photo credit: Ordinary GuyYou probably have heard in the past, that in order to have a successful blog, the quality of your posts matter over the quantity. While in some cases it may be true, majority bloggers in order to succeed need to blog more frequently, without of course neglecting the quality. There are at two reasons why you would want to post frequently on your blog:

1. You want people to subscribe to your blog. And when they do, they in a way expect you to write. That is why they have subscribed to your blog.
2. Frequent posts will invite Googlebot to your blog more often.

This week, after another update of our 100 Top Real Estate Blogs, I have decided to put some interesting statistics together to find out how frequently are the new posts produced by the blogs on the list. I picked two groups of blogs: a)blogs 1 through 10; b) blogs 91 through 100. These 20 blogs collectively produced 354 posts during last week. Top ten blogs had written 312 of those posts! While the bottom 10 only 42.

Blogs 1 through 10

Blogs 91 through 100

Feel free to comment.

Picture speaks lauder than words. This of course is true as far as human beings are concerned. But it is not so with those little spiders that often crawl your website or blog. In fact they can use a little help to understand and make sense of the images posted on your blog.

To have them understand better your images, you can effectively use two attributes alt and title inside the img tag on your pages and your blog posts. If you are not familiar what do they stand for here is a short overview:

• ALT attribute is text value that is displayed instead of the image itself, should your visitor have disabled to load images when visiting your website. Some times you can notice this text value loads slightly faster than the image itself.
• TITLE attribute, which should not be confused with TITLE tag found in the header of the page, can be used to enhance just about any element of your page. When it used inside the img tag or a link, it provides an elegant effect when a user hovers with their mouse over the image or link. Try to hover with the cursor pointer (mouse) over the image below:
  

Both title and alt attributes are considered as part of your page’s content by the search engines.

Nothing will demonstrate the proper better way of using alt and title attributes than actual examples.

Here is the first scenario. Many of the HTML editors and even Blogging platforms create an empty alt attribute. The image below is example of default setting of HTML editors or blogging platforms for adding pictures to your web page:

Here is the source code for the image above:

As you can see the alt attribute contains the name of the file and the title attribute does not exist at all. If you use images on your blog or website chances are that each file is named after the date and time when the picture was taken. This of course provides very little information as far as search engine bot is concerned.

Here is another example of the same picture but with enhanced alt and title attributes. Hover the mouse over the image to see the differnece:

And here is the source code for the above image:

The above image speaks not only to a human being but also to the search engine bots communicating important information about your image or picture through alt ad title attributes. The value of both attributes is considered to be part of the content of the page.

In real estate using these attributes can prove to be very effective from the SEO point of view. Especially when Google is concerned. Google uses the value of the attributes when the image search is performed.

Next time you write about a new listing or place a picture of a home on your blog, make sure to use effectively the alt and title attributes. If your blog uses WYSIWYG editor, it would be better to turn it off so you can modify the scour code of your images. This may take some time to get use to. But when you conquer it, I am most certain that no future image on your blog will appear without these attributes.

To rank well in the search engines, you must create unique content. No one other than the real estate agents are in position to provide truly unique content. {sarcasm}Unless of course a house is listed by two different brokers{/sarcasm}

Update: At the advise of fellow blogger and SEO expert, I am updating this post with a video by Google’s Matt Cutts talking about importance of enhancing your images with alt tag:

Talking to many friends and former colleagues in the real estate industry, I come to conclusion that generally blogging is misunderstood and therefor underutilized in the real estate industry. Unfortunately many still associate blog with MySpace pages – something that 13 years olds do. But when you look around you might be surprised to find out that many leading companies across different industries are using blogs. I have chosen following video to explain first of all to all my friends in real estate what blogging is. If you are reading this from your e-mail or a feed reader, chances are you will not be able to see the video, so please come and visit my website:

Are you in the 21st century yet?

There are many about running this website things I take for granted. Trackbacks are among those things. Thanks to a reader, who also happens to be the founder of Home Buying Assistance Program in Londonderry, NH I was reminded once again how beneficial the trackbacks are. In short trackbacks is a way of communicating with other blogs. Different platforms implement this technology in slightly different way, however the end result remains the same.

Video below (courtesy of Friday Traffic Report) explains how to implement trackbacks on your WordPress website: