Welcome to another instalment in our new agent strategies series, where agents from around the globe share their tips for success in online marketing.

Today’s strategy comes from Andrea Swiedler, a realtor with Prudential Adams & Associates in New Milford, Connecticut. Read on to find out how she increased her traffic with a combination of blogging and SEO:

I believe success online is a combination of things, not just one thing. Blogging will keep my content fresh, while SEO has a very big place in both my blogging and my websites. Without using SEO even the blog would fail to make it on page one.

Before I came to ActiveRain and started blogging and learning about the right way to direct traffic to my blog and website, my stats were down – the only way you could find me was if you could spell my name! I went from stats like 192 unique visitors in March of 2008 (pre-blogging) to 692 for March in 2010.

I am sure this is a direct result of blogging and SEO combined. Although that may not seem like a large number, I am located in a town with a population of about 26,000 and a lagging market. The other towns I cover are much smaller – 3,500, 3,000, you get the picture. These towns have a fair amount of luxury second homes. A very tough market indeed. So all in all, I am very pleased with the results I am seeing and only expect it to increase as my skills with SEO and blogging increase.

To understand what is going on a bit better I have Google Alerts set up for a few of the keywords for my website. Google has started picking me up almost instantly when I write fresh content on a subject.

Again, blogs work, SEO works. I have had leads that came from the Internet – leads that closed sales. Those are the important ones!

Got a great online marketing strategy you’re keen to share? Get in touch with us at editor@propertyadguru.com. For more SEO tips, check out our guest series here.

If you’ve been running a website long enough, chances are you’ve had an email that reads something like this: “I just visited your website and think your content is excellent. I feel a link exchange between our websites would be mutually beneficial.”

It all sounds convincing at first, but on closer inspection you find the request is from a website that has no connection to real estate whatsoever. So why on earth are these people getting in touch? Chances are, they’re still convinced that link volume is the key to great search engine rankings.

In a way, they’re right. It’s generally agreed that the higher the number of legitimate links to your website, the higher it will rank in search engine results. But the key word these days is “legitimate”. As searchenginewatch.com pointed out back in 2002, search engines have evolved to recognise artificial link building strategies.

Today, good link building means you need to plan rather than spam. Some tried and tested strategies – recommended by SEO experts time and again – include:

1. Great content. In a perfect world, your website would be so interesting and informative that other people would have no choice but to link to it. In this case, all you’ve done is put the effort into making great content, which we’ve discussed in depth here.

2. Guest posts. Ok, so perhaps your website isn’t so perfect that you can simply sit back and let the links roll in. But another way to get relevant websites to link back to you is to offer to write guest posts. As long as what you’re offering is relevant and well written, this should be a win-win situation: less work for them, more links for you.

3. Ask, but do it with care. The link exchange request described above is a bad example of a reasonable strategy. So how do make it work? Rather than sending the same hopeful email to a hundred websites, start by doing your research and find those that at least have a section dedicated to links.

Next, place a link to that website on your links page (as long as it’s actually relevant to your readership). Once you’ve done that, contact the webmaster to let them know you’ve already linked to them, and explain exactly where you’d like your link to be placed. You can even go as far as providing them with the html, making their job as simple as cutting and pasting.

Needless to say, those three tips only scratch the surface of link building. If you’re keen to dive deeper into the topic, we suggest you start with searchengineland.com’s Link Week series, which offers plenty of wisdom and a bit of tough love to those in the link building business.

It’s now official: website speed matters, particularly if you’re concerned with where you rank in Google’s search results.

In a blog post last Friday, Google Fellow Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer of Google’s Search Quality Team, explained that website speed is now included in Google’s search ranking algorithms.

“Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users,” the post explains. “Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.”

This research, which looked at how users responded to delays on Google itself, shows just how easily potential customers can be thrown off by a slow website. Google explains:

“All other things being equal, more usage, as measured by number of searches, reflects more satisfied users. Our experiments demonstrate that slowing down the search results page by 100 to 400 milliseconds has a measurable impact on the number of searches per user of -0.2% to -0.6% (averaged over four or six weeks depending on the experiment). That’s 0.2% to 0.6% fewer searches for changes under half a second!”

So even if you’re not particularly worried about where you rank in Google search results, this new emphasis on speed might prompt you to double check how your website is performing. But how do you go about doing this?

Anticipating this question, Google have come up with suggestions of free tools you can use to evaluate and improve your website’s speed, including their own Page Speed, YSlow from Yahoo!, and WebPagetest.

