Doing It Myself Still with Good Results
Do-it-yourself marketing is nothing new and for me it’s a daily activity. As a real estate broker by and SEO hack by night, it is imperative to stay on top of strategies and learn how to implement the latest and greatest techniques.
In November 2011 I attended PubCon Vegas for the second time. Staying more sober than 2009′s trip, I soaked up as much info as possible. Here is a list of some of my items I’ve implemented.
- Hospitals in Everett Landing page
- Re-organizing Content on Real Estate
- Separated Paged Content from Blog Content
- Impletement Google+ Rich Snippets Code – First Result
- Continue to Produce Content on a more Regular Basis
- Growing Facebook Fanpage interaction (really hard)
Marysville Meadows Project: Outranking a Competitor
Last week Mr. L. emailed me regarding a particular problem he is having with being out ranked in the SERPs by a competitor for keywords that has had a lot of time and money invested into the advertising. Mr. L.’s is highly frustrated and his situation is probably not that uncommon in the highly competitive market place of search engine rankings. So instead of hiring a questionable SEO firm, Mr. L. asked me if I would be interested in helping him surpass the competition.
Enjoying a good challenge, it is only natural to say yes but this strategy is far more than just hiring someone to out rank a competitor. Since Mr. L. and I are both real estate brokers within the same firm, and our offices are down the hall from each other, helping a competitor per say is usually not high on my priority list. Luckily, this case is different as I like Mr. L. and it opens doors for opportunities for myself.
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What is the Value of Quality SEO?
The small business sector should be paying close attention to how their website is performing on the WWW dot. Why? Reason: To find missed opportunities. Small business owners are faced with particular online challenges that their larger competitors may not and that is of having an in-house SEO (search engine optimization) expert or even a SEO budget all.
A website contributes little to no value for its owners if it doesn’t bring in a steady stream of business. Have you ever heard business owners saying “I have a website but do not know how much traffic it generates” or “in this industry clients do not come from the internet”? I have. One has gone as far as said “I have a website but don’t know what the website address is”. Believe me, that one drew a facial expression of absolute horror.
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New project maximizes real estate appraisal company’s marketing
This past year TW Resource Group has grown to provide pretty cool services to some awesome companies around Washington. This time is for a Seattle real estate appraisal firm Lamb Hanson Lamb Appraisal Associates, Inc. This is the largest single project done and the strategies use take advantage of the many solid WordPress plugins to achieve excellent results.
A little about LambHansonLamb.com
Strategy and hierarchy were the two most important items of this site and would dictate how the rest of the framework would be laid out. LHL provides services across Washington state but those terms would be to difficult to target due to scale so and leads generated for broad terms would yield little. So it was decided to geotarget Seattle since it is the largest metropolitan area.
The homepage and navigation where built to maximize presence within the Seattle market; some examples are the residential appraisals, commercial appraisals, agricultural appraisals and litigation appraisals pages. Notice the title tags and page title match and this allows for greater keyword density while not overloading and spamming the main text. Clear and concise titles make a page more indexable and favorable with search engines.
Pairing these two items take more than just a standard site using the WordPress platform. Plugins are essential and can only be used by a site hosting its own site not like the free versions that a person can get by signing up at WordPress. Here is a quick list of the plugins:
– Contact Form ][
– SEO Title Tag
– Automatic Update
– Worpress Stats
They are probably the best, easiest and efficient plugins for a WordPress blog. My thought is never crap up a site with junk that is found on every other website on the web. Let your competitors annoy consumers with advertisements and framework that is junk.
Another strategy built into their site is the static homepage with the – blog posting being placed directly on the /blog/ url. Many Worpress blogs fall short will this one because they are not set correctly under the Options panel. Making this work takes the website from being a blog to the next level, blogsite. Incorporating the traditional static homepage of a Web 1.0 site and adding the Web 2.0 blog feature.
The site is going to be a dynamite in the search engines due the framework construction and the staff utilizing the blog feature. Publishing original content, like what is done here, will grown the site into a Seattle real estate appraisal monster.
Upgrading to WordPress 2.5
The other day I tried to upgrade from WordPress 2.1.1, I know…the platform was quite old, to version 2.5. It was all going good until I followed some instruction on a forum which I did not completely understand. After going through the steps, which called for deleting some files, I tried the new install and got a nasty error message on the homepage.
Not what I expected and really got my anxiety level up. The thought of loosing a years worth of content almost made me puke. But fortunately luck was on my side once again. I logged into my BlueHost account and went back into the Fantastico auto installer and low and be hold there was an upgrade to 2.3.3. Crossing fingers I clicked the upgrade link and viola! It all worked, whew…much better. Everything seemed to be in perfect working order so onto try the 2.5 upgrade again but this time using a much different approach, a plugin.
Download: http://techie-buzz.com/wordpress-plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade-plugin.html
This plugin automatically backup and upgrades WordPress with flawless ease. So if you are like me and are not the most experienced on server side upgrades then this plugin is for you. Upgrades are sometimes painful and lesson learning experiences and thanlfully there are solutions to get us through them.