Go Beyond MLS » SEO

More Spam From LeapFish???

Vlad Zablotskyy — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:00:45 +0000

UPDATE Feb. 5, 2010: It appears LeapFish is no longer showing the link in the footer of their website to their “directory” I wrote about bellow:

This change must have been implemented today as Bing.com’s cached page of LeapFish from yesterday February 4, 2010 still has the link:

LeapFish has also implemented robots.txt file on their website disallowing web crawlers from indexing the directory:

Few days ago I tried to to get attention of Google’s Anti-Spam Czar – Matt Cutts via his FriendFeed account. I wanted Matt to comment about LeapFish’s latest directory- but I realize, it may not be Google’s practice to comment on these sort of things publicly. That or you need to be Michael Gray, Aaron Wall or Andy Beard to get some one like Matt Cutts to listen to you.

So what is my latest beef with LeapFish? Their spammy directory located at http://www.leapfish.com/dr/ – my apologies for not providing a live link, I consider LeapFish to be an unsafe website. It also appears by my estimates that Google is indexing this new directory at the rate of about 50 pages a day- there are about 200 pages in Google’s index from this “directory” as of this writing.

So I invite those who are still with me to explore some of the pages from the above mentioned directory. One of the first pages from the directory that jump at me was “Shopping”:

Clicking through to the page on LeapFish.com you are given opportunity to “narrow” your search- so I decide to narrow mine to “Death Care”:

What do you know?!!! Now you can narrow your search geographically- naturally I selected New Jersey the state I live in:

How about that?!! LeapFish knows all the counties in the state of New Jersey- naturally my next selection would be the county I live in:

How about that?!!! Turns out LeapFish is so intuitive it knows about every city in my state- so just for the heck of it I decided to check and see what kind of death care shopping I can do in Jackson, NJ:

And the relevancy of my final destination in LeapFish directory? Google search results associated with the death of Michael Jackson?

What can I say? I am extremely disappointed. I am sure few results of local funeral directors or even a local WalMart with the line of their latest caskets would not be as disappointing. Since LeapFish is using some APIs from Google, they could have really impress me by showing me a few relevant products using Google Base API.

So yeah, I am desperate for the attention from Matt Cutts. Matt could you please explain to me how this sort of “directories” improve the State of The Index? In my opinion the LeapFish Directory does just the opposite- LeapFish pollute the Internet.

If you are interested to find out more about LeapFish I highly recommend LeapFish Review by Better Business Bureau.Similar Posts:

Should I Cross-link My Websites?

Vlad Zablotskyy — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:55:03 +0000

This is something many web-masters struggle with. You create a new website that is going to knock every one socks off, but now you need Google and other search engines to notice it. The quickest way is to slap a few links on other websites you have that may already rank well and are well indexed by the search engines. But is it good idea? As Matt Cutts of Google explains in the video bellow, it all depends. If you have few minutes it is well worth watching:

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The Effective Use of Title Tags

Vlad Zablotskyy — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 11:43:41 +0000

Guest Blogger: Cole Pannell

Website: The Banson Pro

Title tags are arguably the most important on-page SEO factor for any web page. When utilized properly, they can really help to boost your site in the SERPs. But when they are abused or used wrongfully, the impact could be fatal.

For those of you who don’t know, a title tag is the actual title of a document or web page. It is the text content contained within the section of the HTML code. You can always tell the title tag of a webpage by looking at the upper-most bar of your web browser window, as the title of the document will always be shown there.

Also, title tags give the actual “name” of any web page that is displayed in the search engine results pages or SERPs. Not only are they read by the human reader, they are also read by the search engines as well.

As a general rule, you want to use no more than 70 characters for the entire length of your title tag (spaces included). And you will want to use no more than 2 keywords in any title tag. It is very important not to keyword-stuff your title, like many webmasters do. But we will get to that in a minute.

Using too many words can actually dilute the keyword effect of your title. So try to keep the “filler” words down to a minimum. Try to use basic symbols (dash, underscore, comma, or the pipe symbol “|”) to break-up your title, instead of words like “the, and, of, by,” etc.

A good title tag should follow a similar format to this: “keyword1 | keyword2 | company name” or “company name – keyword1 – keyword2”. If you have more than 2 keywords you are targeting (as well do) then you should create separate pages and implement unique title tags for those pages and keywords.

Please remember to include the company name or actual website name inside of your title tag. This is for the benefit of the human reader, whereas the keywords are more for the search engines. You can place you company name either before or after the keywords, as shown in the above format, just as long as it is included.

So let’s take a look at a couple examples of what good title tags should like. Instead of giving you examples base on theory, I’m going to base this entirely from real-world, cold-hard facts and evidence.

Look at the site: bransoncanyon.com.

