Update On Real Estate SEO Tools

This is an update to my previous post where I described my experiment where I used the automatic article directory submission system, Unique Article Wizard to make a single article unique and to submit it to over 600 directories.

If you read the previous post, what I had done as part of the experiment is to take the actual post and write two additional versions with similar syntax so that the Unique Article Wizard system would be able to randomize the paragraphs to make each article unique. I then submitted my three articles to the Unique Article Wizard system and measured the backlinks to our site that offers the discount on RedX REALTOR leads page. Because I used a pen name as part of the experiment, I included the unique word xyssion in the post so that it could be easily searched. As in the previous post, xyssion did not have any data associated with it on google when I published the first article.

Okay with that background, here are the results of the experiment. Within four days of publishing the article the term xyssion returned 16 entries on google that backlinked to our Agents Online and Lockbox websites. As of today, a search for the term on google returned 87 entries (60 on bing), all of which are links provided back from syndication of that one article. The actual number of links is much greater, but these are the sites that have been actively indexed and rank at an acceptable level.

From an SEO standpoint, the article and subsequent publication of it took about two hours. Eighty-seven active backlinks from two hours worth of work sure beats the thirty hours I spent submitting MLSNI.com to various directories to get fifty active links, so I think this experiment can be classified as a success. Now I’m looking for a tool to speed up that manual process of directory submission. I’ll let you know if I find a good one.

It's Reat Estate SEO Time Again with Agents Online

Okay, the fact of the matter is that sometimes your SEO plans work out and sometimes they don’t. For example, I published the real estate country website with intentions to get it on the first page of google for the search phrase “real estate country.” To date the page has not shown up in the top searches for Google, and is in fact very poorly ranked. I blame lack of planning on my part as United Country seems to have numerous high ranking pages that show up under the Real Estate Country Term.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. This afternoon I registered for another term that I feel will be better suited to demonstrate the SEO strategy that I have been sharing for the past while. This new term, Agents Online, gets between 11,000 and 18,000 searches on Google per month. Obviously the term targets real estate agents, I have been a member of the site for eight years, but there are very few competitive sites optimized for that term.

With this new term, here is the strategy: Use XSite Pro to create a website optimized to the term Agents Online. After that, establish backlinks to the site by posting comments on the many social networks and blogs that cater to the real estate segment. I also plan to the site on the few blogs that I manage myself. In fact, wherever there is the ability to place a dofollow link on a website, do so.

After that, it is a matter of reporting on the success. Hopefully I will have better luck demonstrating how to use this technique to search engine optimize your real estate lead generation pages than I did with Real Estate Country.

Yet another Way To Increase Your Search Ranking

I spent a fair amount of time reading message boards a few nights ago trying to find new ideas to get backlinks to the RedX expired listing lead service when, after a lot of reading, I ended up on Yahoo Answers. As an individual with a background in real estate, marketing, and strangely enough nutrition, I started answering questions about short sales, foreclosures, bank owned properties, etc. On every answer, I put a link back to my 4MySales.com site and a keyword-rich description of my area of expertise as part of the source box. After about two hours of answering questions, I went to bed.

Anyway, I checked my backinks yesterday, and a number of my answers showed up as indexed by google. These indexed pages were short lived, but they may have had an effect on my overall rank.

With that in mind, here’s the approach and possible benefit. If you do not yet have a yahoo answers account get one. Spend some time with your profile as it is an extension of your professional bran. Do a search for a real estate topic that serves both your area of expertise as well as your local geography. Start posting answers to questions, and in the resource box make sure to include a link back to your site, with a keyword rich description of your qualifications.

The benefits are that many people read the questions and answers so you may get quite a bit of traffic from the post. In addition, it looks to me like the links do get indexed which should help with your overall search engine ranking.

Finally, if you want an application that runs on your desktop that will notify you when a question that you can answer is asked, answersniper or answereye may be something to look at. Both can also be configured to be abused, BUT DON’T USE THEM THAT WAY.

Automated Directory Submitting, Fast and Easy

Previously, I suggested a quicker way to submit your URL to the multitude of internet directories to grow your backlinks. I did this for a few hours on Friday to grow the links to the discount page of the RedX expired listing lead software and system. Fortunately for me, in my search for an even better approach to directory submission I found a website that automates almost all of the process. I spent another four hours on Saturday submitting 4MySales.com to promote my relationship with the Real Estate Data Exchange (Red X) to the list of directoris and received about 400 backlinks by the end of the process..

The website that I found is http://www.availablescript.com/submiter/index.php?menu=join with the corresponding password of hallo. What the system does is uses a script similar to that of directory submitter to populate all of the fields of your target directory. The only think that you need to do is enter the captcha (human identifier string) and choose the best subdirectory for your particular URL. It is a pretty cool tool and the number of link confirmations that I received in my email confirms that it does work.

An Easier Way to Get Backlinks

There are many tools that I have found to promote the RedX real time listing lead service, and although many of them have been found on discussion areas and groups that focus on the more seedy approach to online marketing, some of these tools do have an application in the white hat world of online marketing.

One approach that has potential is simply what I have been doing manually for the past ten years. Searching for lists of directories with high Page Rank, going to those sites and submitting my link manually. The frustration that I run into is that it takes a whole lot of time to search each directly and after page ten or so in Google, many of the links repeat.

So turning to the black hat guys and their discussions, I think I have found a faster and still white hat approach to get backlinks from directories. I have been using Article Submitter to automatically submit my articles to the various e-zine article directories on the web. The tool shows the link to the website in the top window and the actual website in the lower window. When used to submit articles, the software automatically (more or less) accesses your account for each site and automatically (once again more or less) posts the article. However, there is an purpose application for the software, specifically because it does show the website in the bottom window. That application is to speed up the subscription to hundreds of online directories.

