Internet-Marketing.web.id

As we know living here in Bali, the real estate & land development sector is white hot: development projects are everywhere; new real estate companies (and websites) spring up left and right; and new villa resorts are opening almost weekly. What once was a relatively niche market (I remember developing one of the first bali-villa-rental .com’s back in 2001) is a highly competitive market with big name brands jockeying for the top spot.

I ran across Aaron Wall’s post today about Niche SEO Advice who had some a propos insights & links that address this subject thoroughly. In particular, Dave Conklin at RorySteveAndDave.com applied this niche SEO advice to the online Real Estate market, saying it straight up:

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it 1000 times – if you want to boost your real estate business, make sure you have a STRONG presence on the Internet. As much as old-school agents may want to deny it, the majority of your prospective clients are going online to get real estate information nowadays.

The question is, are they finding YOU when they do it? Or is it your competitor that catches their eye? Luckily, more and more agents ARE getting on the web and attempting to make themselves known on the ‘Net…but we’ve still got a ways to go.

These guys found an excellent guide to online marketing for Real Estate; if you’re a Bali Real Estate agent and want to learn about how you can compete in this heavily competitive market, it is highly recommend you take the time to read these strategies for marketing your real estate online.

Wall Street Journal’s Independent Street blog, a resource for entrepreneurs written by Wendy Bounds, posted a list of 15 Blogs by Entrepreneurs Worth Reading.

The best entrepreneur blogs – and often the most successful ones – do more than just promote the entrepreneurs or their projects. …it won’t sustain it if the blog doesn’t “give.”

Among them are the well known – Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Kevin Kelly, John Janatsch, and Mark Cuban, and a few other quality blogs that look like they are worth checking out.

ChrisBrogan.com posts a brilliant list of 100 things you can do to better brand yourself online, broken up into categories with short, succinct tips. This is Social Media Strategy 101 — excellent tips for building personal brand.

Branding one’s self in an online environment built on entropy and go-baby-go is difficult at best, and impossible if you forget to take your happy pills. To that end, I’ve come up with a quick list of 100 things you might do to help with these efforts.

The truth is, online marketing is complex, but it’s not difficult. Most of the things website owners & small businesses need to know are simple methods applied to current technology. You can’t change a title tag if you don’t know what it is…but once you learn it’s purpose, it’s easy to understand how to improve it.

The basis of website visibility in the search engines is your architecture, content, and incoming links. Those are the fundamental principles of building a website marketing strategy. Everything else supports these principles. The rest is details. For a small business owner, here are the basics:

1. Build a site that is focused on your goal.
2. Provide a clear goal for the visitor; contact form, phone number, clear directions.
3. Write keyword-focused summaries about each page in the Page Title and Meta Description.
4. Get website links from business associates, directories, local memberships.

Great 20-questions interview with Udi Manber, Google’s vice president in charge of search quality.

Since there has been such a thing as Web search, Udi Manber has been working on Web search. Previously a computer science professor at the University of Arizona, then a senior vice president at Amazon and Yahoo’s chief scientist, Manber is now vice president in charge of search quality for Google, where he makes sure results are engineered to the utmost (near) perfection. In one of the only public interviews he’s ever sat down for, Manber gives PM a glimpse into how Google’s dominant engine helps you find what you want, how you can help it find you and how search is constantly evolving with the pace of technology. —Glenn Derene

One of the questions posed was this question, “Do you find that the content on the Web is evolving to be more search-engine friendly?”

Manber’s answer: “It’s hard to say. It’s definitely still lacking. I wish people would put more effort into thinking about how other people will find them and putting the right keywords onto their pages.”

This touches on one our mission statements goals: helping people improve their search engine rankings with clear methodologies that are easy to understand and that are in complete compliance with the search engine guidelines.

We believe that SEO is about helping websites be as relevant as possible so that they will rank for appropriate keywords on search engines. Search engines are a tool to help connect people with information they want. Our job as SEO specialists, is guide website owners towards their goal of creating quality content that search engines will find relevant to the topic of the website.

Properly selected keyword phrases, well-written content and web pages focused on specific topics assist the dominant search engine in indexing websites and providing salient SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Their reputation is based on the information they provide and SEOs help website’s define their message, products and services.

There’s no hard and fast rule here — and each search engine is different. But before you can even consider submitting, only submit your website once you have covered the Basic SEO Steps for your website (as outlined in internet-marketing.web.id). Not taking the time to fulfill these basic requirements will be detrimental to your SEO efforts.

Free Search Engine Submission – the Big 3

Using xml sitemaps

Assuming your sitemap is fully conformant to Sitemap Protocol 0.9 as dictated by sitemaps.org, you should only need to submit it once, but would need to update it onsite by re-generating the code every time you make an alteration to the structure of your site.

Using google sitemaps

If you have done this right you will only have to submit your sitemap once. Every website that you have a sitemap associated with it should be entered into google sitemaps. You must initially add your Sitemap to Google webmaster tools using your Google Account. Google will send a spider each day to check your sitemap and if any timestamps have changed the spider will look for the new page. All new content will be indexed very quickly. However, it could take time when it will be assigned proper ranking and will visible in searches.

If you provide a user link to your sitemap, you don’t even need to submit it as Google will find it and figure it out the next time it does a comprehensive crawl of your site. (Generally when it caches your site, you can find this out by typing your complete URL including the http into the google search field and noting what date your site was cached). Alternatively, take a look to your server log and find out how frequently your site has been crawled by Googlebot.

How do I resubmit my Sitemap once it has changed?

google: “When your Sitemap changes, you can resubmit it to Google to let us know.”

Seems to imply you can submit for any major changes, but I wouldn’t recommend too much, not more than once a month.

