Ideas for Youtube Content Post#1 Topic: Real Estate)
This is a series of posts for some real estate agents I’ve recently worked with who were wondering what kind of video content they should create that would complement their real estate efforts online. Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting a slew of different ideas, so stay tuned!
Neighborhood Video Tours
As part of the process in deciding where they will relocate, home buyers are going to get as much information as they can about prospective neighborhoods and cities. You can provide a valuable service to prospective buyers by taking your camera, and taking some videos of your neighborhoods. You can also highlight the amenities available, so it’s advisable for you to write that information down and do a practice run before you roll film. If you have a real estate website, then you can embed those videos directly into the page to provide extra relevance to that area and subject.
Add comment September 23, 2009
What Does Your Site Need? Ask Your Clients!
As a website owner, small business owner, marketer it is often so very very easy to get wrapped up in interpreting “what your client wants” that you forget to access the best resource to answer that question: the client!
Bottled at the Source!
You’ve all done it…you stare at your Google or Raven seo analytics trying to figure out why your bounce rate is so high. You follow the click paths, create client funnels, follow referral sources, and pour over charts and graphs until your eyes bleed but you STILL can’t figure out why the client left the page. ..You’re missing the most obvious source of feedback! The purest source you can ask for is your client! They have a usually have a “pretty good grasp” on why they would want to visit your website, what they’d like to have as a feature, what web content they’d like to read and why they might not like your current site! So how do you tap this reservoir of recommendations??
All You Gotta Do Is Ask Her Nice
Here’s my recommended tactic that you can use to get feedback from your clients to discover problem areas, services you don’t offer and type of content people are looking for. A simple interview. First, Jot down a set of questions like:
- What would you expect to see on a site for (insert industry here)
- Is there any services our business can do for you online that would make you more likely to be our client? Like Schedule appointments?
- Do you have any unique ideas that would be neat to see on our website?
Second, is to set the client at ease first after approaching them for the survey. Perhaps a cup of coffee or a soda or if you’re a restaurant treat them to a free meal (you’ll definately make a bigger return on the investment of a single meal).
Lastly, make them feel like they’re special, and that their feedback matters deeply(which it should!). The benefit from this tactic is that beyond drawing out some possibly new ideas, or reinforcing your current methods, it will make an impression on that person! That additional level of contact could lead to word of mouth advertising as they tell their freind about their experience. If your lucky, and the person is web-savvy then you could even garner a Yelp review, a blog post, tweet, facebook post or myspace comment about it as well!
Have you used this method to get feedback? Do you have some tips to making it go smoothly? Please feel free to share!
7 comments August 18, 2009
Content Writing Meetup Notes
Thank you for coming out, it was nice to get some fresh opinions and share ideas on exactly what content you should be writing for your site.
Biggest Take Away
It seemed the best advice of the meeting was actually scheduling a specific time and place to dedicate yourself to the project. Since our meetup was all small business owners, the challenge was placing a website and online work in priority with the rest of the business. it’s important to remember that there are tons of resources for small businesses and opportunities in Local Search that you have to have a physical location to take advantage of online.
Where Do I Put Content First?
Photo by WordRidden
Your online presence should be like an octopus, that reaches out from the most likely place of conversion to draw people in and make them into customers. The most logical place of conversion for most businesses is going to be your “static” website. What I mean by static, is that even if it is built on a WordPress platform in a blog style, it has a large number of pages that remain the same, with the same intent that doesn’t change over time.
You should make sure that you have this central location created and optimized for both search engines and for converting visitors to users. Be sure that you’ve got your contact information easily available, and are using “calls to action” that highlight what action you’d like your users to take.
Your Site Should be a Trusted Source, not an Encyclopedia
Photo by Stewart
You should have information that relates closely to your industry. If you’re a Realtor then you should have information about your communities, and the home market. However, your pages shouldn’t be simple reams of information, (or for that matter copied and pasted from the city website or wikipedia). Yes, writing content takes time!
Variety is the spice of life!
Nobody wants to sit and read through 28 paragraphs of stale dull content. Even if your subject is interesting, it’s difficult to engage users online with large chunks of content. So make the content interesting! Be sure to spice up your huge paragraphs of text with things to keep people interested in your writing. Use interesting pictures that line up with concepts or ideas from each paragraph. Perhaps use bullet points to recap if you’ve touched on a number of topics. You can also use quotes to augment your content with authority sources or humor.
Video is Content Too
Don’t forget that if you take the time to create a video for your business, to make sure that it will return the best value to you. For example, if you were making video testimonials, make sure that you’ve got a custom Youtube channel setup. When you create your video listing, be sure to use your full URL in the description, and if you can be sure to edit it into the video itself as well in case it’s syndicated.
Thanks again for all of you who made it out today!
2 comments July 25, 2009
Google is the Other Woman: The Relationship Algorithm
Over the weekend I had the opportunity to talk to some of my friends who are not in the search engine optimization industry, and made a realization as I was explaining how we understand Google actually works. I found myself quickly relying on an analogy that I think might be useful when talking to perspective clients, so I thought I would share it.
Google Is My “Other Lady”
I came to the realization that the relationship that I have with Google is actually extremely similar to the relationship I have with my wife *shameless promotion* who runs an awesome online vintage shop. Looking at the way that I interact, communicate and understand what it is that Google is looking for mirrors the way that I find ways to communicate and interact in my romantic relationship. So we can take a stab at understanding Google’s ranking factors, by looking at the factors in our relationships.
