REwebCentral.com » Google http://www.rewebcentral.com All things web for real estate professionals Sun, 27 Nov 2011 22:20:44 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.4 Google Places is the place to be. Is your business listed? http://www.rewebcentral.com/2011/07/google-places-is-the-place-to-be-is-your-business-listed/ http://www.rewebcentral.com/2011/07/google-places-is-the-place-to-be-is-your-business-listed/#comments Mon, 04 Jul 2011 17:51:40 +0000 Sally http://www.rewebcentral.com/?p=274 According to Google, more than 22% of searches these days are related to locations, and the importance of the local searches is growing every year. Because of this trend, Google’s search algorithm is now shifting from Maps to Google Places. This opens a great marketing opportunity for your Real Estate business.

Well optimized and maintained Google Places Page (GPP) can serve as the gateway to your real estate website. The GPP can even bring clients directly to your real estate business. Your Google Places Page should be considered as a must-have element of any local marketing campaign. The best part of the news: IT’S FREE.

To build the most effective Google Places page and bring more action to your real estate business, you can hire an expert or you can do it yourselves by following these simple steps:

1.    To get started, you will need to have a Gmail or Google account.
If you don’t have one, read this article to learn how to get started, or simply go to www.gmail.com and follow the instructions.

2.    Claim Your Listing by adding your account information. Provide as much information as possible. Having Google account without claiming your place with most accurate information and updates is like opening an office with no doors.

3.    Make your Google Places Page effective by providing complete information about yourself, your business, your listings, upcoming events, etc. Search engines love data; they also love more frequent updates. You can keep you GPP automatically updated by connecting to your IDX pages, such as open houses, new listings, community pages, and other Interactive IDX components.

Be sure to follow the Google Places Guidelines. Google is strict with these guidelines, and following these requirements will determine your listing or delisting from Google Places.

According to Google, only 7 percent GPP have been actually claimed (4% up from last year). This creates a window of opportunity for your business to get your business listed and get higher ranking by getting ahead of your competition.

If you are serious about local internet marketing, contact our IDX Consultants to get help with creating effective Google Places Page.

Call us at 1•800•966•4431 or click here to request a free consultation.

]]> http://www.rewebcentral.com/2011/07/google-places-is-the-place-to-be-is-your-business-listed/feed/ 0 Marilyn’s “New leads come both from national and international individuals” http://www.rewebcentral.com/2011/03/marilyns-new-leads-come-both-from-national-and-international-individuals/ http://www.rewebcentral.com/2011/03/marilyns-new-leads-come-both-from-national-and-international-individuals/#comments Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:51:05 +0000 Eric http://www.rewebcentral.com/?p=219 Marilyn knows All about waterfront condos, and she proves it to United States and overseas clients.

Thank you to the IDXNetwork Team for making a wonderful website for me that has attracted endless leads. I have been able to convert many of the leads into sales.  New leads come both from national and international individuals.
We have upgraded my site thanks to suggestions from the Support Team from time to time, always resulting in increased readership.  I highly recommend using IDXnetwork to build your website!  They are a pleasure to work with!
MARILYN FARBER JACOBS
REALTOR – EAST BOCA RATON, FLORIDA

Thanks, Marilyn. The IDXnetwork Team is thrilled by your success and we look forward to supporting you for many years to come.

FLwaterfrontcondos.com uses turnkey design Serene and has fantastic rankings due to a focus on specific condo buildings and providing great details on the page.  500 categorized Community Filters w/interactive Google maps and tons of relevant text helps Marilyn beat the competition. We even made a search story about it.

]]> http://www.rewebcentral.com/2011/03/marilyns-new-leads-come-both-from-national-and-international-individuals/feed/ 0 Prime Horse Property is “producing a better client base” http://www.rewebcentral.com/2011/03/prime-horse-property-is-producing-a-better-client-base/ http://www.rewebcentral.com/2011/03/prime-horse-property-is-producing-a-better-client-base/#comments Sat, 05 Mar 2011 01:21:10 +0000 Eric http://www.rewebcentral.com/?p=174 Here’s a great note received by the IDXnetwork Team, which illustrates the power of niche marketing and capturing qualified leads.