Most web users would agree that website speed is important, but if you’re worried that this new addition to Google’s algorithms is going to relegate your website to page 10, don’t be. Google’s blog post emphasises that less than 1 percent of search queries are affected by the site speed signal, and that it only applies for visitors searching in English on google.com at the moment. “If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site,” Google says.

Here’s one for the search engine optimisation enthusiasts out there: Google has recently released a report based on the SEO performance of pages for 100 different Google products.

The results show what’s working for Google and where things could be improved, giving the rest of us plenty of valuable SEO hints.

“Simple steps such as fixing 404s and broken links, simplifying URL choice, and providing easier-to-understand titles and snippets for our pages can benefit both users and search engines,” Google’s search quality team writes.

“From the start of the project we also wanted to release the report card publicly so other companies and webmasters could learn from the report, which is filled with dozens of examples taken straight from our products’ pages.”

Once you’ve found some hints and tips from Google’s report, be sure to check out our comprehensive series on SEO from guest blogger Glenn Batten.

UK single property website service estatecreate.com wants to help agents with their search engine optimisation (SEO).

As we explained in our Top 10 Tips for SEO, the number of relevant inbound links to your website can have a big effect on where it’s placed in search engine rankings. estatecreate.com is now encouraging its users to focus on this, and suggests agents set up individual websites for each key road where they sell houses.

Once these websites have been set up, the agent then links them back to their main website. Whenever the agent has a property for sale on a key road, they showcase it on the appropriate website.

There is just one potential drawback to estatecreate.com’s idea: cost. Free one-month trials are available for the service, but after that agents need to sign up for one of estatecreate.com’s paid packages, which start at £39.95 per month for five single property websites.

Looking for more SEO ideas? Check out guest contributor Glenn Batten’s exhaustive series – written for Australian agents but applicable anywhere – for a wide range of hints and tips.

If you’re an agent running your own website, the prospect of a detailed picture of how it’s performing will probably sound quite enticing. That’s exactly what the newly-established service WooRank is offering, and at the moment all its reports are free.

A WooRank report shows you three traffic estimates, gives a run-down of your in-site and off-site SEO, and measures your website’s usability. Areas that need work are clearly marked with an orange dot, or a red dot if things are really dicey.

As the WooRank blog explains, the aim here is to find out what you need to work on to get your website noticed by Google. “Only 16 percent of Google searchers look beyond the first two pages of search results,” the website warns.

Perhaps more exciting than receiving information about your own website’s performance is the option to check on your competitors. Because you don’t have to own a website to check its performance with WooRank, you can compare results from any web address you choose and see what everyone else is doing right (and wrong).

As techcrunch.com points out, WooRank isn’t the first to offer free online reports on website performance. Website Grader lets you plug in your website’s address along with those of your competitors, while HitTail offers a similar service with a free 60-day trial.

If you run your own website but haven’t heard the term “bounce rate”, have a seat. You might be satisfied with the number of people visiting your website, but if the majority of those visitors leave within a few seconds without interacting with any of your content, that’s something you need to deal with.

digital-media.net’s Brad Martens says website visitors will decide whether to stay and interact with your content within the first seven seconds. Give your visitors what they need within that timeframe, and they will be much more likely to investigate further.

But according to Google’s self-proclaimed “analytics evangelist”, Avinash Kaushik, seven seconds could be an optimistic estimate. Kaushik says bounce rate measures the “I came; I puked; I left” phenomenon:

“While metrics like visitors show the number of people who came to your site, bounce rate will tell you how many of those people were unimpressed and left your site without taking any action (not even dignifying the site with a single click!).”

So how do I measure my bounce rate?

Unsurprisingly, Kaushik promotes the use of Google Analytics to measure your website’s bounce rate. Google Analytics is a widely used option that measures up to 5 million page views per month for free.

Here at propertyadguru.com, we use the WordPress plugin Woopra Analytics. Of course, there are plenty of other website analytics tools available, such as Piwik, Clicky and Yahoo! Web Analytics, to name just a few. Because there are so many free options available, choosing one that works for your website doesn’t have to be an expensive exercise.

Ok, and how do I improve my bounce rate?

So, you’ve seen your bounce rate and it isn’t pretty. The good news is, there are plenty of things you can do to keep visitors on your website. Here are our top three suggestions:

Focus on where your traffic is coming from. Using your new website analytics tools, you should be able to determine whether visitors are finding your website via search engines, social media, or other websites. You can then start to make changes to ensure you’re attracting the right kinds of visitors. Ask yourself: is my website optimised for the right keywords? Is my display advertising showing up on the right websites?

Consider usability. Can visitors easily navigate your website to find what they need, right from the start? If you’re not sure, ask for some honest feedback from friends and colleagues. You could even add a quick survey to your website allowing users to tell you what they think.

