told her I might be willing to match the 35%, but she would likely need to try the assigned agent first, before suggesting she wanted someone other than the assigned agent.

Now these programs where an agent is assigned to an employee are, of course, beneficial. These programs have been around for a very, very long time. I myself did tons of relocations with Siemens and other companies around the Country, utilizing this very same program. The 35% of the commission paid by the agent to the relocation company, helps pay for a portion of the relocation benefits such as movers, temporary housing, and other benefits.

In my experiments over the past few months with negotiating buyer agent fees, and a few other out of the box negotiations, I have been able to transfer $20,000 of pure cash advantages plus an additional $10,000, into transactions, with Google clients. More importantly, I have been able to treat the Google clients in these negotiations, identically to the way that I treat seller clients…which is my goal.

If Google does hire 1,000 new people, as Dustin suggests they might, I hope that they will not lock the employees into a program that skims off the employee’s ability to negotiate and ties their hands with regard to agent selection. Relocating is a very stressful and emotional process. Feeling hogtied at the same time, only adds to the stress. While many are happy to have someone ready, willing and able to assist, this benefit should be optional at best and should allow the employee more freedom of choice and no restriction with regard to fee negotiations.

Not trying to change Microsoft here…just trying to encourage Google not to follow suit. Once released from the 18 month requirement, I have been able to assist Microsoft employees and negotiate fees, but the Google guys are still way ahead for some reason in total dollars. Not sure why that is, I’ll have to ponder it when I do my year end round up of “the experiment”.

Since we are entering the Age of Transparency in the real estate transaction, kind of like The Age of Aquarius in my day when everone was stripping off their clothes, I do think that it should not be a surprise to anyone that there is an exchange of monies between the agent and a third party. That goes for any “purchase of a person”, see Zapped, that does not disclose to the person that they have been bought and sold.

Flaming for Ardell

There’s definitely a tech bent to today’s list…

  1. Starting off with Niki’s interesting take on the Reply.com launch. Niki runs Homethinking, a site dedicated to letting users review agents. I had a chance to talk with him at SF Connect over a beer (or two or three) and got to learn a fair bit about his site. It is definitely worth checking out as there is a lot to the backend of what he’s doing and it is not necessarily what you might fear (assuming you’re an agent!).
  2. Inside Google talks about a fun press release from Intermedia that talks to the snarky discussions that Galen and Robbie have been having around online office applications. Tech blogger Om Malik gives his reason for not using google’s new service.
  3. Others are asking if Google services are joined too tightly? I’d be really curious to get Robbie’s take on that.
  4. Thinking of Google, Ardell, does it help that Google could could be adding 1000 people in Bellevue? (via Greg)
  5. I’m not the only one thinking of Ardell… I noticed someone trying to start a flame war on Craigslist over Ardell (look for the post title: “Get the feeling Realtors read from a script?”)… It was great to see a few people come to her defense and unlike so much of the stuff over there, the flamewar never materialized.
  6. I’m all over microformats, so I was glad to see someone write this post about understanding microformats for the non-technical web professional or marketer. Most relevant to real estate is the hListing format currently being deployed by Edgeio.
  7. Watch out when Greg’s talking about rethinking everything. 🙂
  8. Also, considering Greg’s opinion on hosted blogging platforms is not exactly private knowledge, I thought he might enjoy this comic from Chris Pirillo
  9. The blogger from from hismove (a christian real estate network???) points out an interesting chart from the NY Times displaying the inflation adjusted home prices in the US since 1890.
  10. Not only are the For Sale By Locals people ready to launch, but these people are serious about going international. Interestingly, they will be launching their official site at a conference in Bolivia. Their temp site looks really bad in firefox, which doesn’t bode well for them in my mind, but considering the massive activity on their blog as of late, I’m definitely interested in seeing what they produce.

Top 10 reasons to ditch gMail for Microsoft

[photopress:BringItOn.jpg,full,alignright]OK, you knew I had to respond to this. I brought my flame proof suit. I used to work on Exchange, Outlook and Outlook Web Access when I was a ‘softie. Galen’s last post was very Roeper, and I’m going go Ebert on him. I have 3 sets of 3 words and 10 reasons for my buddy Galen.

