This week we are not having a tip, this week it’s time to see who’s site is doing well, and who’s needs some more help.  After all, how can I possibly know what kind of help (or how much) you need without testing your skills?

But, this is not a pencil and paper type of quiz, I’m going to review your sites, see what you can improve on and what you are doing well.

Obviously I can’t test all of your sites, that’s alright, I suspect there are some who don’t need it, and some, who like the kid that didn’t do his homework, hope I don’t ask to see theirs.

So, this becomes a bit of an honor system – and I HOPE you are willing to participate.  I want you to submit your site for me to look at.  You can either post it in the comments, or send me an email (if you are shy) to  jack@jackleblond.com.  I’ll pick a handful and give them a thorough review, looking for ways to improve them both on and off page.  But, there’s a catch.  The reviews will be be posted here so that all of the AG readers have the chance to learn from them.

Assuming you are willing to play along, I hope to post a review each week for several weeks.

Enjoy your holidays.

Welcome back to the SEO Tips series, I’m glad you’ve stuck with me and hope you have learned a thing or two to help your Web site perform better.  This will be the last tip in this series for a while.  Next week we’ll do a review of what we’ve covered so far, and then we’ll be taking a short break.

Over the last several weeks we have covered many ways for you to help your site to perform well.  However, a big part of SEO is also doing research on the competition to learn what they are doing and what changes they are making.  Some of this can be accomplished simply by visiting their sites and studying them, or by using link tools to see who links to them and how.  Those are both great steps to use when setting a baseline for your evaluation of them.  But if they are doing their job correctly, you know that new links will be getting added frequently.  You don’t want to pour through an entire link report every week – right?  Some of the sites I monitor have 5,000+ links to them, so I know I don’t.

You also put a fair amount of time and effort into developing your list of keywords and creating content to target them.  It would be good to know who else is using them, and how.  You might have a new competitor in your area and not even know it until you lose a client to them.

But how can you possibly keep track of all that?  (and still sleep a few hours a day)  Once again, Google makes it simple. Google Alerts is a simple tool that you can use to monitor all sorts of information about your site, other sites, your desired keywords and phrases or even information about yourself.

Configuring Google Alerts

You do need a Google account to use this tool, if don’t have one yet here is your chance.  You can find the tool at http://www.google.com/alerts.

After you log in, you’ll see a button labeled “create new alert”.  When creating a new alert you’ll need to provide the following information:

• Search TermThis is what you want Google to search for and inform you about if it finds something.  You enter things here just link you would on the Google homepage.  If you want to be notified when a new link is discovered to a domain, enter this (without the quotations) “link:domaintomonitor.com”.  You can enter pretty much anything here; Words, phrases, your name, the URL of your site, URL of others sites.  Lots of things.  I also monitor for my e-mail addresses, twitter name and common miss-spellings of my name.
• TypeYou can restrict your search to particular areas (news, video, blogs, etc) within the index if you’d like, but using “comprehensive” will monitor all areas of the Google index.
• How OftenYou can choose to be alerted; weekly, daily or whenever something is discovered.  Depending on what you are monitoring pick a time frame that suits your needs.  Keep in mind that “as-it-happens” means exactly that, if Google discovers something at 2 am, you’ll get an alert at 2 am.
• Email lengthIf you are monitoring very popular sites of keywords the alerts might catch several items at once, especially if you are using weekly alerts.  This option lets you say whether you want up to 20 or 50 alerts per message.
• Deliver toYou can choose to have alerts sent to your e-mail, or added to your RSS feed reader.  Depending on what you are monitoring, either one may be appropriate.  Obviously e-mails should be used for urgent alerts.

Google will let you set up to 1,000 alerts for each account you create with them.  However, the only way you can change the email address an alert goes to is to delete the alert and recreate it with the new one.

OK, now you are all set to start playing the role of Mrs. Kravitz,  get out those binoculars and get busy spying on your neighbors competitors.

Have fun!

Welcome back, hope you had a safe and enjoyable holiday break.  My wife and I used our time to put in new kitchen counters and tile….but, that’s a whole other post.  Let’s get to today’s SEO Tip.

Keyword research can be both intimidating and time consuming, but why should YOU do all the heavy lifting?  Google has a fantastic tool made specifically for doing keyword research.  And…. IT’S FREE! Of course, they hope you’ll use it for an AdWords campaign and send them some money in return, but that’s not required.

It’s not only free, it’s simple.  Seriously simple.  In just a few minutes you can have a pretty decent and reliable list of keywords you can use to start optimizing your site.

