Some Common Mistakes Writing Good Content

It seems I have written so many articles on what you should be doing when writing content for your website, I thought this time I would write about some things you should not be doing. Content writing for a website differs from print style writing because in print you do not have to worry about SEO considerations.  Over the years I have seen many Agent websites.  One common problem is that the busy REALTOR forgets how important writing effective content can be.  Let’s face it the Internet is here to stay and their is money to be made by the smart Agent that can leverage the technology.

To make things organized and easy to follow I am going to disect the page from top to bottom.

Title (H1) Tag

When writing content remember your focus should be on your keywords. But we also have to contend with actual people reading your web page as well. So tip #1 is do not make your Title boring or too technical. While keeping your keywords in play make your title interesting and think about what people may be searching for. Luxury Bergen County Real Estate is both descriptive and encompasses my keywords if they were luxury real estate in Bergen County.

Body Content

Your main body content should be interesting and inf0rmative.  So tip #2 is keep is lively and do not make a long run on paragraph.  Break your content up into logical paragraph blocks.  I say time and time again “Content is King”.  Keep that in mind.  While we always want our pages SEO optimized, if that are boring you will not keep your visitors on the site long enough to gain a prospect.

Paragraph Headings (H2-H5)

Just as you were taught in school paragraph headings play a vital roles in both SEO and a well written page.  Using the H2-H5 tags break your article into easily readable pieces.  So tip #3 is make sure you do not write long boring body content with no heading tags.

Bulleted Lists

Another great way to organize your content is to make a bulleted or numbered list.  These should be preferably be your keywords.  You can then link these lists to section on your current page or to another page on your website.  So tip #4, use bullets lists when you need to organize a series of related information, don’t just write a long run on sentence.

Bolding

The use of bolding is a another great way to provide emphasis to your keywords.  When you bold the search engines see these bolded words as important words and so to people naturally.  So tip #5 is to make sure you do not over use bolding or bold non-relevant words.

Anchor Text

The use of anchor text (links) is another great tactic to good content writing.  They provide significance to your content and the the bot scanning your content.  Anchoring keywords is a must.  When you relate your pages together via keyword anchored text you are giving the bots a good idea of what is important on your website.  So tip #6 is to avoid using anchor text on non-relevant keywords and do not anchor too many non keywords.

Originality

Tip #7 is do not plagiarize.  Copying content may seem like a easy and efficient way to get lots of content on your website but the search engines employ sophisticated technology to look for this and when they find it they will drop your relevance or even drop the page.

BIG problem is that the busy REALTOR likes to copy content.  It might be enticing to copy that community information but you are only hurting yourself in terms of SEO value.  Google and the engines a like spend millions looking for plagerized content.  Build quality original content.  Take your own buying and selling experience and bring that onto your website.

Tip #8 is something I hope everyone realizes.  Don’t try to keyword stuff, use white text to keyword spam, cloaking or any other means to fool the search engines.  They spend millions and millions of dollars to track this and the consequence if you are caught is being banned.  It is not worth the risk.

Use good judgement and write quality content and you’ll be rewarded.

Social Networking Update By Bennie Henderson

As a Web site developer and marketing professional, I teach REALTORS® how to effectively market themselves on the Internet. It was only a few years ago when all you needed was a picture of yourself, a short bio and link to your listings. The times have changed a bit since then. You now need to enhance your web presence by integrating Social Networking as part of your marketing plan. I often refer to this as the solar system approach. Think of your main web site as the sun. You need to create the little social networking sites like stars or planets that will revolve around your site and drive traffic to it. You will create new relationships as well as maintain contact with past clients and also build a referral base with REALTORS® throughout the world.. I have received calls from agents, and brokers thanking me as they have not only enhanced their search engine rankings, but have also received referrals and leads. Recently a REALTOR® in Florida, referred a $2.1 listing as a result of her presence on Facebook.

Below are some of the most popular social Media applications being used:

o        Facebook, with over 150 million active users in its promotional material, provides a forum to post photos and videos, write longer pieces such as a recent trend of listing “25 random things about me,” and create and support causes and groups.

o        Twitter is essentially a shorthand version of Facebook, allowing entries of up to 140 characters, which are often used to post links to other Web sites of interest.

o        LinkedIn is a professional networking site, where people can build up networks of work-related connections and write recommendations for colleagues looking for employment.

o        Slideshare is great way to post presentations and documents.

o        Flickr allows you to create photo galleries and tag each photo.

o        WordPress is an outstanding way of sharing your thoughts and shows your clients that you are tech-savvy.

Setting up Google Alerts

 

 

As promised here is the follow-up to my post on “Can Google Alerts Help The Agent?“

Now that we explored how you might be able to use Google Alerts let begin to talk about setting up your alerts.

In order to use Google Alerts you must have a gmail account.  If you do not have one please go to www.gmail.com and get one.

No that you have your gmail account you need to login to your alerts.  You can go here to directly login or if you have used any of the google tools you can login to your account directly as well.

To login directly to Google Alerts go to this page http://www.google.com/alerts.

(Note: If you have an existing Google account go to google.com and click on the “My Account” link at the top of the page.  Login to your account.  If you never used Google Alerts go to the section “Try Something New” and select it.

Once you login you’ll be at the manage your accounts page.  Click on the “New Alert” button to create a new alert.

1: Deceide on your Search Terms

The first thing you need to do is choose your search terms.  This is the word or words Google will search on.  For this example I will use; “Giants Football”

2: Choose the Type of Alert

Now you need to choose the type of alert.  Your choice are; News, Blogs, Web, Comprehensive, Video, and Groups.

Depending on what you are looking for here is an explanation of each type:

•  A ‘News’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.
• A ‘Web’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.
• A ‘Blogs’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.
• A ‘Comprehensive’ alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.
• A ‘Video’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search.
• A ‘Groups’ alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.

For now let’s choose “Comprehensive” which will yield results from Web, News, and Blogs.

3:  Select a Delivery Method

Now choose how you waned it delivered.  You can receive an email or it can be outputed to an RSS feed.

Next you need to choose how often you want results.  The frequency you select when you set up your alert determines how often Google checks for new results, not necessarily how often you’ll receive alerts. If you select “once a day,” Google will check for new results once a day, which means you’ll get a maximum of one email per day. If you choose the “as it happens,” Google will check for new results continuously and send you an alert whenever they find a new result.

4: Create Alert

Then simply click “Create Alert” and you are done.

Summing it up

So setting up alerts is fairly simple, the trick is using the correct search terms and type to yield results that are useful.  When thinking of what term you want to search on be specific.  For example Arizona would probably give you everything from Arizona news headlines to Arizona Iced Tea.  A better term would be Arizona Scottsdale travel or New Jersey wine tasting.

Also if you are looking for current events you might want to choose only the news alerts  instead of adding the web and blogs.  Also add a separate one for video if you want to see what is being posted for video.

The real trick is to play with the type of alerts and the search terms.  After a bit of practice you can really gain some insightful information out of these free alerts.