Go Beyond MLS » Web Master Tips

Selling Your Website or Blog: eBay vs Flippa.com

Vlad Zablotskyy — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:06:25 +0000

When I wrote about my intention to sell this blog, I certainly did not expect to still be it’s owner more than one month down the road. I would like to thank those offering feedback. Most of those providing the feedback agreed that when it comes to decidea price/value/worth of a website, the buyer will have a final say.

Exposing this website to as many potential buyers as possible may not be as easy as initially envisioned. Part of me sincerely hope that the future owner of this website will be one of the regular readers or subscribers. I understand, however that my hope may not realize. Meanwhile two website come to mind where I can sell this blog: eBay and Flippa.com. I am still uncertain which one to use.

Selling Website or Blog on eBay
Being the King of online auctions it is no wonder eBay attracts thousands of sellers who try to sell website or blog. Yesterday (July 6, 2010) for example 1,591 auctions ended in the category “Internet Businesses & Websites“. The bad news, however, is that only about 120 the those listings actually sold. Two highest auctions ended in $8,100.00 and $13,990.00 – one of these buyers did not get a good deal in my opinion. While eBay certainly can expose you “website or blog for sale” to a larger “audience”, there is good chance you may end up selling you website to some one with very little experience as far as websites and Internet business are concerned. This is certainly not my Intention. I do not want to sell this blog for more than it’s true value is. I was surprised however to see so many auctions ending not being sold for as little as $0.99- surely the domain name along should be worth more than that.

Selling Website or Blog on Flippa.com
Flippa.com is a relatively new website and unlike eBay is exclusively dedicated to buying and selling websites.
It of course attracts completely different kind of buyers and sellers – both buyers and sellers on Flippa.com know what they are doing. It appears that half of the websites listed at Flippa.com end up being sold. Take for example the listing from yesterday, July 6, 2010, out of 89 ended auctions 47 were sold. Even though Flippa.com has a slightly higher listing fee ($19+5% success fee)- it offers more flexibility when the length of the auction is concerned. If you list your website or domain at Flippa.com as public auction you can have it active up to 30 days and up to 6 months if you list your website as a “private sale”.

Since I have never sold a website or domain before, I created following poll to find out if you prefere Flippa over eBay:

As of today, I am leaning towards Flippa.com….Similar Posts:

“Kill Frames” Javascript Code. Do You Really Need It On Yur Site?

Vlad Zablotskyy — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 21:48:00 +0000

UPDATE May13, 2010: Things pertaining to LeapFish.com, their founders and management, along with related startups are no longer of interest to me, therefore no further comments are allowed on this post. There are also more reliable sources out there (such as Better Business Bureau) to help you make an informed decision about LeapFish.

***You may also want to know that the Law Firm of Daniel Bakondi, in San Francisco, CA, is investigating a possible Class Action Law Suit Against LeapFish.

Soon after discussing the use of framesets by newly relaunched LeapFish I received a question from dozen of readers and visitors asking me how they can prevent their website from “being framed” by other websites.

To prevent your website from being from being viewable in a frame of another website you can add the piece of the following code just above tag on your website:

Before you do it you need to really be sure it is what you want it. There are many good websites out there that use frames to view your website- StumbleUpon is one of those good sites.

The above code also relies on whether or not your visitors browser is configured to support Javascript, you would be surprise how many users out there do not enable Javascript support on their browsers.

The above Javascript code “forses” user’s browser to open your page in it’s own window. Before my previous post I have never considered using it on my website and still do not think there are any huge benefits from implementing it on yours.

I would like to hear what you have to say. What are the reasons for using the above code? If you don’t recommend to use it – why not?

Of course I would also love to hear about any other way to “kill frames” – please share them in the comments if you know any.

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

Telling Google How Often To Crawl Your Site- Not A Good Idea After All.

Vlad Zablotskyy — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:58:54 +0000

A while back I wrote an article pointing out one of the features available to webmasters at Google Webmaster Central – ability to set a custom crawl rate. At the time I thought it was an outstanding idea. It is still is a good solution should googlebot visit your site too often causing issues with bandwidth (even though I have never heard of such scenario).

Webmasters however should exercise caution when increasing the crawl rate via Google Webmaster Central. A few weeks ago I was involved in an upgrade of a website with 2000+ pages. One of the side effects of the upgrade was that we ended up with 2000+ new urls. Unfortunately there was no easy way to implement 2000+ redirects on the website. But, since most of the traffic came from PPC campaigns, we decided to let Google re-index the website on it’s own. Exception was of course that we used Google Webmaster Central to implement request for a more frequent crawl by Google. We increased the crawl rate by some 3000% only to receive the following notice a few days later:

Dear Webmaster,
Google has algorithms that determine how much to crawl each site. Our goal is to crawl as many page from your site, http://www.xxxxx.com/, as we can without overwhelming your server’s bandwidth.
For your site, http://www.xxxxx.com/, you have set a very low crawl rate which is preventing us from accessing your great content. We recommend you set the crawl rate option to “Let Google determine my default”, or, if you prefer to maintain a custom setting, increasing the rate.
Thanks,
The Google Web Crawling Team

In fact the Google had not indexed a single URL from the new sitemap. Not even the home page (which is/was the strongest page of the website) was re-indexed. So we followed Google’s instruction and within 24 hours our new pages began to appear in the index.