The 3 set of 3 words
Windows Live Mail
Outlook Web Access
Bring It On


The 10 reasons

  1. So your cheap and use Firefox. Well I agree Hotmail sucks, but Windows Live Mail is damn near OWA good, does very well against gMail thank you very much.
  2. Try using gMail w/o internet access. Where’s the offline functionality? I’m sorry folks but Verizon EVDO and those T-Mobile hot spots aren’t everywhere yet. Have you tried using an AJAX app w/ a slow cellular net connection? (talk about a fate worse than water torture). Wanna gMail on a plane? Sorry, no can do. Until ClearWire takes over the world, a desktop / offline e-mail is a requirement for me.
  3. If you use POP/SMTP w/ Outlook and store your mail client side, your limited only by your computer’s hard drive space. (didn’t Google’s CEO say 2GB ought to be enough for anyone) 🙂
  4. That said, web e-mail is also a requirement for me. Which is why I use Outlook Web Access 2003. OWA still kicks the living snot out of Gmail (on IE anyway). Remember kids, the OWA team practically invented AJAX (they called it Remote Scripting back in 90s). They were the team that convinced the IE team to include an XMLHTTP object with the browser! Without them, there would be no gMail. That said, the FireFox version of OWA 2003 sucks. In partial defense of MS, the last version of OWA shipped before Firefox 1.0 was released. I’ve heard OWA 2007 will have much better FireFox support. But if you use Firefox only (I use IE & Firefox), then I admit OWA 2003 won’t do it for you.
  5. Hosted Exchange servers aren’t that expensive. I currently use Intermedia and have the ability to add/remove mail boxes, change storage quota, etc. I’ve heard 1AND1 is even cheaper.
  6. Privacy. What if the US government decided to Subpoena Google and read your e-mail? Don’t think it doesn’t happen. Granted, Live Mail would also be a target of govt. snooping, but my Exchange server probably would not be.
  7. Calendaring. Can you type “2 weeks from Friday” into a gmail appointment form and have it resolve to “Fri 9/15/2006”? You can with Outlook! Get a real date parser!
  8. Contacts. Where the heck is the mapping integration w/ address info in gMail? OWA & Outlook have had this since the Web 1.0 days. I know cause I wrote that feature for OWA for Exchange 5.5 (way back in 1998)!
  9. Looking for Tasks & Notes? Sorry Google doesn’t have that either.
  10. API support – Google may offer an API in the future, but Microsoft offers that today

Galen can keep his gMail. But, you can pry Live Mail, OWA, Exchange and Outlook away from my cold dead hands! Offline scenarios still have value to people. Feature rich Windows/Mac/Linux apps (Outlook, Entourage, Evolution, etc) can still clobber web only apps (no matter how much AJAX & Flash you try to put into them). I’ll freely admit the Redmond evil empire’s shortcomings (see the above “Hotmail sucks” & “OWA’s 2003 firefox support is weak” remarks), but Google is going have to do much better than have better Firefox support than OWA 2003 to convince me it’s better than Microsoft’s e-mail technology. E-mail mindshare, well that is another debate…

Let the e-mail Jihad begin! Who & what do you use for your e-mail and why? Would you pay for e-mail service or is free ad supported e-mail the only way to go? How important is your domain name to you? Does your e-mail server use SMTP/POP, IMAP, or HTTP? How important is offline to you? What do you look for in a web e-mail client? What about them Blackberry’s, Q’s and cell phone sized devices that do e-mail? Is Galen the one on crack or am I? (or are we both right)?

Five reasons to ditch Outlook for Google Apps

If I had a 5-30 person office, I would jump on Google Apps in an instant, particularly if I didn’t already have an imap server and all the other hardware and software jazz Microsoft likes to sell you so Outlook will actually work.

Here’s why:

  1. You will never run out of space on your email account: Every email account comes with 2+ gigs of storage.
  2. You can easily add and remove email addresses from a web-based panel (no more calling the tech guy for basic tasks).
  3. Your employees can access their email from anywhere and on any operating system (the Mac guy can keep his Mac!).
  4. You get my new favorite Calendar system – it’s really easy to add events, invite others, and manage multiple calendars including group calendars (we use group Calendars for the very infrequent events that we must all attend at ShackPrices). Also, you can access your calendars from other people’s computers.
  5. Your employees get all the nice little touches that are quickly being added to Gmail – the ability to preview word documents, excel spreadsheets, and pdfs without opening up a new program, in-browser chatting with other gmail users, and the ability to send voice mails (to anyone!) from Google Talk.

You can already download all your email from gmail to any email program and Google will be offering an API, so you can hire a programmer (or download plug-ins) to access all the rest of your information should you ever decide to quit.