I just wanted to write a quick note of thanks to you and your team. The results of being able to filter the IDX have had a tremendous positive effect on my business, thank you! Traffic at my website has significantly increased and I am #1 on Google in my area. This increased traffic combined with the filtered IDX for my niche market is producing a better client base as they are easily finding the properties that matter most. I’d also like to thank you for your generosity in sharing your vast wisdom as to how to best build my pages thus giving me an even better understanding of SEO techniques.

Thanks very much!

Best Regards,

Beth Barbour, Realtor®
Allison James Estates & Homes
http://PrimeHorseProperty.com

Beth uses design #201006 – Paramount and a community filter builder package to draw in the horse community.  She really cares for horses, and it is clearly displayed in her homepage slideshow, text, and choice of  communities. This attention to detail has caused horse minded property owners to take note. Here are a few properties from her community page Horse Property in La Cresta, Murietta, CA.

Thank you for your kind words, Beth.

P.S. Give an extra apple to the horses from your friends at REwebCentral and IDXnetwork.

]]> http://www.rewebcentral.com/2011/03/prime-horse-property-is-producing-a-better-client-base/feed/ 0 Google Changes Pagerank Algorithm http://www.rewebcentral.com/2010/12/google-changes-pagerank-algorithm/ http://www.rewebcentral.com/2010/12/google-changes-pagerank-algorithm/#comments Thu, 02 Dec 2010 18:24:26 +0000 Eric http://www.rewebcentral.com/?p=151 Google was quick to change their PageRank algorithm on the heels of a troubling article in the New York Times.

Accoriding to the Official Google Blog:

in the last few days we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience. The algorithm we incorporated into our search rankings represents an initial solution to this issue, and Google users are now getting a better experience as a result.

We can’t say for sure that no one will ever find a loophole in our ranking algorithms in the future. We know that people will keep trying: attempts to game Google’s ranking, like the ones mentioned in the article, go on 24 hours a day, every single day. That’s why we cannot reveal the details of our solution—the underlying signals, data sources, and how we combined them to improve our rankings—beyond what we’ve already said. We can say with reasonable confidence that being bad to customers is bad for business on Google. And we will continue to work hard towards a better search.

Have these changes made a change to your ranking?  Tell us about  it below.

]]> http://www.rewebcentral.com/2010/12/google-changes-pagerank-algorithm/feed/ 0 Google Provides Faster Indexing with Caffeine http://www.rewebcentral.com/2010/06/google-provides-faster-indexing-with-caffeine/ http://www.rewebcentral.com/2010/06/google-provides-faster-indexing-with-caffeine/#comments Tue, 15 Jun 2010 02:28:55 +0000 REweb http://www.rewebcentral.com/?p=133 Google recently announced changes to it’s indexing system named Caffeine, which boasts “50 percent fresher results for web searches” when compared to the previous Google index.

According to the Official Google Blog:

Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.

We’ve built Caffeine with the future in mind. Not only is it fresher, it’s a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online, and delivers even more relevant search results to you. So stay tuned, and look for more improvements in the months to come.

Google is constantly updating processes to performance, and so should every Real Estate website owner.  Here is a video update of the major improvements.

What are you doing to capitalize on faster indexing?

Not sure how search engines work? Here is a video from Google which simply explains the process in just over 3 minutes.

]]> http://www.rewebcentral.com/2010/06/google-provides-faster-indexing-with-caffeine/feed/ 0 New feature added to Google’s Ad Planner http://www.rewebcentral.com/2010/05/new-feature-added-to-googles-ad-planner/ http://www.rewebcentral.com/2010/05/new-feature-added-to-googles-ad-planner/#comments Mon, 31 May 2010 01:15:51 +0000 Sally http://www.rewebcentral.com/?p=120 Google just introduced several new interesting features that integrate DoubleClick Ad Planner data with other solutions.