So if you are thinking of increasing the crawl rate in Google Webmaster Central – exercise caution or you may run the risk of not increasing the the crawl rate enough for Google to do it’s job. Similar Posts:

Appointments Made Easy With Appointy

Vlad Zablotskyy — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 18:28:24 +0000

Have you ever considered allowing your client to schedule appointments with you right on your website? In search for such solution for my and for my friends and clients websites I came across Appointy, a Florida based startup. You can see the implementation of Appointy scheduling feature on my other website where I allow clients to reserve my interpreting and translating services online.

While Appointy offers an easy integration for WordPress websites via a plugin, their system can be implemented just on about any website through an “ifame” code.

Appointy comes “PayPal ready” allowing you to charge a fee for the appointment at the time of scheduling- either full amount or partial. You are of course free to not charge your clients for appointments, as it would be the case with most real estate agents I know. But if you would like to prevent “no shows”, you might want to implement a minimal fee refundable at the time of the appointment.

Currently Appointy offers four different plans:

FREE plan- this basic plan has some limits and you have no option to charge your clients for the appointment at the time of scheduling. Appointy also will inject some ads into your calendar – hey they need to pay their engineers and developers.
PLUS plan comes at $9.99 per moth and is ad free but it does not allow you for branding nor accepting pre-payments.
PRO plan will set you back about $19.99 per month- the plan I am looking forward to use. You can brand your calendar and accept pre-payments with this plan. This plan includes e-mail marketing tool that allows you to send different e-mails to confirm, remind or even cancel the appointments. The best thing of course that when you sing up for Appointy, you get to try this plan absolutely free for 30 days.
Finally the BUSINESS plan wich comes at $39.99 is the top level plan from Appointy. I would recommend this plan for businesses that have several staff members accepting appointments, the plan allows a separate logins for administrator and for the staff.

If you are looking for a solution that would allow your clients to book an appointment with you right on your website, Appointy should be given frist consideration.

As I have pointed out, I am using Appointy myself, although I am only beginning to test many of it’s features and probably have not seen yet what Appointy can really do for my business. I will report on the results about one month from now, so stay tuned.Similar Posts:

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:

Telling Google How Often To Crawl Your Website

Vlad Zablotskyy — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 05:39:33 +0000

If you are using Google Webmaster Tools you are probably aware that, among many things that these tools offer, there is the ability to submit your web site’s sitemap to help Google discover pages on your website. Google Webmasters Tools can also provide some insightful information about your website. Among many different statistics you will see the page containing information about about “crawl statistics”. You will find there a graphic of Googlebot’s activity on your website over the period of last 90 days. Just like the one you see below.

In the past Google did not offer webmasters many options or saying about how ofter they can or will crawl your website. While from time to time, after determining that your website may use a faster crawl rate, they would offer you an option to change this rate. However over the period last few months I was never offered that option in Google Webmaster Tools for my websites. So I have trusted Google, as most of us do, to crawl and discover the websites in their own time, and have completely forgotten about the “crawl rate” settings.

It appears, however, that recently, Google Webmaster Tools have opened the option to set a custom crawl rate for the websites you have listed in your account:

The above option can be found under the main settings in your Google Webmaster Tools account, and it is quiet self-explanatory. Stetting a “slower crawl rate” will reduce Googlebot’s visits to your website. I would recommend not to set a rate slower of what Google is already doing, unless your are experiencing issues with bandwidth. The slower crawl rate will probably result in delay with indexing your latest content. If anything, you may want to experiment with a “faster rate”, if you think it takes too long for your latest content to appear in Google’s index.

For time being I will not customize the crawl rate for this website, as I am pleased with what Google is doing now. I will however experiment with few other websites with intention to report here how can you benefit for this option, if you can benefit at all.Similar Posts:

Do You Use Google Webmasters Tools?

Vlad Zablotskyy — Sun, 18 May 2008 00:20:28 +0000

I do. But I have not always been a huge fan Google Webmasters Tools. Yes I had a paranoia of “keeping things secret” from Google. However, lately I am not only rediscovering some useful things the tolls have to offer. I think I am becoming a fan.

One of the reasons for any webmaster to consider using Google Webmaster tools that it allows to submit sitemaps of your websites or blogs to “help” Google to discover the pages on your websites. Yes, it is not guaranteed that your pages will necessarily be indexed by Google, but when they are these tools can provide some very useful information.

For example today I have noticed that there are 57 pages on this blog that have “duplicate” meta descriptions. While I can not be certain how much effect this actually has on how well my blog ranks in the search results. I am assuming there may be some sort of penalty associated with those “dupes”.

It is very easy to find out if Google has issues with duplicate meta tags on your website. All you need is to log into your account and click on “Diagnostic” menu and then on “Content Analysis”. If Google has nothing to report under that menu I guess you can consider it a good news. In may case as shown in one of the screen shots above I have an issue with at leas 57 pages containing meta tags that similar or straight duplicate from other pages. If you are running a WordPress blog and an plugin that automates the process of creating metatags you may run into a similar problem. What is the solution? First you can probably block Google bot via robots.txt from indexing the duplicates, but I would not recommend doing so. Chances are those duplicate are result of category or archive pages on your website.

Many in SEO community think that meta tags do not offer benefits as far as Google is concerned. I have chosen to disable the plugin that is responsible for generating meta tags. If anything, I would rather suffer a duplicate content penalties based on the content of the pages rather than on meta tags.

The bottom line is that there are many benefits from using Google Webmasters Tools, and if you have not done it before give the a try now. If your platform is WordPress I highly recommend Google XML Sitemaps Generator for WordPress- this plugin creates sitemaps for your blog that you can not only through Google Webmasters Tools but also through a similar services in Yahoo! and MSN.Similar Posts:

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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