Via John Battelle’s Search Blog (a great blog if you haven’t checked it out)

I believe that real estate agents are either in marketing or…

  1. Google is doing a major update on their backlink calculator. One of the updated datacenters is showing over 1600 backlinks to RCG while the regular search is still only showing 733. This is great news! The more often Google re-indexes backlinks the better because we get so many more (recognized) backlinks than the typical agent website and I’ve noticed that each time Google updates these backlinks (they only do it every 3 to 6 months), we placed much better in organic search results shortly thereafter. Yum!
  2. Talking about organic search results, I let Greg know that I thought he was potentially hurting himself in Google by posting identical articles on both his regular blog and his ActiveRain blog (no longer available). Put very simply (and definitely an oversimplification), when Google sees two identical articles, they are forced to make a choice in determining which article is “good” and which one is “spam”. Assuming you don’t want either of your sites to be labeled “spam”, then don’t have identical content floating around in full. (When a spam site copies your articles in full, you’re just have to trust that Google will figure it all out!) If you’re going to put articles on more than one site, make sure that you change things up a bit, or better yet, summarize the article and link to your main site where the full article can be found. I would point out some of the other people besides Greg who are doing this same thing on ActiveRain, but it appears that word travels fast via email and most of the guilty have taken their ActiveRain blogs down (Joel being the only exception I’ve found at this point… and he really should not be doubling up his content at this point considering he’s still in the process of “teaching” google about his new domain.)
  3. However, all this makes me feel bad… Matt, I promise my intentions were good and I wasn’t looking to get people to drop their activerain blogs. I think you’ve got a great platform and others should definitely consider blogging on your site. I just wanted to warn people that they might be committing googlecide (a great phrase coined by Greg!) if they post identical content in both places! For everyone’s benefit, Matt Cutts gives a comprehensive explanation on how to get re-included in Google searches should your site ever be listed as spam, but I don’t think that should be necessary as the re-inclusion request is typically for sites that have actively tried to trick Google in ways much more devious than duplicate content.
  4. Steve Hurley let me know about his new blog for the Tacoma area (South Sound) and he asked for some advice on how to get more readers. My advice: start linking to other real estate blogs! There are a lot (a ton!) of real estate blogs with good content that will never get “discovered” because they live in their own bubble (yes, real estate has lots of bubbles!). I think a lot of real estate agents have a view that they are smart enough to be the one and only resource of real estate information. Even if that held water, very few agents are good enough to break out of the mold without some major help from other real estate bloggers. So, regardless of how good your stuff is, find someone else to link to in every post! Really, every post!
  5. Another way to drive traffic is to leave comments on other people’s blogs. The nice part about leaving a comment is that you’ll get a link back to your blog with each and every comment. However, that won’t generate traffic nearly as effectively as if other bloggers are linking to you within their posts. What is the most effective way to get the attention of other bloggers so that they will link to you? Link to them! Want more? Here are the three most important elements of real estate… blogging: Linkation, Linkation, Linkation.
  6. Greg: Ardell’s going to kill me for that title. I promise I wrote it before I became a believer in the church of Ardell! 🙂 I really wish I could give you a “on a related note” to this story, but I simply can’t blog about a meeting I had last week with the master of real estate marketing…
  7. I agree with Chris Pirillo that social bookmarking buttons have gotten out of hand. I’ve not added any to RCG because it seemed like it took up valuable real estate and I’m not sure it provided a valuable service to our readers. The only one I’ve considered adding is del.icio.us, but considering most del.icio.us users have a button installed on their browser (they tend to be a tech-savvy bunch), I’ve never bothered. Adding a button for a site like digg (let alone sites like reddit) seems pointless for a real estate blog since I’ve never seen one real estate article promoted by those communities. (In other words, why would I give them an ad (i.e. their logo) on every one of my posts if they are never going to send me traffic?)
  8. I want one… Sony is preparing to introduce a light-weight geocoder with software to make geocoding photos easy. Although I wish geocoding photos was easier than dragging along another device…
  9. Taken one step further (and two steps too far): Wouldn’t it be great if you could search for an item based on where you were when you were working on the file? As in, “I remember taking those notes while in San Francisco…” and then have a document filter based on where you were when you made those edits (obviously, this only makes sense if you’re working on a laptop or mobile device). The secret weapon in this idea would be taking advantage of the wifi positioning from Loki so that you don’t have to lug around another device…
  10. Everyone knows that Loki was the god of mischief, right? (Due to a simple twist of fate, I know a lot more about Nordic gods than I do bible stories, but I can’t go there because I’ll get to sidetracked…). Well, the mischievous people over at Trulia have blocked Move’s IP address so that I didn’t read what Greg liked so much about their post until I got home. (I know I could have proxied in, but I didn’t bother). Anyway, the article is hilarious and definitely shows the benefit of not taking yourself too seriously. Tell your kids: real estate is fun!!!