You’ll also need some kind of spreadsheet or database tool – Excel works great.  You can use this process without a spreadsheet, but don’t hold me responsible if your brain explodes inside your skull.

Google Keyword Tool

Let’s get started by going to the tool – open up your favorite Web browser – I’ll be using Netscape for my screen shots.  Go to: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal Don’t panic when you see it talking about AdWords – you won’t need to give Google any money (they have enough already).

In the center column, enter a search phrase you think people might use to find your site.  I used “austin real estate”.  You may or may not see the captcha image, depending on if you are logged in to a Google account or not (I use netscape when I don’t want to log in and have Google know everything I’m doing).  Leave the “Use synonyms” box checked.  Click on the button labeled “Get keyword ideas” and let the magic begin!

In just a few seconds you are presented with a list of potential keywords.  The default screen will show you three data columns (along with the keywords):

1. Advertiser Competition
   This bar is a relative gauge as to how many AdWords accounts are bidding on this phrase.  The more green it is, the more competition you’re likely to have for that phrase.  Both in the paid and organic listings.  That does NOT mean you shouldn’t use those words/phrases for your site, just expect that you’ll have to fight for every click you get.
2. Local Search Volume
   For many of your sites, this is probably the most important column.  Google is able to locate (reasonable well) where people are located when they search for things – and where YOU are when you run the tool.  This column tells us approximately how many searches were conducted in a recent month for each word or phrase, in the same geographic area as you are in.  We’ll probably pick several phrases from both ends of this column before we are done – I’ll explain more later.
3. Global Search Volume
   This column indicates how many times (based on a monthly average) a phrase has been used from all over the world.  This could be very important to know for some phrases.  In my list, the phrase “moving to austin” is searched an average of 2,900 times a month, “austin lease” is searched roughly 4,000 times.   If I was a Realtor you can bet I would give some thought to  targeting those phrases.

Cleaning the List

The list Google gives us is not bad, but it certainly has some words and phrases that really are not worth our time.  This is where Excel comes into play.  Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the “export to csv” link.

Remove some paid competition

Now we can have some real fun.  When you open the file in Excel, you’ll notice that the Advertiser Competition image has been converted into a numeric value ranging from 0 to 1.  We’ll start our clean up with this column.  Right click it and select “sort, largest to smallest”.  Give careful consideration to anything with a value of “1″.  Most of the time those words are so generic that that only way you’ll rank for them is if you pay for listings.  That eliminated 15 phrases from my list.  Carefully review the next several places on your list – are the words too generic for you to compete with the people buying placements?  Possibly, but don’t chicken out and delete too many.

Find strong local words

Now lets see what phrases are popular near us.  Sort the Local Search column from largest to smallest.  Not many surprises here.  Since this is our first pass through the process, these words are still pretty focused.  I had a couple surprises in my results though – two non-geo-targeted phrases are quite busy in the Austin area.  Combined, the phrases “ranch homes” and “ranch homes for sale” had more than 225,000 searches in the month of October.  That’s worth looking in to.

It can be difficult to determine a cut off point, but carefully review the words near the bottom of this list and delete those that have low search numbers.  However – before you delete them, glance over at the Global Search column and make sure it also has low numbers.  This removed another 21 from my list.  While we are near the bottom, study these phrases carefully.  These are probably long-tail phrases with possibly only a few hundred searches a month.  Your initial thought might be to not bother going for these and focus only on the phrases with higher numbers.  That would be a mistake.  People who search with long-tail phrases are (usually) beyond the research phase and are ready to make a commitment.  You want those people to find you.

Find strong global words

I suspect that most of you will have at least a few phrases that do better globally than locally…and still apply to your market.  Go ahead and sort the Global Search column now.  Compare these numbers to the local numbers to see if anything stands out.  Like with the local values, review the words near the bottom and delete the few that don’t apply to you, or you feel are not strong enough.  This removed another 7 phrases from my list.  Yikes – I’m now down to only 46!

Remove ridiculous words

Admittedly, not every word and phrase that Google suggests will make sense for your site.  Scan your list and remove those.  I deleted “512 austin” from mine.

Lather, Rinse and Repeat

Now it’s time to really let Google flex its muscles.  Go back to the first page of the AdWords keyword tool, copy ALL of your remaining words from the spreadsheet and paste them into the keyword/phrase box.  Click “Get ideas”

BAM!