The title tag reads “Branson Real Estate – Branson Missouri Homes for Sale – Branson Canyon”. Obviously, the primary keyword for this website is “Branson Real Estate” and the secondary keyword is “Branson Missouri Homes for Sale”. Branson Canyon is the actual name of the company.

This is a perfect example of an effective title tag – for both SEO purposes and for the human reader. It has good keyword placement and also clearly shows the website for the human readers.

Also notice how it keeps the filler words down to a minimum. Using something like “Branson real estate and Branson Missouri homes for sale here at Branson Canyon” is not as effective as the existing format using the “|” symbol to break apart the words. It also would have been just as effective to use “Branson Real Estate, Branson Missouri Homes for Sale – Branson Canyon” (or any other variation that utilizes a symbolic naming convention).

What evidence do I have to back this up? I was actually hired by Branson Canyon to do the SEO work for them. Before I started, they were at position #53 for Branson Real Estate and position #26 for Branson Missouri Homes for Sale (both in Google). They now show up at position #19 and #17 for the same keywords, respectively. And at the time of this writing, it’s only been 3 weeks! And they will continue to rise as the SEO campaign progresses.

Granted, I also built about 50 in-bound back-links for their site and used the same keywords for the anchor text. But that’s a different topic for a different day .

Now let’s turn to a good example of how NOT to use a title tag.

Check out: bransonwestrealty.com. This lame is using exactly 471 characters in his title tag. And it’s definitely one of the worst cases of keyword-stuffing I’ve seen yet.

His title tag reads “Branson West Realty | BRANSON + REALTY + BRANSON MISSOURI REAL ESTATE + Branson West Real Estate + BRANSON + MISSOURI + VACATION + INFORMATION + PACKAGES + Tri-Lakes Area-Reserve Branson Vacation Packages-Cabins, Condos, Motels, Hotels, Music Shows, Area Attractions and Information-BRANSON MO Nightly Rentals-Branson Missouri Attractions-Vacations + Golf, Lodging, Show Tickets – Branson West, Missouri -Branson Real Estate Locator–A Service of Branson 1 Realty-Welcome”.

If you visit his site, you can clearly see that there is something wrong with this dude. There is no real content on his site. It’s just a bunch of junk links. Also, if you view the source, you can see that he is using 5349 characters for his description tag (it’s recommended to use only 150) and he has 332 keywords in the keywords tag (out of a recommended 10).

This is blatant and disgusting abuse of meta tags in general. Not only is he harming himself in the eyes of the search engines (his SERPs suck) but he is also being unfair to his visitors.

This type of “SEO” can have seriously detrimental effects. The search engines can penalize you or even ban you from the index for pulling stunts like this. And it will NOT help you in the least bit.

To summarize, let’s go over the key points again:

Use short, descriptive title tags (less than 70 characters).
Always include your company name or the official name of the website – you are not only writing for the search engines but for humans as well.
Use no more than 2 keywords for each page’s title.
Title tags should be unique for each page in your site.
Use common symbols instead of filler words.
Do not keyword-stuff
Don’t be a lame

Remember that effective usage of title tags is only 1 piece to the SEO puzzle. But when properly implemented, you will be well on your way to seeing your site rise to the top.

Thanks for reading!

-Cole Pannell

www.thebransonpro.com

If you enjoyed this post by Cole here are few more you might enjoy The Power Of Backlinks and Finding The Right Keywords For Your Niche.Similar Posts:

5 Tips for Killer Online Press Releases

Vlad Zablotskyy — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 04:15:51 +0000

This is a guest post by Janet Meiners Thaeler – Newspapergrl (online PR)

Have you ever thought of improving your online business with a press release? Press releases are great tools to help your web site rank higher in search engines. I’ve written press releases for national brand name real estate pros. Here are some tips to help you write and distribute your first press release:

Find something newsworthy to write a press release about.
Right now the economy and saving money are hot topics. You may be doing some creative marketing in your area that would be a great story. If you need inspiration, search a site like PRWeb for “real estate” and see what others are writing about.
Remember that news is something that exists in time – something has happened, is happening now, or is happening in the future. Sometimes people get confused and mistake a press release for an advertisement (not objective) or an article (not timely information).
Add quotes to your press release.
Quotes are important because they say key points of the news “in your own words.” This is the only time you can use “you” and “yours.” I like to use at least 2 quotes in a press release and make sure that they capture the news or an aspect of it. Be specific in your writing (rather than vague or generic) so that anyone reading the quote could know who you are, what the news is, and why it matters just from reading the quote.
Use Links in your press release.
Many people make the mistake of not using links in their press release. Online it’s vital to use links because links are the currency of the Internet. A link is a “vote” for your web site in search engines. Use about one link for every 100 words.
Link to other pages besides your home page.
It may be tempting to just add a link at the end of your press release that says something like: For more information, see “www.yourwebsite.com.” So you only have one link and it’s just to the home page. Ideally you should link to related pages, articles, or blog posts. You should aim to use words as links, not just URLs. I usually add a link in the intro, throughout and then as the last sentence of the press release. S
Distribute your press release online.
Press release distribution sites like 24-7pressrelease.com will let you add text links for about $50. It’s worth the cost to use a service like this. For larger distribution I highly recommend PRWeb’s $200 SEO visibility package. The submission process is a bit more involved but you’ll get traditional media and get the best online distribution on the Internet.

