The recent buzz on the topic was started, in part, by a lengthy feature in the New York Times which highlighted how an online “designer” glasses reseller, DecorMyEyes.com, enjoyed high organic search engine ranking in Google for designer brand names and keyphrases like ‘designer sunglasses’; not only to spite bad reviews and complaints, but BECAUSE of them.  The owner was claiming that all the ‘link juice’ from the mentions of the brands in the poor reviews on reputable websites are actually helping him rank for the terms organically and helping him get new customers every day.

BUT IS IT TRUE?!

Google addressed the issue on the Official Google Blog earlier this month, tweaking their algorithm to penalize merchants that provide an extremely poor user experience, and explaining the issues they face when considering the upgrades.  As Google pointed out in their blog, many review websites actually use a bit of code known as a ” rel=nofollow ” which tells search engines that the link is not to be considered an endorsement and is to essentially be ignored.  Most of the ‘link juice‘ to the vendor in question actually came from articles by reliable news outlets writing about the owner’s arrest and antics!

Good Business Practices Still Apply

If this ‘Negative Marketing’ was somehow helping the company rank higher in organic search results.  However, a little research would have shown potential buyers that the business has a lot of negative reviews, complaints, and lawsuits against it.  Search engines are trying to provide users with the most relevant content to their search query.  It’s up to online consumers to use their search engines to research merchants.

I want to assure you that the old saying that, ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’ just isn’t true.

The unethical marketing techniques exercised by Decor My Eyes to take advantage in loop-holes in search engine algorithms are just an expansion of ‘Black Hat’ SEO tactics.  There may be short-term tricks for temporary manipulation of search engines, but algorithms are constantly evolving and changing.  Eventually, bogus tactics are discovered (remember keyword-stuffing, anyone?) and improvements are made to the algorithms to make the search results even much more reliable.

THE TRUTH ABOUT NEGATIVE ADVERTISING

As a consequence of all this “Negative Advertising”, search providers and review forums such as Google, Get Satisfaction, Yahoo, and others have already taken direct action against Decor My Eyes.  I did a quick search on the brand names he mentioned ranking for in the major search engines in the interview for the New York Times article, and at the time of writing this blog, he is no longer showing up in the top results for any of them.

Look what happens when you start to search for the company name, Decor My Eyes, in the major search engines now!

Immediately After the Word 'my', Google Suggests a Scam

Interestingly enough, at the time this blog was written, if you were too quick and used Yahoo Search, you could land on the company’s website without ever being alerted to any scams or complaints, as shown in the screen shot below.  Although, as soon as you start to type the word ‘eyes’ into the search field manually suggestions for scams and complaints start to appear.

Yahoo Search- 'decor my' WITHOUT Warning of Scam

Yahoo Search for 'decor my e' Suggests Scams & Complaints

BE A SMART CONSUMER

Bad companies like Decor My Eyes are only able to succeed because of uneducated consumers.  Consider this story as an example of why you should take the extra few moments to do some research on a company before giving them your business!

Seek out and read reviews to see what others are saying about the company.  Look for reviews by established community members, not people who are anonymous or reviewed a low number of business, because reviews by less established members are not as credible.  Note if there are any relevant news articles in your search engine results for the company, such as the final link appearing just above the scroll on the Bing search results about the Decor My Eyes guy getting arrested in the screen shot below!

Bing Reveals the Reputation of DecorMyEyes

In this modern age of technology, consuming is easier than ever; we can even do it from the comfort of our home!  This is very convenient, but  it can also lead to the dangerous habit of engaging with businesses we know nothing about.  The best way to avoid being the victim of a scam, is to do your research.  Search engines are also a great tool for researching company histories, not just what to buy.

WHY BEING GOOD IS ALWAYS GOOD FOR BUSINESS

This story should also serve as a warning to businesses engaging in bad business practices in efforts to trick search engines and customers.  Search engines will continue to route out ‘black hat’ SEO techniques and scams like this ‘Negative Advertising/ Link Building’ Decor My Eyes was utilizing.  Any advantage received from unethical ranking techniques are only temporary.  If caught using unethical techniques, search engines can penalize and even ban you.

There are also real-life consequences to the bad press, consumer reviews, and Better Business Bureau complaints this company has been receiving.  The website hosting and credit card payment service providers are ending their associations with Decor My Eyes for fear of being associated with an unethical business.  Search engines have also deliberately targeted his company as a result of the bad press.  In the end, the technique had failed, and eventually so will his business.

Businesses would be much better off putting their time and efforts into creating happy customers, writing valuable website content, blogging, and building a positive social media presence, which will only increase in value over time.  You’ll probably also get more sleep that the owner of Decor My Eyes, and not be afraid to have your photo in the paper!

What People Say Counts. Be Good to Your Clients.

So while forming a “Content Strategy” can be difficult due to differences and individual factors, here’s a more streamlined 10-step process for you to check out.
1. Principles

Setting principles for your personal brand is a pretty basic branding idea: having these established will allow for discussion to take place centered around your authenticity, humility, and transparency. Now’s also the time to define your “client-engagement” policy. Set some principles. Doing so allow the brand to have a healthy and robust discussion around authenticity, transparency, and humility, as well as an opportunity to define the engagement policy. You need to be aware that brands cannot control when conversations end, so brands must make a continual investment in this ongoing endeavor.

2. Business Objectives
So…why are you doing this? State your objectives and link them to metrics where you can set targets and define a budget.
3. Brand Purpose

Here you delve a bit more into what your brand stands for within its “substance”. Focus on the topics that are important to you, and identify your position on certain subjects. What is your point of view? What’s your story? What’s your purpose? And most importantly, why should people care about you and your brand?

The best brands often identify an “ideal”, which can be an interesting direction to go into: for example, Fanta believes the world would be better if we grew up less and played more. How can you apply this thinking to your real estate brand? What would you like to see? This is a great way to give your brand a purpose and give you something to anchor your future content to – and remember to continuously back up your brand ideal with evidence!

4. Content Value (Social Currency)

This “social currency” determines what value that your content delivers directly to people. The direct value of content can be broken down into four types:

- Entertainment value. Currently, advertising has taken a huge focus on this type of content value “currency”. People like to be entertained, and ideas that can be parodied spurs much conversation.

- Knowledge value. Business to business knowledge provides much content value within select industries.

- Monetary value. Actual monetary value can be applied through PR via promotions and competitions.

- Utility value. Phone apps and the latest in real estate website features fall into this category, and with the increase in intuitive real estate websites, apps may be a viable option to look into.
5. Sources
So who will produce all this great content for you? If you are a brokerage, you may have more choices than you may realize.

- Your Agents can be an effective choice for content creation. The US online shoe retailer Zappos.com encourages all staff to use Twitter and adds a competitive element: a leaderboard that ranks Zappos staff according to their Twitter following.
- Industry Peers by simply sign-posting people to relevant, interesting stuff: this goes for websites for both brokers and real estate agents.
- User-generated content (UGC), crowdsourcing, and co-creation is pretty self-explanatory and can also be a viable option.

6. Spaces
Whats the distribution strategy for your content?

- Brand media: your real estate website, email, and events (i.e., open houses?)

- Earned media: influencer networks, communities, or the media
- Paid media: I think we can guess how to get this.

It’s important to control the balance of these spaces, and experiential and social spaces work really well together. Another aspect of consideration is the question of social destination: not a lot of brands can pull this off. If you don’t have enough support, it may be difficult to get this going – and you’ll be spending on generating useless traffic. It may be more beneficial to your brand to get involved with communities that already exist, so do your research!

7. Formats
Formats that are appropriate to use include pictures, blog posts, videos, presentations, tweets, or Facebook. You can also repurpose your content into different formats:  if you have an upcoming open house, use the same topic in a series of  blog posts, announcement on your Facebook, Tweet it, and maybe make a video out of the Open House itself to throw up on YouTube. Make sure that your content is in a format for people to easily share!

8. Schedule
Conversations aren’t campaigns: they can’t be turned off. You should have a consistent content schedule (i.e., blog 2x per week) and keep it rolling. Take into account ad hoc and reactive content to what is going on around you to your pre-planning. Setting up a schedule will also ensure a constant stream of content. Be creative: experiment with different content and build on peaks of interest with similar material.
9. Social Agents
You’ll need someone to manage your brand outposts. Someone needs to be responsible for managing your brand outposts and managing your conversations. They should also be able to build relationships, redirect questions and suggestions, and ultimately be responsible for your social brand. This “person” can be a team of real estate agents for your brokerage, an intern, all agents, on an outsourced real estate SEO company.

10. Active Listening
It’s not enough to simply produce content, you need to be an active listener with your brand to gauge the reaction to your content. Track the conversations that you start, which ones you want to join, and create a metric to track your progress in regards to your objectives, targets, and budgets.

Questions, thoughts or strong feelings? Feel free to comment with your feedback!

Source article

If your campaign is producing 1000 visitors per month in month 1, then 1100 in month 2, then 1200, that’s great. Let’s say that the trend in month 4, 5, 6 then goes 1200, 1150, 1100. Well, that’s not so good, it was going up ~10% per month, now it’s falling about 5% each month. Well, if the site is optimized around a set of target search terms, and then other traffic comes from halo terms, then to assume that the SEO is providing more or less traffic is also to assume that search volume for this family of terms is constant.

If we used Google Trends to normalize, we might find that the number of times a term was searched on fell 15% during those down months. So, the 10%/month upward trend was actually sustained.

Another way to look at this is to simply ask, what percentage of potential clicks did you get? If this percentage is trending up, then you’re in good shape. This means you’re taking more market share.

Another way to think of this is the following: Let’s say that you’re doing search engine optimization for a site that sells air conditioners. Let’s further assume that you start the SEO campaign on January 1st. Well, no one is really looking for AC units in January. Then, in April, you start to see an upward traffic trend, it goes higher and higher and peaks in August. Then, by mid September, you’re not seeing any traffic from the search engines. You start Googling around and see your site, but no visitors.

Well, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that people just aren’t buying air conditioners in October. So, you’d pretty much expect to see less traffic. In this case, the best way to judge if the SEO campaign is succeeding is to either look a target terms and catalog placement in search engine results pages, or to normalize your numbers. Take a benchmark at the beginning of the campaign, say a ratio of traffic to searches, then, each month you’d want that ratio to climb. This way, you’ll know if your SEO is working, regardless of market trends.

The Sequoia platform continues to evolve to meet our customers’ needs. In the last month, we’ve added numerous features which make managing leads and tracking information across multiple offices in a large real estate firm simple and intuitive. All of this is of course in addition to the outstanding features which brought Jack Conway to the Sequoia platform in the first place – features which make it easier than ever to obtain leads and close deals. Integrating lead and content management, IDX property search, interactive user tools, deal tracking, blogging, live chat, and much, much more, the Sequoia platform serves as the foundation for the most advanced real estate websites in the industry.

In 2010 Jack Conway & Co. was once again named the No. 1 independent, privately owned real estate brokerage company in all of Massachusetts by RisMedia. With the Sequoia platform behind their new site, they will undoubtedly benefit from their substantial new ability to generate sales online.

Jack Conway is the largest independently owned real estate firm in Massachusetts, serving communities from the North Shore to Cape Cod.

1) Click “Join”
2) Click “Invite People to Join” to the left
3) Invite all your friends.

Here were the results:

Day 1: 987 members.

Day 2: 2,191.
Day 3: 5,175
Day 4: 8,798
Day 5: 17,408
Day 6: 38,852
Day 7: 105,119
Day 8: 202,262
Day 9: 508,726 members!

It looks like by the end of today they’ll have their 1 million fans. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=info&ref=mf&gid=283600686512

Now, this is a group that supports same sex marriage. They produced a huge amount of awareness in just a week and a half. You might have heard about another group, supporting the fight against breast cancer, who encouraged women to post the color of their bra on a particular day. Millions of women were simply posting a color as their status update. Black. White. Blue. The results were incredible.

The other factor here that should not be overlooked is Cause Marketing. Lots of folks are passionate about same sex marriage. Millions of us would love to see a way to cure or prevent beast cancer. If you’re in a for profit enterprise, there are ways to get the same zeal behind your brand. Here are a few ideas:

1. Work with an organization. Think of how you can be carried along with the cause. RE/MAX is doing some good work with Susan G. Komen for the Cure, just as an example.
2. Create something that people want to be a part of. It doesn’t have to be a cause. It could be a conversation group. Could be a place where bragging goes on. it could be a trend that people want to be a part of, just make sure your company is associated with whatever you create.
3. Make it a challenge. These folks said “I bet we can get 1 million fans in 10 days.” And people took this on as a challenge.

Final note: Look at those numbers above. They’re experiencing exponential growth. they started with 1000 people and grew by 2x or 3x every day. Just remember, they started with 1000. Now, I have a few hundred facebook friends and so do most of the folks I know. If this sounds impossible to you, think again.

Folks, I’m going to give you a simple formula to achieve more search engine traffic in just 100 days. The formula isn’t hard to write down. You will need to dedicate an hour or two each week in order to execute this plan.

You will also need to have a few things in order to follow these steps. They are:

1. A decent real estate website
2. A blog as part of your website ideally in the structure xyz.com/blog (if you have a boston logic website with a blog, you’re all set)
3. A site with a dynamic site map that updates when you publish a new blog post.
4. The pages of your site (not just the blog pages) should be somewhat optimized already. H1s, Title and description tags, sufficient paragraph text and a good internal linking structure all help.

Now, this is by no means all you can do before launching the following steps, but it should give you a nice starting point.

So, we’re going to increase your site traffic by producing good blog content. Each week you’re going to blog 2 or 3 times so that you are posting 10 times each month. We’re going to use the following post types:

• Listing posts – You take on a new listing. Someone in your office takes on a new listing. Or you simply go on a showing. Write a blog post about the home. Here’s an example listing post.
• Market reports – Write about a present market trend. Prices going up, down, or remaining the same, for example.
• Guest blogs – Have a friend or co-worker write a post for you.
• Answering a common question – every day, practically, you answer questions from buyers, sellers, and renters. If you do this by email, which you probably do all the time, you can anonymize and re-use the content. Others have the same questions and this content is fantastic blog fodder.
• Real Estate news – If there’s an auction announced, a big closing  in the market, a national news story pertaining to real estate, or anything newsworthy, write about it. State some facts and give your thoughts. Here’s some real estate news.

Step 1 – Create 10 to 20 categories in your blog. Give the categories the same names as your keywords. If you’re trying to figure out what keywords to use, search this blog some and you’ll find posts on how to do that.

Step 2 – Set a schedule, put the time into your calendar. Write a check list. Do whatever it takes to make sure you’re going to do the posts.

Here’s what this can look like:

1. Week 1
   1. Real Estate listing post
   2. Local Market report
   3. Answering a question
2. Week 2
   1. House listing post
   2. News item
3. Week 3
   1. Answer a seller’s question
   2. New Listing post
   3. Guest post
4. Week 4
   1. Home Listing post
   2. Answer a question
5. Week 5
   1. Real Estate Market report
   2. Realty News item
   3. listing post
6. Week 6
   1. Answer a home buying question
   2. new listing post
   3. Guest post

I think you get the gist…

When you create a post, make sure it is listed in every category that is even remotely applicable. Tag your posts too, using keywords in the posts that are close to or the same as your category names.

Step 3 – track your progress. Make sure you’re posting 2 – 3 times each week. In the first 100 days, you should post over 30 times. Yes, more than 30 posts. If you want to see an even greater impact on your ranking and traffic, post 3 or 4 times each week. In short, produce content regularly and post it properly.

You will see results.

For our readers who aren’t familiar with the system, Joomla is an open source content management platform. It was built to make building a generic website easier. It was not built for real estate offices or agents.

If you’re going to build a real estate website, you need to use something that was designed for the real estate industry.  At Boston Logic, we’ve developed the ONE System Real Estate Website Platform, but I’m not going to write about that today. Before we invested the thousands of hours that we’ve put into building this system, we did use Joomla to build some sites. So, I’m speaking (writing) from experience here. Let me tell you about some of what we learned:

1. Joomla is not built to integrate with an MLS. This is critical. Your real estate website should be built with an integrated MLS search. The search should not be on another website or in an iFrame. You should be building on a platform that has the search, search results, and property details pages right on your site. In addition the interactive user tools should be part of the site and so should your lead management system. Obviously, joomla doesn’t have a real estate lead management system for you to leverage.
2. Joomla’s content management system is overcomplicated for real estate. When you design software, you start with requirements. Joomla was built to do a lot of things. Most of these things, real estate agents and offices will never ever do. Advanced content management requires a lot of user access levels and controls. Realtors require a simple and easy to use interface for managing their content. Joomla, we found, confused our clients more than it enabled them.
3. Joomla is relatively laborious to style. Our team has worked with Joomla plenty of times. It’s still a bear to make the pages all look good. If you think you’re saving money, think again.
4. Customization is harder. When you get down to it, working with open source systems can get you a lot of functionality for no money. That said, going beyond what the system includes and/or what the plugins you find can do is a challenge. So, if Joomla will do 80% of what you want for your real estate website and then you think it’ll be easy or cheap to hire a developer or web development shop to take you the rest of the way home, think again. Customizing Joomla gets expensive quickly. As a point of reference the last Joomla site that we worked on required about $75,000 in work to get to what the client wanted.
5. Joomla is hard to turn into an effective real estate website. Great real estate websites have lots of features that are not part of the Joomla platform. I’ve already mentioned the MLS search above. Agent profiles linked to their listings. Pages on developments and/or buildings with available listings right on the pages. Live Chat. Lead distribution and management. Featured property pages. Maps. And many of the other features that make for a great real estate website are missing.

Here’s the all important conclusion. Joomla should not be used for real estate websites. It’s unlikely that the cost benefit will outweigh the poor end product that you’re going to see.

I’ve talked about similar topics before, but I wanted to lay it out succinctly for our readers since we get a lot of questions on this. The lists below are ways to judge and ways NOT to judge a SEO provider. They’re also metrics and methods for measuring the effectiveness of a real estate marketing campaign overall.

Indicators of good real estate SEO campaign performance:

• Leads generated
• Site traffic numbers
• Average number of pages visited by users to your site
• Average time visitors spend on your site
• Search engine ranking (placement) for a long list of terms

The most important things that a SEO campaign can do is to cause more visitors to arrive at your site and to generate more leads for your real estate business. Now, the number of leads that your site generates also has a lot to do with the design and architecture of your site. So, if the SEO provider has little control over these contributing factors, then the traffic numbers are the best indicator you have of quality.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t touch on benchmarks for a moment. You must have benchmarks to measure against. If your site is seeing 150 visitors per month from Google when your SEO campaign starts and 1050 users part month 6 months in, this is strong performance. If your website was producing 1 lead per day before the campaign started and how it’s producing 10 leads per day, again, your SEO is doing a good job.

An indicator of a good SEO provider and of any real estate marketing firm is whether or not they provide these metrics to you. If they’re willing to be accountable to you, and they’re not hiding anything, then they have no choice but to show you good work. Otherwise, you’re liable to fire them when the contract is up.

Here are some ways NOT to measure performance of an SEO campaign or of an SEO provider:

• Whether or not you rank for 1 particular term
• Traffic numbers 3 months into a campaign
• The frequency with which reports are delivered to you.

Believe it or not, search engine ranking is NOT what makes for a good SEO campaign. Marketing campaigns MUST produce results. Results = revenue. Results and ranking don’t mean the same thing. As I’ve said before, ranking and a token will get you on the subway.

This same analysis must be applied to all real estate marketing campaigns, media, and ad buys. If the money ain’t producing the biz, then it’s not well spent. Ask the questions, do the math, get real numbers to judge performance.

Without further ado, here are is our advice about blogging best practices:

1. SEO 101 – How to SEO my Real Estate Blog
2. SEO 101: Blogging Part 2
3. Answers to common Real Estate blogging questions
4. Starting a conversation
5. SEO Army – A Real Estate office working together
6. How long should my blog post be?
7. Redesigning your blog? Keep SEO in mind
8. Top 10 sites to submit your blog
9. 10 ways to optimize your blog for Real Estate SEO
10. Blogging instead of spending

Previously we took you inside WordPress as a blog platform. A platform that we highly recommend for blogging. The only thing better than WordPress for search engine optimization is a customized solution.  It just so happens that we offer such a platform. The blog is only one component of the Boston Logic ONE System, a comprehensive real estate website platform, but it is a crucial component for SEO.

It is important to customize your blog from head to toe to represent your business. Everything from the blog name, URL, titles, meta tags, images, content, links and categories should reflect how you want to have your business represented online. For example, this blog (Real Estate SEO by Boston Logic) talks about search engine optimization for real estate. The URL www.realestateseo1.com and title ‘Real Estate SEO, Our SEO blog for Real Estate Brokers, Agents, and Developers’ makes it clear you won’t be reading about dog haircuts. Notice also that you are reading a post about customizing your blog and how it’s the key to success in real estate online. All of these items reflect Boston Logic’s mission to provide market leading tools and services that enable real estate professionals to acquire, retain, and develop clients–go figure.

Here’s a bare bones example of what Boston Logic’s blog application offers (see image below). In addition to giving you all the great blogging features that a mainstream platform (like WordPress) provides, the ONE System makes it easy for your readers to find their way to the property search–the part of your website where you ultimately want all traffic to go. By having the option of a static “quick search” tool on each page of the site  (including your blog), you gently  guide visitors to your listings.

Cabot and Company, a Boston Real Estate company recently had their website redesigned by Boston Logic and are using our online marketing – SEO services. As part of our SEO services we recommended our customized blog platform and all it has to offer. Joseph Palermino, a managing partner at the company, is now a regular blogger and to his surprise, a really good and engaging writer.

Our recommendation to Cabot and Company and others is–learn your blogging platform and use it well. Write as often as you can and have fun with it – or find someone to do it for you. Our clients consistently see increased traffic and visitor retention by writing new posts and keeping loyal readers coming back for more…and you can too!

PS: here are a few more Boston based real estate companies that use the Boston Logic blogging platform;

• Avenue 3 Real Estate
• GKR Residential
• Coming soon – Boston Realty Advisors’ Blog