Writing Good Content

Writing quality content for your website is one of the most effective ways to enjoy a successful on line presence. This success comes not only in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimized) content but good quality content shows your visitors you are an authority.  Once you become an authority people will see you as a source of information.

In terms of search engines, they are basically looking for the website that has the most relevant content to the keyword phrase someone types in. Search engines are concerned with 2 major factors; Content and Links. In terms of links, inbound links help to build your worth in terms of how many people want to link to you. The more people linking to you (and you NOT back to them), the more authoritative you become as the search engines see you as an important presence on the Internet. Reciprocal, Outbound, and Internal links help tell the search engines what is important on your site. Content on the other hand tell a search engine who you are and what is important to your website.

Keywords

Before you can build quality content you need to know what your keyword(s) are. Put it another way, what are people typing in to find you. One keyword might be ‘real estate’, while it is about your business, it is a very broad keyword and would be difficult to achieve good rankings with. The more precise your keyword phrase is, the more success you are likely to have. So  ‘Allendale New Jersey Real Estate’ might be a better choice. Google among others have keyword research tools you can use to help you along. Here is one such Google tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.

Now that you have an idea of your keyword phrases you need to build them into your content. the biggest mistake I see is people trying to build too many keyword phrases into a page or a website. Start small, I feel your entire website should not cover more than 3-4 keywords and each page should not contain more than 2-3 keyword phrases or variations. Too many will simply dilute your content and search engines will have a hard time determining what is important on your site and your relevance will fall sharply.

Keyword prominence is the percentage of your keywords to the total amount of content on a page. Your keyword prominence should be around 7% but never over 10%. So 7% of the total content of your page should be keyword phrases. You can purchase tools such as webposition to determine this.

Meta Data

While meta tags are not widely used, they are still worth putting time into. The meta title is important as this will transcribe to the top of your browser tool bar and when you get indexed the meta title and meta description still play a role is some search engines.

Paragraph Headings

While building your content use paragraph headings. You know the H1-H6 assignments you can give to text. This helps the indexing by allowing you to organize your content in relative importance. H1 being the most important text on your page.

For example look at the text below.  Luxury Real Estate in Bergen County is my H1 text which tells a search engine this is the most important text on the page.  It is followed by regular paragraph text.  I then have Vallhall Pointe which is a H2 tag which tells a search engine this is not as important as an H1 tag but more important than my paragraph text.  So by using this methodology we can control what is most relevant.  It also serves to help a reader understand your content better but organizing it into digestible blocks of text.

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Luxury Real Estate in Bergen County

Buying a luxury home in Bergen county.  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Cras laoreet bibendum enim, eget porttitor nulla malesuada a. Quisque tincidunt viverra erat ut vulputate. Pellentesque et dui libero, a dapibus ante. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Morbi nunc dolor, auctor ac fermentum in, pharetra eu quam.

Valhalla Pointe

This is one of the most sought after communites in sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Cras laoreet bibendum enim, eget porttitor nulla malesuada a. Quisque tincidunt viverra erat ut vulputate. Pellentesque et dui libero, a dapibus ante. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Morbi nunc dolor, auctor ac fermentum in, pharetra eu quam.

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So get out there and begin writing.  One thing I want to leave you with is that your content should be constantly evolving.  To keep updating it regularly and adding as you go along.  Search Engines LOVE sites that have fresh content all the time.

Facebook User Names

Facebook now has an easy way for you to get to your Facebook page. You can now personalize your Facebook URL (web address) by selecting a unique username. Your username will appear as; “http://www.facebook.com/username”.

Starting at 12:01 a.m. (EDT) on Saturday, June 13, 2009, you will be able to select a username at http://www.facebook.com/username.

You can select a username that Facebook suggests or create your own. Select “Check availability” to check for available usernames. If the desired username is available, click “Confirm” in order to confirm your choice.

Usernames are available only for Facebook profiles and Pages. You cannot claim a username for a group or event created with these Facebook applications.

So check it out….

Home Sales Are UP!

The number of U.S. homebuyers who agreed to purchase a previously occupied home in April posted the largest monthly jump in nearly eight years, a sign that sales are finally coming to life after a long and painful slump.

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) said Tuesday its seasonally adjusted index of sales contracts signed in April surged 6.7 percent to 90.3, far exceeding analysts’ forecasts. It was the biggest monthly jump since October 2001, when pending sales rose 9.2 percent.

Economists surveyed by Thomson Reuters expected the index would edge up to 85 from a reading of 84.6 in March.

Typically there is a one- to two-month lag between a contract and a done deal, so the index is a barometer for future existing home sales.

I would think this big rally is due to the fact that President Barack Obama introduced the $8,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers. This was included in his economic stimulus bill signed back in February.

Since buyers need to finish their purchases by Nov. 30 to claim the credit one should expect more activity in the months ahead.

The national median sales price in April plunged more than 15 percent to $170,200, from $201,300 in the same month last year. That was the second largest yearly price drop on record, according to NAR.

8,000 tax credit

So why am I writing about the $ 8,000 Federal Tax Credit for new home owners?  Well it’s simple – I see very few Agents publicizing this on their websites.  With the press dishing out so much negativity about the housing market right now, you can use all the positive PR you can get.  So go on and post something about the credit and the great mortgage rates now.  Leverage the tax credit for a new home buyers article.  Need an image to use, go ahead and take mine.  Good luck and get writing.

Active Rain Posts Go Paid

I saw a post on Active Rain today that you can now pay to be the first FEATURED post on the AR home page.  These “Sponsored Posts” will be visable for a 24 hour period from 12:00am to 11:59pm.  AR claims to receive ~2.5M visitors per month, 85% of that is organic (from SERPS).  So you’ll get lots of eyes on your post.

Sponsors can sell/advertise their products and services in most any fashion they see fit, so long as they coincide with ActiveRains Terms of Use.  Certainly large brokerage’s can leverage this as a PR or recruitment tool as well.  While you can still post on AR for free, if you want to be the first featured post  you’ll need to pay for it.

While no pricing is posted, I have a feeling it is not cheap.  Here is the AR post if tyou want to read all about it

Twitter and StalkDaily.com Worm Virus

By now most of the Twitter users probably heard Twitter was hit with a potentially harmful virus.

For those who did not see the posts around the net here is what basically happened.

Twitter profile pages are being infected with cross site scripting (XSS) attack. What this really means is that Twitter profile pages are being compromised by hidden javascript. When you visit an infected profile page, this script runs and infects your Twitter account. The script then send Tweets out to your followers to visit StalkDaily.com. The virus also inserts itself into your bio pages, allowing your bio page to become a host to infect others.

StalkDaily had said they are not the orginator of the attack.

If you are infected do the following:

1. Go to your Twitter account settings and switch your bio back to the normal setting.

2. Clear out your cache and cookies from your browser.

3. As a precaution, change your Twitter account password.

Twitter was pretty fast on knocking this down and posted this their status page:

Earlier today we were informed of a malicious site that was spreading links to StalkDaily.com on Twitter without user consent via a cross-site scripting vulnerability. We’ve taken steps to remove the offending updates, and to close the holes that allowed this “worm” to spread.

No passwords, phone numbers, or other sensitive information were compromised as part of this attack.