Communication is Key
When you are talking to a girl, and hope to begin a relationship you have to let them know about you, who you are, what you do, and what your interests are in life. When you are building a website, you need to also be communicating to Google who you are, what you do, and what interests might bring people to your website. You can’t just be fluff, you have to have content that’s relevant and makes “semantic sense”. This means that the year 2000 tactics of stuffing pages full of keywords and not actually using real sentences is out. The way you present yourself and dress does say something about you, no it’s not just being shallow. If you like to wear a stained and faded black sabbath t shirt with hopelessly ripped jeans, it sends a message about you. Header tags ( h1, h2, h3 etc) have the same effect, they send a clear signal about your page’s content, so be sure to use them effectively.
Meta-tags: The Pick Up Line
Do you believe in love at first sight…or should I walk by again?
You only have one chance to make a first impression, and being far too forceful can have just a negative impact on your chances of impressing Google, as an attractive woman. In your first conversation, you also need to be truthful about what it is you actually do. If you claim to be “in finance” and turn out to be a cashier at the local Quikie Mart, then you aren’t going to be seen as particularly trust worthy.
In your meta-title, description and keywords you need to describe what it is your site is about, without adding items that you don’t actually cover. Also be sure not to stuff your meta-keywords with tons of repetitions or words and topics your site doesn’t cover. Recently Google made a change to it’s handling of meta-tags for longer queries, and uses items from the page to understand context, and this is important because it means that Google is looking past the “pick up lines” and looking at the content of your site, and letting searchers see more of the context from your page before they even click through to your site.
Don’t hate the Player, Hate the Game
If the people who know you refer to you as “shady”, or “flirtatious”, then a woman you want to be in a relationship with is going to be second guessing you, questioning your actions and generally not going to be secure in her relationship with you. Likewise, if you hang out with a crowd of people that are constantly having “drama”, getting in arguments with their girlfriends, go out gambling and hanging out in strip clubs, you are most likely hurting your chances. Whether you think it’s fair or not, people are going to make assumptions about you and your character based off the company you keep. Even worse is if you consistently stand up and talk up these people as your close friends who can be trusted…when they can’t be.
Google also looks at who your website is “hanging out with”, and is going to analyze your online relationships. If you’re linking out to adult and gaming websites, and recommending your visitors to those types of sites, you’re going to lose credibility with Google. What other sites say about you will be used by Google to evaluate your relevance to a particular topic, so be sure you’re getting good “anchor text” from reputable websites that are related to your site’s theme, topic, or geographic area.
It’s All About Trust
To summarize my analogy, no relationship can function without trust. Without it, both partners will start taking on negative behaviors, and trust me, you do NOT want to have Google as your Ex-Girlfriend! But if you stick to the straight and narrow, and faithfully update your content, find trustworthy links and friends to support you, then you will over time become more and more trustworthy to Google and your girlfriend.
I Now Pronounce You Man and Search Engine
A relationship in the end is about commitment. If you do not commit yourself to the time needed to write content, create videos, blog, respond to blog comments, submit yourself to directories, put out link bait, promote yourself socially then you’re not going to have a very successful website or online presence. So get over your commitment issues, and go for it! Now repeat after me:
I SEOer,
Take Thee Google,
To Love and to Optimize for,
With useful, unique content
through serp changes and algorithm updates,
For Adsense or Adwords campaigns,
Till Death or Server Outage do us part.
4 comments July 24, 2009
Content Writing Advice: Strategy Meetup
Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader something to look for so they aren’t distracted by the total lack of content in your writing.
Randy K. Milholland
When you own a website, sometimes it can feel like a very insular project, where your website is an island. I’ll be hosting a meetup for site owners in the Riverside, California area to discuss content writing advice and SEO strategies for business owners, Internet marketers and site owners.
The meetup will be held at Back to the Grind, in Downtown Riverside California on Saturday 7/25/2009 at 10:00 Am. Please bring your laptops to the meeting if posible!
2 comments July 10, 2009
Skeletons In Your Website
In this last year I worked with a client to put up a website for him for La Quinta, California. As usual I added a sitemap( BTW this site makes quick and easy xml sitemap files) and verified the site with Google’s webmaster tools (Which just underwent an awesome Google facelift and gives more data and feed back than ever).
Pay attention to the bones of your Site: File Names
Well, I just went back and checked in to my Google webmaster tools account and discovered something very strange for this real estate and local centric website for La Quinta, CA…
I was totally confused why this site had so many different terms that it ranked for for “Skeleton”… Well I did some digging and realized that when I built the site, I had added the background image with the file name “images/skeleton.gif”. The rest of the site has NOTHING to do with skeletons but here Google is giving rankings for a wide mix of terms related to the main content of the page, as well as for terms related to skeletons! For example Google webmaster tools showed me ranking 48 for [Jack Skeleton] from Nightmare Before Christmas, as well as [skeleton in desert] which seemed to have used the geographic context along with the filename. The lesson here for your site is that filen ames are one of the many factors in how Google understands your website, so do everything you can to name them appropriately!
7 comments May 17, 2009
Rich Snippets: Adding Microformats to improve your SERP
Just in March Google announced that it would be altering the SERP result page to increase the amount of information that the description would give for long tail searches. It started pulling additional context from the page, in addition to the information it may pull from DMOZ. Google has upped the Ante… Today at Searchology among other new programs the most important change for SEOers and Website owners in my opinion is “Rich Snippets“. Here’s an example of a “Rich Snippet” from Google’s Search Result Page.
So essentially by using RDF markup and Microtagging you can utlize special markup on page and that information will actually be utilized in the Google Serps. These types of Microtags have been used in the past but this is the first time Google has announced that they’re using this information. It will be interesting to see how this change roll out will affect Google’s fortunes. While Matt Cutts says that this change will roll out slowly for specific searches at first, but there’s a form where you can indicate you’d like to participate.
Adopt Early
If you’re a small business website and your trying to get your information displayed more prominently then add the microformats to your address or if you offer online products, be sure to add the proper tags!
3 comments May 13, 2009
