dsc_1000 will get you 707 results

Any one care to guess what I’m talking about here?  I mentioned this when I had the privilege to speak at the November meeting.  I’m talking about taking the time to change the name of images to be keyword rich and descriptive. I did a quick Google image search of the term dsc_1000 and got 707 returned results.

There are three place to pay attention when using images in your posts.

The File Name

I’m talking about the file name of the image you upload.  Change that file name to keywords which are descriptive of the post.  Instead of dsc_1000.jpg use McCormickRanchGolfCourse.jpg.  You can also insert hyphens between the words.  The search engines will remove the hyphens.

The Title Tag

I often make the title and caption the same.  (Captions if using a Wordpress blog).  Here again I would title it something like “The view from the tee box at the 15th hole”.

The Alt Tag

The alt tag is the one place you don’t put keywords unless they really do fit for the image.  The alt tag is what is spoken for the visually impaired if they can’t see the screen.  Their browser reader will tell them it is an image and the alt tag is what is read to describe the image.  This is not the place to put keywords unless they are descriptive of the image.

I would never recommend you use the Title or Alt tags to stuff keywords.  I don’t believe in keyword stuffing anywhere on a blog or website.  Create good content and tag your images and posts accordingly.  Do this often and you will do more for the SEO of your blog than all the keyword stuffing you can think of.

Descriptive Terms Increase Your Traffic

Up to 1/3 of my traffic on any given day comes from image searches on Google.  They find those images because they are searching for things related to Tucson or the desert etc.  No one besides me searches for dsc_1000.  Use those descriptive terms and you will increase targeted traffic to your site.

Finally, Google and other search engines are clamping down on all the keyword stuffing that has been going on in alt tags.  (Abuse leads to regulation and penalties).  My point.  If you have been keyword stuffing your alt and title tags of your images you not only should stop it, you should go back and edit those previous posts where you abused the system, even if you didn’t know it was an abuse.

Google doesn’t look to see when you started or stopped, it will know when it finds it and it will penalize accordingly.  JUST BECAUSE EVERYONE IS DOING IT DOESN’T MAKE IT OKAY.  What you might “Get Away With” today could very well earn you a penalty in the future.  This is why it is always best practice to follow “best practices”.  It will make your life easier in the future.

An artificial high placement today is fleeting.  What you want is long lasting placement and earned trust of the search engines by using best practices in all you do on the web.

AZREBN Welcomes 100th Member!

Az Real Estate Blogging Network is proud to announce our 100th member on our AZREBN Meetup.com group, Nancy Sexton!  Nancy joined our AZREBN group in December of 2008 and we are pleased to welcome her to our network.  Nancy comes with a very impressive background in Real Estate and is currently building her Home Staging business locally.  She has shared her website with us, Sexton Services Home Staging.

With our SpotLight of the Month, I would like to recognize our 100th member and say, "Thank You Nancy," for joining our network and we look forward to getting to know you better and wish you much success and a very prosperous year!

Nancy Sexton’s career in real estate began as early as high school back in New Jersey when she worked part-time in a real estate law firm that handled real estate closings (the practice done on the East Coast). A few years later and 3000 miles across country she became a California Real Estate agent in 1989 and will be celebrating her 20 years in real estate this upcoming year. In the meantime, she graduated from UCLA, and went on to become a level IV paralegal. Taking skills from her real estate career, her analytical skills from law, her inherited interior decorating skills from Mom, and her training as an Accredited Staging Professional®, she is now focusing on her own home staging company — Sexton Services. 

As a proud “Dog Mom” of two German Shepherds, she understands the special needs of families living in their homes while they are for sale in the real estate market, and thus specializes in owner occupied home staging. She also offers vacant home staging, and home redesign for homeowners who desire some assistance setting up their new home, or would like an interior design change in their current home.

Nancy’s goal is to educate the public and the real estate industry on the amazing benefits of home staging to sell a home faster and for more money! Home staging is clearly here to stay as more people realize that marketing a house for sale requires the same “product showcasing” as any other product for sale. The statistics are amazing and prove that the investment in home staging is returned several times over.

Nancy is thrilled to be one of the lucky people in the world who loves her work and enjoys not only the satisfaction of transforming a home for sale into a buyer’s delight, but also the grateful joy of homeowners who accomplish their goals of selling their house and moving on to their own dream homes.  If you would like to contact Nancy Sexton for her services and/or a quote please contact her at 480-553-1105 or contact her through her meetup profile! Thanks again Nancy for sharing your story and look forward to seeing you monthly!