Don’t believe anyone who tells you they have the easy road to search engine rankings — they only want your money! It takes sweat and marketing savvy to build traffic to a site.

Some of the major search engines and most of the smaller search engines will provide a form that you can use to submit your site for free. With the smaller or thematic search engines, this is a good method to use. For each search engine you’ll just need to locate the submit URL form and submit your home page. There is no need to submit anything else. And, you don’t need to keep submitting your site month after month; generally every couple of month is sufficient or if you undergo any major website changes.

For a quick (& free) submission, simply follow these links (update: March 2008):

Google – http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Yahoo! – https://login.yahoo.com/config/login?.src=srch&.done=http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request
(requires Yahoo! account)

MSN – http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

One of the many factors in Google’s search engine algorithm is the age of a domain name. Like any business, the age of a domain gives the appearance of longevity & authority and therefore a higher relevancy score in Google; people tend to trust a business that has been around for a long time over one that is brand new. The same is true for websites in the google algorithm, primarily as means to stave off the myriad of spam websites that are created for malicious purposes.

Two things that are considered in the age of a domain name are:

• The age of the website
• The length of time a domain has been registered

The age of the website is built up of how long the content has been actually on the web, how long the site has been in promotion, and even the last time content was updated. The length of time a domain has been registered is measured by not only the actual date the domain was registered, but also how long it is registered for. Some domains only register for a year at a time, while others are registered for two, five, or even ten years.

In an update to the Google algorithm a couple years ago (that SEOs call the Jagger Update), some of the big changes seen were the importance given to age; age of incoming links, age of web content, and the date the domain was registered. There were many things, in reality, that were changed in this last update, but since we’re talking about the age of a domain, we’ll only deal with those issues specifically.

One of the ways Google uses to minimize search engine spam is by giving new websites a waiting period of of xx number of months before giving it any kind of PageRank, this is also referred to as the “Sandbox Effect“.

What does this mean to you? For those of you with new websites, you may be disappointed in this news, but  don’t worry. There are some things you can do while waiting for the sandbox period to expire, such as concentrating on your backlink strategies, promoting your site through Pay-per-click, articles, RSS feeds, or in other ways. Many times, if you spend this sandbox period wisely, you’ll be ready for Google when it  does finally assign you a PageRank, and you could find yourself starting out with a great PageRank!

Even though the domain’s age is a factor, critics believe it only gets a little weight in the algorithm. Since the age of your domain is something you have no control over, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your site isn’t going to rank well in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). It does mean, however, that you will have to work harder in order to build up your site popularity and concentrate on factors that you can control, link inbound links and the type of content you present on your website.

So what happens if you change your domain name? Does this mean you’re going to get a low grade with a  search engine if you have a new site? Perhaps intially. There are a few things you can do to help ensure that your site won’t get lost in the SERPs because of the age of the domain.

1. Make sure you register your domain name for the longest amount of time possible. Many registrars allow you to register a domain name for as long as five years, and some even longer. Registering your domain for a longer period of time gives an indication that your site intends to be around for a long time, and isn’t going to just disappear after a few months. This will help boost your score with regards to your domain’s age.
2. Consider registering a domain name even before you are sure you’re going to need it. We see many domains out there that even while they are registered; they don’t have a website to go with it. This could mean that the site is in development, or simply someone saw the use of that particular domain name, and wanted to snatch it up before someone else did.
3. Think about purchasing a domain name that was already pre-owned. Not only will this allow you to avoid the “sandbox effect” of a new website in Google, but it also allows you to keep whatever PageRank may have already been attributed to the domain. Be aware that most pre-owned domains with PageRank aren’t as cheaply had as a new domain, but it might be well worth it to you to invest a bit more money right at the start.
4. Keep track of you & your competitors domain age. One of the ways you can determine the age of a domain is with this handy Domain Age Tool. What it does is allows you to view the approximate age of a website on the Internet, which can be very helpful in determining what kind of edge your competitors might have over you, and even what a site might have looked like when it first started.To use it, simply type in the URL of your domain and the URLs of your competitors, and click submit. This will give you the age of the domains and other interesting information, like anything that had been cached from the site initially. This could be especially helpful if you are purchasing a pre-owned domain or considering a link exchange with another website.

Site maps are essential to get all permalinks of your site indexed by search engines. Using a standard Sitempas protocol, Ask.com, Google, Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo! have announced support of “autodiscovery” of Sitemaps in your website root directory. The new open-format autodiscovery allows webmasters to specify the location of their Sitemaps within their robots.txt file, eliminating the need to submit sitemaps to each search engine separately.

This step is very useful as webmasters can easily submit their content to the search engines and benefit from reduced unnecessary traffic by the crawlers. The search engines get information with regards to pages so index as well as metadata with clues about which pages are newly updated and which pages are identified as the most important and search users get more fresh content.

How to modify the robots.txt file?

Simply add the sitemap url following the word sitemap like this

Sitemap: http://www.internet-marketing.web.id/sitemap.xml

(Replace internet-marketing.web.id with your own site name.)

Save & upload the file and you’re done! Its simple. Update your robots.txt file today and help search engines index your site better.

There are no quick and easy “secrets” to ranking well and driving traffic online, but it’s not rocket science either. Small businesses simply need to start with the basics, and then build on their knowledge as they go. I’d strongly recommend getting acquainted with the Google Webmaster Guidelines, it is a true road map for any business owner who has questions about how their website should be built:

Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the “Quality Guidelines,” which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise penalized. If a site has been penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites.

• Design, content, and technical guidelines
• Quality guidelines

When your site is ready:

• Have other relevant sites link to yours.
• Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
• Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
• Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
• Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Design and content guidelines

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
• Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Quality guidelines

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

Quality guidelines – basic principles

• Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
• Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.