We started with one phrase, jumped up to 90, cleaned out about half,  and now we have a list of 200.  Repeat this process a few times and before long you’ll have a very accurate, very targeted set of both local and global search words you can use on your Web sites.

More than one road to Rome

If you do this enough times you may eventually end up with list containing every “good” phrase that you should be using, but that could take a lot of time.  Instead, go back to step 1 and use a different starting phrase – another one you already think is good but didn’t get found in your first or second trip through this process.  For example, the phrase “austin vacation rentals” gave me another 200 phrases I could start reviewing.  You can see, it would not be difficult to build up several good lists of keywords.

Now you have no excuse for not using targeted words in your web content, and don’t have to fear pulling a muscle while you gather them.  Have fun!

Welcome back, time for another SEO Tip.

Is your Web site like a Hollywood back-lot?  All snazzy looking up front, but nothing on the inside?  More importantly, does Google think that’s what it is?  I’ve hinted at this a couple times before, but it is very important that you don’t ignore the interior of your sites.

It’s nice to have a pretty front page that displays some good content, and maybe shows your blog posts when you add them.  But what happens to those posts when they roll off the front?  Are they doing you any good?  Does anyone link to them? Can anyone find them?

Do you have other “static” pages on your site that contain information that might be useful to your potential customers?  Does anyone link to those?  Can these be found?

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself…

WHY do you need to optimize the inside?

Your web site functions much like your “real” office.  The front page is the lobby, from there prospective customers follow a set path to get to the place they need to be, to get the information they desire.  Want commercial property?  Go see Bill in room 7.  Want to rent out a room in your house? Go talk to Sally in room 3.  Want to buy a new construction home? Tom in room 4 is who you need to see.  What if your web visitors could go straight to the place on the site they need to be – without going through the “lobby” first?  That would probably make them much happier.

How do you optimize the inside pages?

When you started the process of creating, or optimizing your Web site you (hopefully) did a considerable amount of keyword research.  Many of those keywords probably apply just fine to your site’s home page.  Others, however, really belong to your interior pages.  If your agency handles multiple forms of real estate – or even multiple geographic areas – it is IMPOSSIBLE to fully optimize your home page for all of the required keywords.  Sure, you have can short blurbs of text and links, but that won’t do much for you.  The best way for you to  make use of those additional keywords is to create a place for people (and search bots) to go and read them.  Create individual pages for each area.  Describe the area using as many details (and keywords) as possible.  Of course, you should avoid sounding spammy.

After you have the great content, do your best to start getting links to those pages – remember that Google LOVES links.

What can you expect from optimized interior pages?

I found a couple sites in the Atlanta area that have optimized interior pages with some success.

Above are two results for the Google search “atlanta real estate info”.  I realize that may or may not be a phrase these sites, or anyone is optimized for – it just popped into my head (searchers are funny that way).  Notice anything different about these listings?  Google found enough good content on, and/or links to some of the internal pages that it created supplemental links – directly to those pages.

The first site is laid out nicely, does a god job of providing information.  It has just under 1,000 incoming links, but only about 40 of those are to interior pages.  Clearly, Google likes the content.

The second site…well, honestly it’s a mess. I can’t believe that any reasonable human would choose to hire them based on that page.  They do use a few spammy SEO techniques, but not enough to get them in trouble – just enough to look bad.  However, they have enough content and links that Google thinks they are an authority.  They have around 1,700 incoming links, 400 of those are to interior pages.  Our friend backlinkwatch.com reveals that many of those links use keywords as the anchor text.

If I were in Atlanta, I’d be hoping that this company didn’t hire a real designer, or discover WordPress.  In either case, this little site could rule the rankings easily.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving holiday next week – I will be too full and tired to move, never mind write.  There will not be an SEO Tip for November 28.

Welcome back.  My series of SEO Tips is winding down; I hope you have gotten a lot out of them.  If you have questions about this, the earlier tips or something I have yet to cover, please don’t hesitate to ask.

How could Christopher Robin ever find Pooh or Tigger’s place without his map of the 100 acre woods?  Without a map, how easily could you get around in a town you’ve never been to before?  Sure, you could drive up and down every street until you found your destination, but that map sure does make things a lot easier.  Sitemaps do the same thing for your Web site, they help google and the others get through your site more easily.

Sitemaps are special pages, or files, created to help visitors and search spiders more easily navigate to all of the pages on your Web site.  Sitemaps can be created in a couple different ways, either as traditional HTML files, or as XML files.  Naturally, each has its own pros and cons.