Hope these tips are helpful. I’m writing a book about online PR. Send me an email – janet [at] affiliateflash [dot] com and I’ll let you know when it’s finished and I’ll also notify you when I’m ready to give away a few copies on this blog.Similar Posts:

30 Minutes of SEO Goodness With Stephan Spencer

Vlad Zablotskyy — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 12:07:55 +0000

If you have 30 minutes of free time, you can probably benefit by watching the video below from the WordCamp 2008. The presentation below is made by Stephan Spencer the founder and president of Netconcepts and the author of SEO Title Tag Plugin for WordPress, which I might add should be #1 plugin on your list to install if you are just starting to use WordPress.

(HT: ProBlogger)

UPDATE: To benefit from the above presentation download the PowerPoint Presentation that Stephan mentioned at the start of his presentation.Similar Posts:

Common Sense SEO Tips From Matt Cutts

Vlad Zablotskyy — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:16:02 +0000

Just found the video below on Matt Cutt’s blog. He was interviewed by USA Today and offers some interesting points. One thing I found interesting that Matt points out about importance of description meta tag, but why should I spoil it for you. Enjoy!

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Top 10 Results On Search Engines. What Difference Do They Make?

Vlad Zablotskyy — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:44:27 +0000

Today many people believe that search engine optimization is a waste of time. I think it is based on misunderstanding of what SEO really is. This misunderstanding is often a result of negative users experience as far as relevancy of the search results are concerned. If you practice SEO in an attempt to manipulate search result to get to the top at any cost, you are very short sighted.

I belong to a group of people who believe that SEO can be very useful. I am mindful of SEO every time I write a new post, trying to provide useful and relevant content to the user. I don’t think I am cheating my way to the top of the search engine results. Every time I write an article, I want it to come up in top 10 results for a keyword or set of keywords.

Why 10 top results? Most of the internet users using search engines do not change the default settings and, after submitting a query, each page produces 10 search results. The top 10 search results across the search engines receive anywhere from 70% to 95% or more of all clicks.

I have recently discovered 103bees (HT: ProBlogger). 103bees is a very good analytics tool, which every blogger should use. It helped me to visualize the distribution of click over the keywords used to find this blog. One need thing about 103bees, that it also reports what position of the search results your website was found at. Take a look at the results for this blog of last few days:

As you can see, the likelihood of user ending up visiting your website if it found among top 10 results is 7+ times more than if your website was found on the second page (results 11-20).

When creating new content for your blog or website, you should be mindful of good SEO practices. It can produce impressive results. Similar Posts:

Make Your Images Understandable To Search Engines

Vlad Zablotskyy — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 06:57:41 +0000

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:

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Working With Hittail Suggestions: Short Guide For Real Estate Agents

Vlad Zablotskyy — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 23:57:21 +0000

Among all different statistics that Hittail is able to provide you with, what is listed under “suggestions” proved to be by far the most beneficial information. Working with the suggestions can help you dramatically increase the traffic from natural search results while saving you some money on PPC campaigns.

There are several things that can be done with Hittail suggestions in order to achieve the best results. For the sake of the argument I am going to presume that you have already installed Hittail code on your website or blog and there are already suggestions offered to you by Hittail. While every website will probably receive suggestions that are more relevant to your website, to make the example more vivid, I am presuming that one of your suggestions was “rentals in New York”.

Step 1: Create Content (Article) On Your Website That Will Contain The Hittail Suggestion
If your website permits to publish articles or you may even have a blog on your website, the first thing to do is to write an article about “rentals in New York”. If you are a real estate agent working New York such an article should not be that difficult to come up with. In fact you probably have enough knowledge and experience to write such an article on a monthly basis, maybe comparing the market condition specifically regarding rentals in New York. It is good idea if this suggested by Hittail keyword appears not only in the title of the article, but it is also found a few times in the body of the article as well as in the URL of the article. It would be also to your advantage if the key word is present in the title meta tag of the page containing the article.

