BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Steven Leung (page 1 of 1)

Realtor, Internet Entrepreneur

November 17, 2008

The Difference Between the Best Website and Results

by

Realtor, Internet Entrepreneur

Author website

The Web Marketing Association has an annual competition in 96 industries to recognize what they believe are the best websites. In the real estate section, they list 7 criteria they look for:

  1. Design
  2. Ease of use
  3. Copywriting
  4. Interactivity
  5. Use of technology
  6. Innovation
  7. Content

All seven are subjective, which is fine: the organization giving the award gets to set the criteria. But looking at the winner last year, their award is doing a great disservice to any real estate agent who uses that site as their inspiration. Here is a link to the site.

Now I don’t know the people who built the site, and I don’t know those agents or their company. Nor do I have anything against them, or the award.

Personally, I think the site is fine but not spectacular in execution for what it is: a nice-looking website.

But there’s not one mention in seven criteria of results.  My assumption is that most businesses want a website that is going to help them get results (i.e. generate visitors and turn them into leads). And here’s why this site is at a severe disadvantage.

It is invisible to search engines.

To you, me, and anyone else with a Flash plugin, this is what the site looks like to human eyes:

What does this site look like to Google? Here’s a visual of the actual page using a text-based browser:

It looks like nothing. Want proof?

One entry.  Name.  Rank.  Serial Number.

A site exists.  Beyond that?  No information.

This site leaves money on the table. For my real estate site, according to Google Analytics, 73.4% of my 150-250 visitors per day come from search engines.

But the only way to find their site from Google is by its own name, “Elizabeth Lofts”, and if one goal of marketing is to get people who don’t already know your name to contact you, then this site had failed by that criteria.

And as of today, you won’t find it under “Pearl District” or “Pearl District Condominiums” (until the purgatory of page 5) so it wouldn’t have generated leads from people who express interest in that district.

Worse, this site has plenty of information Read more

September 8, 2008

Notes on Inbound Link Text

by

Realtor, Internet Entrepreneur

Author website

I broke my blog a few weeks ago and it proved something pretty interesting about Google.  The lesson behind that experience can help you bring in higher quality visitors from search engines.

Fixing my mistake was simple since I’d just put a semicolon where it didn’t belong, and while the error was ugly, my site was back to normal in about a minute.

But sometimes coincidences happen, and while my site was belly up talking about some PHP parse error, Google’s friendly spiderbot came crawling by to pick up its latest snapshot of my site.  Oops!

So, normally, a search for “silicon valley real estate” shows my entry like this:

And, for the next day or so, it would look like this:

After reading the ugly description text, I put my eyes back in their sockets and thought about the title text.  I never use the phrase “steve leung silicon valley” on my site and my title tag at the moment was something like “Unexpected Error”.  But I knew, like the Erics have mentioned on BHB before, that Google gives a lot of weight to what people link to you say.

It takes those links so seriously, that it will literally use their text in its own search results if your site loses the plot for some reason.  Which shows how important other people’s links to you are.

How do I know people used that phrase to link to my site?  In this case, Google Webmaster Tools.  You won’t use it everyday, but it’s indispensable for a few reasons.  The most important is that it gives you insight into the great undocumented void of how Google sees your site, and if you have any technical issues that will prevent you from getting indexed correctly in their search engine.

In fact, Google Webmaster Tools has evolved to a point where it will flag issues that aren’t purely technical, like repeated titles.  This happens a lot with WordPress blogs which use the same title any time there’s pagination.

It also gives you the ability to communicate with Google if you really need to.  I once bought a domain name from someone who’d Read more

April 12, 2008

The Anatomy of Generating a Lead Using an E-Book

by

Realtor, Internet Entrepreneur

Author website

svhbb.pngIn what must be dog years ago by now, Greg and I had a virtual conversation which sparked an idea that was successful for me, so I wanted to share some of the real-life insights I gained, with him and the rest of the Bloodhound readers.

The idea itself wasn’t completely new but there were some details in the execution that helped the campaign along since its inception May 2007. These techniques have proven useful many times over throughout the years and they’re what I’m hoping to communicate here.

The first step was to build credibility — and to test if the download was actually useful to my readers. See, the idea was to create a downloadable home buyers’ e-book from the existing content on my real estate blog.

I thought readers would like the convenience of a book with “chapters” on how to buy a home, arranged in step-by-step order. In turn, I would get a viral marketing piece that readers could forward to their friends, which not only had my contact information but linked back to my site within the content on every page.

Originally, I didn’t ask for any information in return for the e-book. The reason for this was because it was important for the credibility of the project to start with a large number of downloads. That and frankly if “no one” downloaded it, I would chalk one up for experience and move on.

The first month produced exactly 1,001 downloads. I advertised this number and began requesting a name and an email address (where an automated system would send a download link), effectively raising the price from free to legitimate contact information.

Since the price had gone up, it wasn’t a huge surprise that downloads dropped to 47 the next month. That averages out to a little over one lead per day. All but 3 registered using their real names (at least ones that closely matched their email addresses and the first step in building a relationship), two used their first name and last initial, and the third was fake. The Read more

Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

Media Contacts