HTML Sitemaps

Sitemaps created using traditional HTML (or other standard code) layout methods can be a life ring to stranded visitors.  Done correctly they are an opportunity for you to use your preferred keywords as the anchor text (you remember how important anchor text is, right?), directing visitors and search engines in a way that most benefits you.  The sitemap at apple.com is a great example of how to build one in this style.  Take a peek….I’ll wait a minute.  You can see that they gave careful thought about how to lay out the page and the text to use for the links.  It fits the overall design of the site, making you feel welcome – not lost.

Unfortunately though, sitemaps are often treated as a necessary evil and not given the proper attention and respect.  Take a look at this sitemap for a California pizza shop…not quite so nice.  True, it does serve its purpose, but just barely.  The biggest disadvantage to sitemaps like this is that as your site grows they can become difficult to manage over time.  Keeping track of new files, files to remove or when each gets updated takes a lot of work.  Additionally, if you have a large site, listing every page on your sitemap is just not practical, forcing you to decide what pages to include.

XML Sitemaps

Creating your sitemap as an XML file almost always makes it easier to create and maintain, especially if you run your site with WordPress or another content management system (CMS). There are several plugins available for WordPress that will automatically generate and update your sitemap whenever you add to or change the content on your your site – how easy is that?

The formatting of XML files is not pretty to look at (Take a look at the one on my site). Because of this, they are not intended to be browsed by your visitors, just the spiders.  Since you don’t need to worry about how the files look to visitors, you are able to include every page on your site.  That’s good for the spiders, very good.  Some tests have shown sites that use an XML sitemap get indexed deeper, faster and more frequently than those that do not.  The obvious downside to using this style of sitemap is that you have no life ring to offer your visitors if/when they get lost in your site.  Thankfully though, WordPress (and other CMS) sites are generally pretty easy to navigate.

Two maps better than one?

If you have a particularly large site and are concerned your visitors might get lost, but you still want the search spiders to find all your pages, there’s no reason to not have both types of sitemaps – well, other than it’s twice the work for you.  But, your visitors and traffic is worth it, right?

OK – time for you to get busy creating your own sitemap so that when the Google bot visits your site it doesn’t get trapped in Eeyores gloomy place.

You have all been told for years that you must add lots and lots of images to your sites.  You’ve learned that visitors enjoy looking at pictures of houses, that blog readers are pulled in by having large images at the top of a post.

But is it possible to bring more traffic in from the search engines because of how you use images on your sites?  The answer is yes. Today we’ll cover a few ways to help your site rank better using images.

Before we continue, take six minutes and watch these three Google Webmaster videos:

1. Should I expect increased traffic if I optimize my images?
2. Matt Cutts Discusses the Importance of alt Tags
3. Does Google consider the URL of an image?

That pretty well sums up this post…oh, you want more?  Fine, keep reading.

Use Descriptive File Names for Images

In video 1, Matt flat out tells us – YES OPTIMIZING IMAGES WILL INCREASE TRAFFIC.  What else do I need to say to convince you?

Matt suggests using descriptive file names for your images.  Don’t keep the bland,boring name your camera created, what good is a name like “dsc00234.jpg”?  You should use a carefully thought out descriptive name.  You shouldn’t get too carried away with long file names, but I do suggest using multiple words. Of course, keep in mind our tip from last week and use dashes to separate the words in your file name.  Possibly use something like: “3576-lakeview-street-homerville-tennessee-kitchen-1.jpg”.

Use ALT Tags for Images

In Video 2, Matt reinforces something I and others have already told you – ALT tags for your images are important.  However, he does tell us something new; it’s OK to use slightly longer, more descriptive text instead of just “cat”, “house” or “motorcycle.”  So what does that mean for you?  It means that when you take pictures of a house you are listing, you have an opportunity to really do a good job of describing the property through photos, in a way the search engines not only understand, they want.  Consider putting something like this in your ALT tags: “123 brookehaven road, Jasper, Wyoming – master bedroom – MLS 123456″.  Be creative in your description, use words people will be using when they search the web.

Image File URLs

In video 3, Matt reminds us that the URLs of files help the search engines figure out what is in the picture.  Depending on how your site is constructed, this might take a little bit of planning.  Rather than just drop all you images in a generic folder named “images”, or named for the date you uploaded them (like WordPress does by default), perhaps you should consider creating a special structure to store them in.  You could get pretty detailed if you wanted to take the time.  You may want to create a folder structure like what’s shown here, based on your state, county & city names.  Of course, YOU should know your web traffic better than I do, use names you KNOW people use in searches, based on your keyword research.

