Working on Real Estate SEO on Bing

I haven’t quite formed my opinion about Microsoft’s new release of their Bing search engine. In reading the reviews, I am not alone. I have spent a little time this afternoon trying to get a feel for what where my real estate listing lead site and associated links lay in the ranking. What I found is that this “because it’s not google” search alternative has a completely different algorithm which will likely require a completely different SEO strategy for your real estate website.

I am not sure if this new search engine will give google a run for its money in search engine terms. As Seth Godin put it, “Bing is trying to be the new Google. Unfortunately Google is the new Google.” However, it does have some interesting features.

Now for those of us who are trying to get our real estate website to the top of the ranking, optimizing for bing may require a different strategy. In fact, in looking up the search terms that index my site well on google, I there is little success on bing. The Expired Listing Lead term did return back my link to the RedX as the top link, but the multitude of other sites that typically show up in reference to me did not. For my Agent Online experiment, the site was not even indexed, and similar to google, real estate country did not return a link to my page, even when I typed in the exact URL. Even my wife’s’ “prenatal vitamins” page did not get indexed.

From what I can determine with the very limited experience that I have had with the site, it uses an algorithm similar to google’s but puts a high weight on sites that have been around a while along with those that are well linked. Unfortunately from an SEO standpoint there is not much that you can do to age your real estate URL.

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.

Online Marketing Resource; The Best That I Could Find

It is obvious to most of you reading this post that online marketing is going to be the most cost effective way to attract new business. You have the farthest reach, can touch the most people and it is the only advertising that you can do to get prospective clients when they are sitting at their desk at work during the day. This is no shortage of places to learn about marketing your site online, and making the conversion process more streamlined, but I have to tell you that the information taught by MarketingExperiments in their bi-weekly webinars is by far the best. I attend their online marketing optimization webinars every other week and have a lot of success in growing the conversion and even the page rank of 4MySales.com and leveraging the benefits of the RedX real estate lead attraction system.

Marketing Experiments is owned by Marketing Sherpa, which is one of the most best known online marketing resources around. Their entire approach is to take the websites of small businesses and organizations, and run optimization experiments on those sites to increase lead capture by focusing on various aspects of the website and the steps that the prospect goes through as they convert to clients. The online webinars are hosted by a well respected team of researchers whose only job is to find out what best practices actually result in additional sales for a given website. The link to their site is above, and if you want a great resource to learn how to improve the effectiveness of your website and online marketing I would recommend Marketng Experiments.