This is the approach. Article Submitter allows you to upload your own list of URL’s. To use it for directory submission, search online for a list of good directories, or Google online directories and start copying web addresses. You can also use what is known as a URL scraper and search for directories to expedite the collection of directory sites, but these are typically tools for spammers so use at your own risk.

Once you have collected your list of URL’s, upload them into Article Submitter. Add your link information into the software and start manually clicking (you won’t be able to use the auto-submit feature for this) each of the links on your list. Because the URL’s show the website in the bottom window in the software, you can manually go through the registration process for each directory. Your progress is expedited because the software automatically populates forms within the site.

Now I am not saying that adding your link to directories is not still going to take some time, especially if you are doing it legitimately. However, just by having a single list with the ability to automatically insert your links into forms is going to save a great deal of time which adds efficiency and will hopefully result in a lot more backlinks.

Increase Your Online Traffic Using Two Simple Methods

I am learning about to promote the RedX REALTOR Lead generation service so I have spent time on the SEO blogs, am a regular attendee of online marketing webinars, which by the way I am applying to Bloom’en, and spent hundreds of hours reading and watching videos on online promotion.

So what have I learned? The answer is quite a bit, but to simplify my learning, there are two basic approaches to increasing links to your site and increasing the site’s visibility on the main search engines. The first approach is to attract organic backlinks from the trillions of websites that are out there. The second approach is to generate your very own websites that you administer and place links on those sites to your own. Both approaches can be accomplished legitimately, or through black hat methods, but using both approaches together is very effective at generating the links that results in higher search engine placement.

We are all very familiar with the first approach, so I will spend my time on the second. The second approach is what I want to talk about because we are talking about creating decent page rank links to your site from other sites that you control. So what do I suggest? I have the following list to help get you started:

1) Online social networks rank really well. Odly enough, pageflakes and not so strangely facebook show up well on search engines as does Linked In links. If you don’t have accounts with links to your primary site, it is time to step up your online footprint.

2) Squiddo and Hub pages: If you have not created a lens in sqiddo or a hub page, consider doing so. By creating and administratin these pages, you can create some great links to your site from a page that has a relatively high page rank.

3) Create your own directory, forums and management websites. There is a lot of software available in the open source community that you can use to create unique sites that cater to your area of specialization or your neighborhood. Create them and sponsor them from your home page with anchor links.

4) Multiple blogs. I know it is time consuming, but as a google product, Blogger has a very high page rank; which means any links from a blogger site will have a high weight. Create a number of blogs, (don’t link them together) and add backlinks to your primary site. Recruit guest bloggers or pay per article ghost writers to create content. There are software programs out there that will actually scrape content from other sites, but these will get you banned from blogger. Unique original and legitimate content is best.

The intention with this program and what I have described is simply to expand your online footprint wherever possible. If you can create single page websites, or sites that have a lot of content, use them to drive traffic to your primary website. I know that time is valuable and what I have discussed above can initially take a lot of time, but the real estate market is becoming extremely cutthroat and your success may ultimately rely on how many people can find you online.

Grow Links to With a Black Hat Tool

I am learning about the sneaky world of black hat marketing, and there are a number of tools that can be used to ethically promote links and traffic of your own website.  As before, this is all in an effort to promote my relationship with the RedX expired listing lead system and the discounts.   I am also saving money with some of this software by promoting my wife’s prenatal vitamin company, Bloom’en Nutrition as well. 

Anyway, a few posts ago I mentioned an interesting software that automatically submits your entry to a couple hundred article and e-zine websites.  Using the software quite a bite over the past few weeks and have found that duplicate content is a major hindrance to increasing my rank on the search engines.  In doing some reading on the SEO and black hat forums I learned that Google may actually penalize your site for having duplicate content spread across the web.  This leads to a conundrum, on the one hand you have at least hundreds of backlinks per article of various page rank, but on the other hand the penalty for duplicate content may bring your ranking down.    

The solution, interestingly enough is another black hat tool designed specifically to increase SE rank.  The product is known as a word spinner and what it does is takes your article posted on blog and randomly modifies the text to make is unique enough to make the resulting text 40 to 80 percent different than the original.  The specific product that I found was WP Spinnner and it is a simple Wordpress plugin.  To use it, you simply add an article and some alternative text or sentences to your article and post it to your wordpress blog.  Each time you refresh your blog the WP Spinnner will change the article to read differently enough to appear as a new article.  This is great for search engines because it makes the spiders think that there is new content on the blog each time it spiders the site, regardless of your posting schedule.  

The real power of the spinner however is the ability to create multiple unique articles that can be submitted to the 300 plus article directories.  It adds a little bit more time to the submission process, but instead of having 300 submissions that count as one link on google, I now have over 300 quality backlinks from unique articles every time I sit down to write and post.  

Now if I can only find a software that combines the article submitter with a spinner, I will be set.

Authority Black Book for Better Backlinks

I was trying to update myself on the latest social marketing technology on Mashable.com when I found a link to an interesting e-book that I could use in my ever evolving online viral promotion strategy for my discount site of the RedX expired listing lead service.

The e-book is names the Authority Black Book and it explains the numerous approaches to increase the visibility and web traffic of your website. The e-book is fairly comprehensive, and with over 67 pages of data contains a great deal of data that can help to better understand the need and overall effectiveness of linking and membership programs with the myriad of online social networks. I know you have an Active Rain account, but do you have a facebook, twitter, stumbleupon, digg, reddit, etc.? Much of the information in the book can be considered common sense, but overall it is a good learning tool to help you grow your backlinks and increase your online presence.