Highlight calls to action. A high bounce rate need not be a tragedy if people are subscribing to your RSS or Twitter feeds, or becoming your fan on Facebook, within those first few seconds. With the Internet becoming more social by the day, it’s important to remember that these are the preferred methods of website interaction for many.

Bursting with ideas on how to improve bounce rates? Let us know your thoughts in our comments.

[Image: hirethings.co.nz]

As the Google code blog explains, the tool came about when Google realised around 10 percent of people couldn’t see the download button for Google Earth without scrolling down the page.

So, how does the new tool work? Simply visit browsersize.googlelabs.com and type your website’s address in the search bar. Your website will then pop up with an overlaid graphic showing what percentage of visitors can see the various parts of your website. We’ve plugged in propertyadguru.com to give you an idea of what the results will look like:



Once you’ve seen what your visitors see, you can decide whether your website is in need of any changes. propertyadguru.com is already working on a new design, which we’re looking forward to debuting early next year.

The news just over a week ago that Google was “entering” the UK/European market has sent the share prices of Rightmove and Seloger into a tailspin. Seloger dropped by 9% while Rightmove has plummeted a whopping 17%. Seloger has since recovered to its pre-news price while Rightmove continues to be significantly down.

So let’s look at what happened, will the property portal landscape change and is this impact on the share prices is justified.

An article by the Financial Times (Dec 2 titled “Google set to enter UK property market”) seems to have set the cat amongst the pigeons. The article stated that Google is in talks with British estate agents and that “experts” say that an entry by them to the market could pose a serious threat to existing property websites. The article didn’t talk about what Google was going to do and Google didn’t comment. So there is really not much to go on. So the only guide we really have as to what Google may do in the UK and Europe is what they have done in Australia.

Google “entered” the Australian market 6 months ago (July 2009) when they made it possible for agents, brokers, franchise groups, and portal sites to place their listings on Google Maps. When a user does a search on Google Maps (not the main Google search) for real estate, Google plots the houses in its database on the maps and users can then click on the various dots to see if they like the houses and then are driven back to the advertiser’s site.

At that time, there was a similar uproar and many were predicting the death of realestate.com.au and domain.com.au and the REA Group share price dropped nearly 7% from $5.90 to $5.50. However in the 6 months since the announcement by Google, the REA Group share price has increased 60% to $8.84, the traffic to the site has increased from 4.5m UB’s in June 09 to 5.4m UB’s in October and analysts are predicting an additional 20% revenue growth for the REA Group in FY 2010.

In August, PropertyPortalWatch wrote about the challenges for Google knocking over the market leaders. Here is the link to the article called “The Challenges for Google Real Estate”. All of these still hold true.

Many hope that Google will be the saviour from the “big bad” commercial property portals and deliver free marketing to the agents. However this is a simplistic view and underestimates the challenges Google faces. The challenges include gaining enough listings, maintaining their quality, driving traffic to the maps area, and ensuring the interface is attractive to consumers.

Even if Google is successful in addressing the above, they will only be delivering clicks to the agent’s site not email leads. The agents will need to invest more in higher quality sites to convert the clicks to leads. This, of course, comes at a cost. The old adage holds true, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

It will be interesting times and if I was an agent, I would be putting my listings on Google. However, any clicks I get from Google should be supplemental to my existing online marketing strategy and not replacing my use of established portal sites.

Of course, Google emphasises, this feature can be turned off or paused if a user desires, but it is currently opt-out rather than opt-in. This video from Google goes into more detail:

So, what are the implications for online real estate advertising? It seems unlikely that personalised results will have much of an effect on traffic to more well-known real estate websites, which can rely on familiarity to ensure their users don’t visit Google in the first place. But it could have an impact on those that rely on Google to attract their audience. As searchengineland.com’s Danny Sullivan points out:

“Happy that you’re ranking in the top results for a term that’s important to you? Look again. Turn off personalised search, and you might discover that your top billing is due to the way the personalised system is a huge ego search reinforcement tool. If you visit your own site often, your own site ranks better in your own results — but not for everyone else.”

In other words, for less well-known websites, personalised results could mean existing SEO has to be reworked to capture Google results that might have previously have been considered reliable.

However, as Sullivan goes on to say, this doesn’t mean all the effort you’ve put into SEO for your website is now pointless. Google told searchengineland.com it wants to preserve diversity in its results, even as it skews them to a user’s preferences.

Quick off the mark, digital agency zeta.net have already come up with a few tips on how to make the most of Google’s personalised search. As always, we look forward to your thoughts and ideas in our comments.