Tag Archives: Search engine optimization

John Merse

NY Times Article: The Dirty Little Secret Of Search

How JC Penney Got In Trouble With Google

NY Times writer David Segal wrote a great article about JC Penney attempt to ‘’cheat’’ Google and increase their organic rankings. As we know, Google’s goal is to search every corner of the Internet and find the most important, relevant sites that match the query you typed in. But what is the cost of being a relevant website and ranking number one for numerous keywords? JC Penney unfortunately found out the cost of trying to fool Google into instant rankings across the board.  These sorts of tactics, known as “Black Hat” SEO, comes with consequences (and is of course not what we recommend).  This article brings up the issue of using Black Hat versus White Hat SEO.

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John Merse

Search Engine Giant Google Drops Its Real Estate Listings

Your Website Is Still Number One

Don’t be fooled by Google’s decision to eliminate real estate listings from its classified listings site. This doesn’t mean shoppers aren’t looking for homes online or the imminent collapse of real estate search forever! From the outside, this change to Google’s classifieds section, Google Base, sounds like a big deal (mostly because it is Google)! However, Google freely admits that their decision to make this change is a result of low usage and the increased development of agent website tools.

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John Merse

Earning web traffic the old fashioned way


For many businesses, launching a website feels like the finish line.  You’ve worked hard to have a final product and you’re excited to move on to other things. Unfortunately, there is no simple finish line for web success.  It’s important to celebrate a website launch, but the true test of your website is how well it works for you in the long run (how many new customers, donors, or volunteers it brings in, how much you grow your email list, how many new leads you’ve gotten).  Having a site that works for you and makes you money doesn’t just happen on its own.  What was true for Smith Barney in 1986 in the above video (go to the 20 second mark) is true for keeping your website up to date now.  Old fashioned hard work pays off, even if the tools and strategies you must learn to use in the cutting edge of the web are far from old-fashioned.

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John Merse

A new look for UnionStreetMedia.com

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably noticed the change already.  Things have been spruced up around here.  We have taken our own advice and you are now looking at a revamped and redesigned Union Street Media website.  Why?  As we advise all of our clients to do, we took a good hard look at our business goals and used that as a starting point to make sure that our website conveyed the overall strategy behind what we do for our clients’ websites – generate traffic, engage site visitors and convert visitors into customers – through fresh, engaging content, navigation and visual aids.

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Union Street Media News

Facebook for Business

The Social Media boom may be bigger than you think; Facebook is at its forefront. Our “Facebook for Business” series will help you make sense of this powerful tool. You’ll learn how to tame the beast and harness it for your business. Follow our series during the next several weeks and:

  • Learn Facebook basics
  • Learn how to leverage Facebook to underscore your brand
  • Learn how to get fans (and what to do with those fans)
  • Learn how to optimize your Facebook page
  • Learn about applications and FBML (Facebook Mark up Language)
  • Learn how to measure your Facebook traffic
  • Learn how to effectively link your networks

With over 300,000,000 Facebook users, 120,000,000 of whom log on daily, the business opportunity Facebook presents cannot be ignored. According to Socialnomics, social media has claimed the number one web activity spot over the previous “less acceptable” contender. Facebook is a free way to improve your online presence. To increase your success online, your business must be part of this popular activity.

Leading companies have joined the crowd and are successfully using their Facebook pages to keep their customers happy and connected with with their brand.

Look at who is making the best of Facebook: 10 Successful Facebook Business Pages (from the Penn Olsen Social Media blog). With due diligence, and focused hard work, your business could be among the leaders.

Facebook logo

Facebook logo

A business Facebook page is different than your personal Facebook page.

  • You have “fans” instead of “friends”
  • It represents your brand, not you.
  • You have access to much more information about your traffic.
  • There is more customization for privacy settings.

The business page is built off of your personal account and gives you plenty of tools to reach the growing network of individuals using Facebook. You can run ads on the Facebook sidebar, track the demographics of your page traffic with Facebook Insights, create a badge or fanbox to promote your page, start discussion boards with the fans, add company information and events, and much more.

There are many ways to use these features and many ways to optimize your page; but to start, how do you create a business page?

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Union Street Media News

Real Estate Blogging Objectives

A typewriter with the QWERTY layout

Tired of blogging? No Time?

Recently I came across this forum post by a beleaguered, blogging Realtor.

“when i first began blogging i was very excited i found out a way to reach the world and express my thoughts.My Real Estate blog began to be filled with content and awesome articles. As i continue to blog and expand my audience and continue to grow my business i have found myself exhausted and overwhelmed. I am exhausted every article requires time and thought something that i really dont have. i recently began looking for a ghost blogger but guess what i haven’t found one yet. Does any one have any suggestions?”

As the season gets busier for Realtors, a common issue is finding time to sit down and write a well written blog post with good content. It is wiser to keep a consistent output rather than flurries of activity, so if you only blog once a month that is preferable to a high frequency of blogs and then nothing at all for long periods. Readers will check in at regular intervals but if there is nothing there for ages you run the risk of losing them completely as they think the blog is dormant. Rather than leave your blog dormant until you find the time and energy to jump back in, consider this:

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G Dewald

Other Readings: Thinking about Search

Legacy 2400 baud modem for leased lines. Proba...Image via Wikipedia

A lot great articles about search lately. Not just search engine optimization, but the whole concept of what search is and how it can be used for engagement etc. Here are some that I’ve been reading:

Mobile Search

People search for things in a context. They are somewhere in the universe and they need to know something. Ten years ago if we wanted to search for something we could use this fancy new thing called the internet and it was awesome. We logged in on our dial up modems and typed our questions. We used computers weighing at least eight pounds to interact with the data. The screens were maybe a foot wide or more.