One of the most noteworthy features is the Ad Planner 1000 list, a list of the largest 1000 sites worldwide, based on Unique Visitors (users), as measured by Ad Planner.  This list is updated monthly as new Ad Planner datasets are released. The information is available online as a reference and as a downloadable file.

The new feature added to Google’s Ad Planner is the new Export to AdWords feature. You can export the sites and placements identified within the Google Content Network by media planners and they will be set up as a new campaign or ad group within your AdWords account.

]]> http://www.rewebcentral.com/2010/05/new-feature-added-to-googles-ad-planner/feed/ 0 Google modifies display URL policy http://www.rewebcentral.com/2010/01/google-modifies-display-url-policy/ http://www.rewebcentral.com/2010/01/google-modifies-display-url-policy/#comments Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:00:28 +0000 Sally http://www.rewebcentral.com/?p=90 Google announced a display URL policy adjustment for AdWords campaigns.

The display URL (the URL that appears within the ad itself) shows potential visitors to a site where they’ll land when they click on an ad. For sites that sit on shared or hosted domains (such as wordpress.com) all ads will be required to display URL “that accurately reflect their destinations.”

Going forward, ads that do not include this additional information in their display URLs will be disapproved. A suggested display URL will be provided in the disapproval email notification, but we encourage you to proactively adjust any ads that you think might be affected by this change.

If you’d like to learn about this policy in greater detail, please visit the AdWords Help Center.

Need help with Google AdWords optimization? Click here to request a Free Consultation.

]]> http://www.rewebcentral.com/2010/01/google-modifies-display-url-policy/feed/ 0 Switch From Print To Online Advertising And Watch Your Profits Soar http://www.rewebcentral.com/2009/04/switch-from-print-to-online-advertising-and-watch-your-profits-soar/ http://www.rewebcentral.com/2009/04/switch-from-print-to-online-advertising-and-watch-your-profits-soar/#comments Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:25:34 +0000 REweb http://rewebcentral.com/blog/?p=20 Today’s smart consumers are turning to the Internet to start their real estate transactions and the first place they go is straight to the search engines. The term “Googling” a topic didn’t get added to our everyday lingo by some clever PR person. Oh no. “Googling” is a phenomenon that is taking this country by storm and real estate is no exception.
So, how DO you get your website to show up at or near the top of the results when a consumer types in “real estate” for your geographic area? And aren’t all your competitors trying to do exactly the same thing?
Search engine optimization and ranking can be a tricky thing. The rules are always changing. That’s why it’s important to hire just the right consultant to help you – one who understands the engines and more importantly, one who understands your exact business and how your consumers are going to behave when they sit down at a search engine to do their research.