BONUS Information

How well did you listen to video 3?  Go back and listen to it again, starting from about the 25 second mark, ending at about the 40 second mark.  OCR and Meta-data for the images?  Now we’re talking.

OCR?

OCR, if you don’t know, stands for Optical Character Recognition.  Matt’s comment implies that Google is able to READ and understand the text with in your images.  How can you use this?  Start adding a crisp, clear title to all of your images.  Make it easy for them, place the text on a plain background and use a simple, non-swirly font.

Meta-data?

OMG!  Not more meta tags!  Take a deep breath, relax.  It’s not more geeky tags.  Image meta-data is often added automatically by digital cameras and it can be edited by many image editing tools to add all sorts of information.  The image to the right is a screen shot taken from within Adobe Photoshop, but the software that came with your camera may also allow you to edit your files like this.  Place your descriptive text within these fields before you upload them.

I know this was a lot of information, but I’m confidant you can manage it.

When working with images, keep the fortune cookie in mind; how it looks on the outside is important, but sometimes it’s what you can’t see that is more important.

Welcome back, hope you are learning lots from my series of SEO Tips.  This week we’ll take a look at some common methods of separating words in your URLs and page titles, and which should provide you the best results in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Separators in URLs

Depending on how long the developer has been creating pages, how they were trained and the system they use, they often develop a favorite method (right or wrong) and stick with it.  Unfortunately for me, my coding skills were developed before the ‘net took over the world and my brain still wants to use underscores as separators.  I’ll explain why that’s not a good idea shortly.  But, my point is that you may see different developers doing different things, and having no idea that what they are doing is right or wrong – it’s just the way they have always done it.

Some people just smoosh all the words together like “PortlandMaineHomeSales.php”, which to us humans looks OK, but Google will see this as one big word.  Don’t do this if you can help it.

People who started creating documents after Windows (and Macs) gained popularity often want to use spaces in their file names.  In most cases, web servers and browsers (firefox, internet explorer, etc.) can handle spaces fine and will deliver the pages.  However, spaces get translated to “%20″ by the browser, this makes the page URL look confusing for your visitors.  For example, you might create a file named “four bedroom ranch style homes.php” on your web site.  It will load just fine most of the time, and the engines will see each word individually.  However, when displayed to your visitors, it will look like this; “four%20bedroom%20ranch%20style%20homes.php”.  Not so nice to look at, is it? Additionally, the “%20% is saved by analytics programs making it difficult for you make heads or tails of your traffic.

I’ve already told you that using the underscore “_” character is a bad idea.  This is because Google treats the underscore as a connector, not as a separator.  For example, in a URL you may have something like “/quahog_rhode_island_home_sales/”.  To us humans it reads fine, we can clearly see there are five distinct words there.  However, Google just sees one big word.  As such, this URL will not be returned for a query of “quahog rhode island home sales”. Well, that’s only half right – the page might be returned, depending on its content, but the URL will not contribute to its success in the SERPs.

That just leaves us with the dash, or hyphen “-”.  As you may have guessed by now, this is the preferred method of separating words in your file names and URLs.  In one of his webmaster videos, Matt Cutts tells us that if we are already using underscores, and they are working fine – leave them alone.  However, he does say Google prefers dashes.

Separators in page titles

When it comes to page titles, all of the rules above also apply.  But there are a couple additional characters that people will sometimes use.  The ampersand “&” and the pipe “|”.  Google treats each of these as a word separator, so either one is fine to use.  As with all things Google, Matt Cutts hints in another video that it’s best to do what your users like.

Separators in domain names

When it comes to domains, Google does things a little different.   Because domains are so important, and (sometimes) difficult to acquire, Google put some extra steps in the algorithm when it comes to processing them.  Unlike in directory & file names, Google is able to recognize when multiple words are squished together in a domain.  I’m sure that they prefer they be separated by dashes (less time required to analyze the words), but it is not required and there  is not impact on rankings.  It is also easier to communicate your web address to someone when dashes are not used.  Most people understand the spaces are omitted when you tell them a domain name, so when you say “hey, take a look at today’s agent genius dot com”, they know to visit agentgenius.com.  Put that dash in there and it’s not so clear, perhaps even a little confusing to have to say “go checkout the latest post on agent dash genius dot com”.  Obviously, we can’t always get the domain we want without using hyphens, but whenever possible I recommend you avoid them.

There you have – word separators in a nut-shell.  No geekery and hopefully not too much controversy for the commenters