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Search Engine Marketing - Experienced Real Estate Websites and Marketing

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Written by Kevin Harper    Thursday, 01 November 2007

I run across a lot of questions about parking domains or redirecting them:

• If you have multiple domains, should you park them, or redirect them to your main site?
• What about creating "micro sites" on their own domains? Is that a bad practice?
  
  

I've read articles that have it completely backwards, recommending domain parking and staying away from microsites that direct traffic to your main site. In order to make sense of it, it's important to understand what Google is trying to avoid, which is duplicate content (AKA spam).

Scenario #1 - Using domain redirects rather than parking

Let's say a site has good content on one domain. Then the owner goes out and parks 30 more domains on it, with no redirects. That otherwise good content is watered down now, duplicated x30. Google's index is now bloated, and they feel (correctly) that they're being "gamed" with spam. Google's recommended practice is to redirect domains, not just park them.

Read this article about domain redirects from beginning to end and you'll get it.

Scenario #2 - Using micro sites

Let's say you have one main domain, but focused content that you want to put up on another domain directing traffic to your main site. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as the site is unique, the domain is unique, and the content is unique. Those are huge caveats, don't violate them.

Using micro sites is no different than another content site linking to yours. The only thing different is that the owner is the same. In a "free speech" world, you can have as many micro sites as you want if you have the time and resources to write them, and if they are not spam articles solely for the benefit of search engines. Then it's okay to link from them to your main site.

Whether they'll rank well and actually bring in significant traffic is debatable. What they can do, however, is add an inbound link to your site from a keyword-rich page. It doesn't have to have a high PageRank to help in that effort. Building micro sites is not something I would devote a lot of money to...yet I believe it can help in the whole SEO equation.

Think of it like Proctor and Gamble having a main site with a product page for Charmin, but also having a micro site for Charmin that deals in a more focused way with promoting that specific product. Both these sites point to each other. You could actually remove the link back from the main site and have it be a little more advantageous, since one way links are better than exchanges.

Last Updated ( Thursday, 01 November 2007 ) User Rating: / 0

Written by Kevin Harper    Thursday, 30 August 2007

Do you rely on prospects typing in your website address to find you, perhaps from a business card or printed material that you distribute? If so, you are forfeiting a lot of search engine traffic if your website strategy relies solely on type-ins. There are reasons your site isn't attracting traffic from Google. It's because you don't have a strategy for getting your site ranked well by the search engines.

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Written by Kevin Harper    Friday, 24 August 2007

Exchanging links is important for search engine ranking. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. The key is in how it's done.

About link exchanges

A link exchange is an agreement between two parties to place reciprocal links on their respective websites. It is not the same as a link farm, which is a website that consists primarily of indiscriminate links to other sites (sometimes called FFA, or free for all sites). Link farms are bad, and became popular for one reason: search engines love inbound links. At least they used to, until the spammers came along.

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Written by Kevin Harper    Thursday, 14 December 2006

If you're a real estate agent, one thing you should do immediately is go through the steps to list your business on Google Local. Don't know what Google Local is?

It's basically their mapping portal, but it's really much more than that. I'll explain why.

Google has been including Google Local results at the top of generic search results for awhile now. When Joe Homebuyer types in "Yourtown Real Estate," there are a number of ways he can find your site:

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Written by Kevin Harper    Monday, 13 November 2006

A website is only as good as the words on the page. Without words, your site is virtually invisible to search engines. Because search engines have become the gatekeepers of the world's information, it is imperitive that a websites contain more than pretty pictures and boilerplate content. If your site is going unnoticed by the search engines, it is probably going unnoticed by your potential clients as well.

You'd have to have lived under a rock not to know the value of the Internet in marketing your business. But simply putting a webpage out there doesn't really constitute brilliant marketing, any more than sticking a sign on the front of your place of business. That's the bare minimum you need to do, but frankly, everyone else is already doing that.

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