Increasingly, we’re out in the world and looking for something. We use devices weighing a few ounces. The screens are a few inches wide. We can’t type into them and a noisy real-world environment surrounds us. But we still want to search for something.

“Mobile Search Engine Optimization” describes some of the different ways we use search on the go. We think and act differently when using mobile devices. Your search engine optimization that works so well on a desktop at your office, might not be reaching and engaging a customer who is standing within ten feet of your product or service. This is an emerging area of research so expect more in this vein.

Want to get ready for a mobile search world? The future of the mobile web is available to you every weekend.

Lifestyle Real Estate Search

While Union Street Media customers have been using our One Click Real Estate Search technology to craft custom lifestyle real estate searches on their sites for some time, there are an increasing number of services and aggregators focusing on creating real estate searches that highlight more than just price and location. Joel Burslem gives a roundup of several, including the Onboard Infomatics Lifestyle Listings Engine (which looks pretty sweet).

How do people search for real estate?

Understanding what people type into search engines is very important to getting the reach you need for your site. It helps you put your site in front of people that may find your site relevant. There’s been a fair amount of chatter about “natural language search” vs the “old” checkbox-zip-code-how-many-bathrooms approach. The FBS Blog (quickly becoming one of my favorites, by the way) gives a quick take on natural language search and whether it applies to real estate.

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Amanda Everse

See how your real estate web site’s SEO is performing: use Rank Checker for FireFox

Are you tired of spending time typing in your preferred keywords on Google or Yahoo to see where your real estate web site is positioned on the search engine results page (SERP)? If you’re below page two, this can be a real time drain and take up a lot of your search engine optimization (SEO) time . If you have several keywords to check, it can be an even BIGGER hassle. Whenever you want to see if your efforts at SEO are paying off, simply use Rank Checker to get the data.

The folks at SeoBook have made our lives easier with a fantastic Firefox plugin called Rank Checker. I’ve been using this tool since July and couldn’t live without it. Even though it’s easy to install and use, SeoBook’s Aaron Wall has made it even easier by creating a 5-minute video to tech you how to install and use it. I highly recommend taking the 5 minutes to view it.

Five Tips to make Rank Checker even sweeter

  1. You can cut and paste your list of keywords out of a spreadsheet and add them all at once, or you can type them one at a time.
  2. Be sure to save your list of keywords to the preset folder. That way, you can run it any time you like with almost no effort.
  3. You can simply view the results on-screen, but even better is to download the .csv (comma separated value) file.
  4. Save that raw data file to it’s own folder as simply MM-DD-YY, M-D-YY, MM-D-YY, or M-DD-YY. (see tomorrow’s post to see why this is so important!) feel free to open the file in Excel and save it as a .xls file so that you can format and play with the information. Just don’t mess with the original CSV.
  5. Plan to run this once a month for three or four months so that you can observe the impact of your SEO efforts (changes to content, meta data, and inbound link building).

This is the second in a series of five posts this week on cool FireFox plugins to assist in optimizing your real estate web site. Yesterday’s post featured a Firefox plugin for easily adding images to your real estate blog. Tomorrow’s post will examine a cool (but somewhat tricky) plugin that helps Realtors visualize and report on the data they get from Rank Checker.

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Amanda Everse

Real Estate Agents – Time to Refocus Your Ad Budget

If you’re a Realtor looking to justify the investment of time and money that you’ve made into your website and/or blog, this article from RISMedia about Yahoo!’s recent study of real estate consumers’ online behavior should give you some reassurance. It might have you considering shifting your budget even further towards support of your site and/or Pay-Per-Click campaigns.

In a recent study of 500 consumers, Yahoo! confirmed that people use the Web to ensure that the selected agent will best meet their specific needs.

Key findings include:

  • Home buyers and sellers consider approximately two agents on average before making a final decision
  • The Internet impacts consumer trust. Forty percent of respondents credited a site in increasing their trust in the agent
  • 74% of people who accessed an agent website got there with the help of a search engine
  • The online research process is quick and intense: consumers spent an average of 12 hours online researching agents and 75% selected an agent within one week of starting their search

Online resources provided introduction to new agents as well as promotional deals:

  • 45% of respondents used the Internet to learn about agents they didn’t know existed
  • 41% discovered special deals and promotions offered from an agent through the Internet

However, there is a disconnect between advertising dollars and consumer behavior. Based on Yahoo!’s study, 77% of respondents used an online source for information during their research process compared to 34% for print. But, according to a recent analysis by Borrell Associates, Realtor advertising dollars have yet to catch up to where home buyers are going – the Internet. While this year’s online media spend did in fact double from 2005, capturing 32% of the overall advertising spend, newspapers continue to get more share of dollars with 40%.

So, if you’ve been struggling with where to focus your advertising budget, these numbers should help resolve the debate. While print-advertising will always be demanded by your sellers, you’ll find your buyers via a well-optimized web site that is found easily on search engines. If you want some support, Union Street Media’s Internet Marketing Team is here to help. You can choose from a variety of services that suit your budget.

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