]]> http://www.rewebcentral.com/2009/04/switch-from-print-to-online-advertising-and-watch-your-profits-soar/feed/ 0 Search Engines – A Critical Component Of Your Online Marketing Toolkit http://www.rewebcentral.com/2009/04/search-engines-%e2%80%93-a-critical-component-of-your-online-marketing-toolkit/ http://www.rewebcentral.com/2009/04/search-engines-%e2%80%93-a-critical-component-of-your-online-marketing-toolkit/#comments Thu, 16 Apr 2009 23:25:36 +0000 REweb http://rewebcentral.com/blog/?p=18 Optimizing and Registering Your Website With Search Engines Will Boost Your Rankings
Over half of today’s real estate consumers start their buy or sell transactions on the Internet, more often than not by logging on to their favorite search engine and typing in key words like “real estate and [city name].” In fact, Google expects to launch over half a billion realty-related search results next year. Where will your website fall in these results?
Making sure that your website comes up at or near the top of search engine results requires a process called search engine optimization and registration, and its value has soared as the number of websites has climbed into the billions. Standing out in the crowd is critical. A high ranking in the right search engines is one marketing tool that can increase traffic on your website as much as 90 percent, according to BrandWeek Online Magazine. The more traffic a website gets, the more sales that result, improving the return on investment for money spent on Internet marketing.
What is search engine optimization?
Choose the right keywords.
Use meta tags.
Check out your competition.
Improve relevancy with links.
Deceptive practices are death.
Is optimization enough?
Search engine vendors.
Beware the guarantees!
What is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization is the process of configuring your website to be attractive to search engines. Search engine optimization is not the process of deciding what you personally might think is attractive or even what you think your prospects will find attractive. It’s the process of choosing and improving criteria that the search engines think is important, and the process is part art and part science. The engines seek relevancy and their relevancy algorithms are a closely guarded secret. An experienced search engine expert can be invaluable in helping you maximize your search engine optimization efforts.
Choose the right keywords. Think about the words that will come to your prospects’ minds when they think about your business. These are the terms that you want to maximize on your site. If, for example, you represent buyers or sellers in Los Angeles, you will have thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of competing sites that list “Los Angeles real estate.” You, therefore, will want to also add more specific phrases such as “Los Angeles beach properties” or “Bel Air real estate.”
Use meta tags. Websites are written in html code and use meta tags to identify various parts of a page. Each page has a different “meta tag title” of 50 to 80 characters, which is arguably the most significant component of search engine optimization. Your best keywords should be in the titles of each page.
Each page also has a meta description tag, which most search engines will display in their search engine results to tell the viewer what the page contains. Think about what a compelling call to action for your prospects would be and make sure this is what will appear in the search engine results. Sellers’ agents, for example, might want to use “free comparative analysis for your home on my website.” Buyers’ agents might want to use “search the MLS on my website.”
Each page also has a meta keyword tag that should include a string of all terms and phrases relevant to your business. Limit this tag to 250 characters and include common misspellings for words to match misspelled search requests. Absolutely do not use words that are popular, but unrelated to the content of your site, in a bid to attract the search engines. Engines that discover such words when they “crawl” your site will blacklist your site.
Check out your competition. Visit your competitors’ websites to see what key words they are using. This step will help you refine your own keywords by identifying ideas you didn’t think of.
Improve relevancy with links. Increasingly, search engines are factoring into their rankings the number of other websites that provide a hyperlink to your site. When other sites on the Internet point to your site, search engines attach a higher importance to your site and your ranking goes up accordingly. It is important, however, that you link only with sites related to your business. Excessive links to irrelevant sites are read as “spam” by the search engines and will adversely affect your ranking.
Deceptive practices are death. If search engines believe a website is using deceptive practices to boost its ranking, they will blacklist the site and it will not turn up in search results at all.
Is optimization enough? In a word, “no.” With their increasing popularity with web surfers, search engines have become big business. While a search engine might eventually “crawl” to your site and discover you, you need to “motivate” the engine to find and recognize you sooner with paid registration. Once you register, your work is still not done. Each search engine will randomly assign you a position after registration and it is up to you to analyze the position and strategize ways to improve it, if indicated. It is important to keep in mind that search engine rankings are extremely fluid. You must vigilantly monitor your ranking and take frequent steps to protect and improve it.
Search engine vendors. An experienced search engine registration vendor is worth its weight in gold. Such a vendor can economically bulk register your site with all the important search engines and analyze the resulting positioning and recommend valuable strategies, both free and paid, for improving your position(s). And don’t forget, rankings are fluid. A good vendor will help you monitor and protect your rankings.
Beware the guarantees! Do not believe the search engine optimization and registration vendor who guarantees you the top slot or two in the search engines. Only one result and be number one and rankings change constantly. Don’t pay extra for a guarantee and be particularly wary of any vendor who makes such a guarantee.

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