Step 2: Write An Article For Article Directory Containing The Hittail Suggestion.
In one of the previous posts I have mentioned the importance of article marketing when working with Hittail Suggestions. In doing so I would advise to not submit an exact copy of the article you have created in the step one. Doing so will inevitable create what can be looked at as a duplicate content, which will not be into your favor as far as search engines are concerned. If you have no time for yet another article, you can consider modifying your original article from step one for the article directory of your choice. However you should be diligent enough to paraphrase your sentences so it does not appear like a duplicate of your original article.

Some article directories allow you to place links back to your website inside of the article. While others permit you to do so in so called “resource box” which generally appears at the end of your article. In either case it is an opportunity to gain an incoming link back to your website as soon as your article is accepted and published on of of the websites. When your articles are republished on other website, you will gain even additional incoming links.

When creating links that will point back to your website, it would be in your interest that those link use the suggestion offered by Hittail as the anchor text while linking back to your original article in step one. I know this may sound something like “and wheels on the bus go round and round….” But that is not necessarily a bad thing and may reinforce what Andy Beard calls a “link juice flow”. If you are new to SEO Andy’s article may be a little over the top, but I highly recommend to bookmark his article for the future. As you become more familiar with SEO, his article can help you in more than just one way.

Step 3: Increasing Number of Links pointing to Your Website Or Blog
Step number two on it’s own can increase the number of links pointing back to your website when other webmasters begin publishing your articles on their websites. However there are other ways to gain backlings to your website. Becoming active member of online forums can prove beneficial and can be used to gain some valuable links back to your website. After posting certain number of posts, some of these forums may offer you a privilege of including a signature along with your posts. I would like to underline the word privilege because it is very easy to show up at these forums begin leaving links. But doing so you will earn a reputation of a spammer. However if you earn some authority first among the members of the online forums, it may be more beneficial than an opportunity to have a link back to your website.

Afterthoughts
If you search the internet for information on how to increase incoming links to your website, you will inevitably come across websites that promote buying and selling links. While in the past this strategy worked, the search engines had become increasingly impatient with websites selling links. Personally I would discourage every real estate agent to buy links. There are other ways to increase incoming links without compromising the status of your website in the search engines.

I realize that not every real estate agent has a blog on their website nor do the agents have time to regularly write articles. However I am not stretching when I say that many real estate agents were skeptical about building e-mail lists just a few years ago. Today there are number of successful companies that help real estate agents with e-mail marketing.Similar Posts:

Hittail Is Helping Me Save $1,725 Each Month

Vlad Zablotskyy — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 05:55:01 +0000

Yea, right!!! – If that was your first reaction when you saw the headline for this article, do not worry you are not the first one. In fact when I recommended Hittail as must to have tool for every real estate website, I have received somewhat similar reaction by some one from SEO Web Design:

Erm… still requires money? The features work exactly the same as Google Analytics and Webmasters Tools. However, i think Google is far better because it allows us to set goals to track our landing page conversions, shows the query terms that your website appears in, search terms that get you visitors and much more. It is free and has no limits on the number of visitors. Isn’t it better? I don’t know, it is up to our friends here and i am just sharing. Cheerz

I am not going to argue that Hittail is better that Google analytics. However, it was Hittail and not Google who brought me through their “suggestions” to a point when I can say without slightest exaggeration that with Hittail I am better off by about $1,725 each month.

As they say pictures are worth more than words, so I have taken some snapshots from my Hittail Account to demonstrate to you how much Hittail really helped me. The images below are the snapshots from the “Keywords” tab. If you are using Hittail you can find that info just above the list of keywords under the “Keywords” tab. That info changes from day to day depending on the search hits to your website. As you will see from the snapshots below I am currently tracking 5 websites with Hittail. All of them are listed under the “free account”. All of the websites below, had virtually no natural traffic from the search engines wen I started to use Hittail.

Website #1

Website #2

Website #3

Website #4

Website #5

It is true, the figures in the above images are calculated on $0.50 per click basis. It is also true that if you optimize your lading pages well you can maintain $0.10 per click. However there are niches, including real estate, where even well optimized PPC campaigns can cost you a $1 or $2 per click. Sometimes even more. So at the end of the day Hittail’s calculation is not that much off after all.

One very important part that Hittail users may miss is that by using Hittail suggestions it is much easier to maintain those coveted $0.10 per click campaigns. Hittail has helped me not only to increase natural search traffic. It also helped me to keep my PPC nice and clean with hundreds of keywords at $0.10 per click.

Am I saying you should abandon Google Analytics? Absolutely not! Hittail and Google Analytics can work with different data providing different analytics and you can benefit greatly from both.

In my next article I getting down and dirty with showing you how to make use of Hittail Suggestions. So please, stay tuned and subscribe to my blog.Similar Posts: