One big mistake when I started building links to my Davis site was to maily focus on links pointing to my home page.  Probably a lot of people here know that I knew NOTHING about how search engines worked when I started spending time on the forum and the entire reason I wanted a custom IDX was just so I could have a website where I could break the different areas of Davis onto their own page because I felt there are a lot of buyers here that search for homes that way.  I did not really consider the benefits of what an custom IDX would do for SEO - I didn't even know that term. 

To really create a dynamic site though, you probably want certain pages to be considered more important than others.  People often call this page rank sculpting.  Anyway, after…

I started blogging on Active Rain and Real Estate Webmasters about the same time- the last quarter of 2007.  I actually have more posts on my AR blog than my REW blog but I've spent more time recently on REW for a lot of reasons but thought it might be an interesting test to see which blog had more strength. 

Both my Active Rain and Real Estate Webmaster blogs have posts on that rank on the first page of google for similar types of terms.  Both blogs have a couple of posts that pull in a moderate amount of traffic - although one brings in a steadier stream than the other. 

I realize this isn't a completely scientific test - other people are more than welcome to do something similar - more data points the better.  There are so many cities I haven't…

Here's a short video from Matt Cutts, head of Google's spam team about why blog posts tend to show up so quickly.

We tend to talk a lot here about google alerts some people even have them sent instantly. The video points out that often once a post is made google blog search comes and crawls the site. This does not guarantee that the site will be indexed. Matt also said, like he always says, create good content and become "well known" google is going to notice your site.

I found this information helpful because I had noticed that my posts in my new real estate blog were getting listed into google very quickly but were not ranking for keywords. This is likely the reason why.  Give the blog more time to build authority and it will be crawled more…

Developing a game plan for real estate analytics

One difference I see between a lot of us site owners/webmasters and professional SEOs is that we check our results in the search engines much more often than if we hired someone like REW to do it for us.  If there was one thing I should change about my current method of working on my site it would be to put more scheduled activities in place.  On the one hand it is nice that if I see an interesting site to explore or if an issue to blog about comes up at the last minute - I can chose to do it instead of or addition to whatever else I'm working on, however, it is not very efficient and as I keep saying - I'm soon going to have a second site to work on as well as multiple blogs - efficiency is quickly…