Bring Your Buyers To You Workshop! January 15, 2009

Come join Emily Leach, an SEO expert offering a one day workshop created for the Real Estate Professional.  Even if you are just beginning your career as a Realtor, Real Estate Investor, Property Manager, or Mortgage broker - this workshop is for you!!

In this workshop you will learn: Internet marketing Secrets, Tips, and Techniques to Increase Your Real Estate Website Traffic
• How to develop a web site that attracts sellers and buyers
• How to apply Search Engine Marketing strategies to drive visitors to your website
• How to leverage your areas of specialization so that you are given preference with Search Engine results
• How to create a “Google Friendly” website
• Lower your costs of Pay Per Click Advertising and increase your traffic
• Use result tracking techniques to direct visitors to call you!

The bottom line:  You will leave the seminar with enough ideas, techniques, and strategies to catapult your business to the next level.  The workshop is presented in easy to use, easy to understand terms.
Click here to get the complete outline of the sessions that will be covered for the entire workshop!

AZREBN December 18th - SAAR - Donation Drive

Please join Az Real Estate Blogging Network and SAAR (Scottsdale Area Association of REALTORS(R) and welcome Emily Leach, a SEO expert that is passionate about the success of her audience and has made public speaking a lifestyle; so far in 2008 she has presented at NAWBO New Mexico, UNM Digital Arts Conference, National Video Gaming Conference, Chamber of Commerce and local venues to increase awareness. Outside of Public Speaking she stays on top of SEO skills by teaching SEO certification workshops and Internet Marketing skill workshops throughout New Mexico and Arizona.
With 12 years of experience in the field of Search Engine Optimization, Website Development, Internet Marketing and Information Systems you can rest assured she will deliver new techniques that will entice all real estate professionals that are looking to strengthen their online presences.

Here is the outline for the AZREBN MeetUp:

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Can the Internet Transform Your Real Estate Business?

• Understanding WHY people use the Internet:
• Understanding HOW people use the Internet
  • Both of these concepts apply to every business using the Internet, it isn’t enough to create a website. Whether you have a site or are looking to create one, you NEED to get these two concepts down.
• What is Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing?
  • Is there a difference? Or is this a scam to get people to spend money?
  • Find out the answers AND how to put it to use for your business.
• Building a strategy to take you through the next 12 months
  • Find out what almost every company fails to implement when they start using the Internet for marketing
  • How to stay focused in your strategy
  • Should you niche your business?
• Overview of 10 different tactics you can implement in your business
• Open Question and Answers

This is an open and interactive workshop, bring your questions and your creativity!

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With the holiday season upon us we thought that AZREBN would like to join in giving to those less fortunate and help homeless children and families with some daily necessities of life. May you please join us in helping with your donation at the door!

Please help us with your donation at the door for Save The Family with donations of adult toiletries or infant diapers, lotions, toothpaste, etc. Please see other toiletries that are Items needed below:

Toiletries * Adult & Children’s pain reliever Cough drops Deodorant Feminine products Lotion Mouthwash Razors Shampoo & Conditioner Shaving cream Soap Toothbrushes & Paste Thermometers

Baby Items * Baby Pain Reliever Baby Powder Baby Oil Baby Shampoo & Soap Baby Wipes Crib sheets & Blanket Diapers-all sizes Diaper Rash Ointment Instant Formula

Please be sure to reserve your spot and RSVP!!

December 18th, 2008 at 9:45am - 12:00 pm , Thursday!   Click Here for office flyer!

Location:

Scottsdale Area Association of REALTORS®
4221 North Scottsdale Road
Scottsdale, AZ 85251
(480) 945-2651

Find us on your favorite social network groups!
Click on the icon…

Do you own your Real Estate Business?

This may seem like a strange question, and for some of you it will be a 100% absolutely, yes I do answer.  Particularly if you are the owner/broker of a real estate company.  But that isn’t actually what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about your online real estate business:  Do you really own it?

For example, how many of you have, as your primary email address:  SuperAgent@aol.com, or SuperAgent@yahoo.com, SuperAgent@cox.net, or even SuperAgent@gmail.com?  If you do, who owns that email address?  It doesn’t look to me like you do.  Rather, it looks to me like AOL, Yahoo, Cox, or Google own your email address, and they are simply letting you use it for a while.  I wonder how long they’ll continue to do that?  Forever?  For a year?  For a decade?  What if they start charging you for their service, or impliment anti-business rules for their “free” email accounts?  After all, each of those businesses can decide to do whatever they choose to, since they own the email account.

For bloggers, let’s look at another very common example of NOT owning your business.  Is your blog at Blogger.com?  Is it at Wordpress.com?  Both of those sites allow you to create a free blog.  Each has some sort of rule about blogging for business, which many people ignore, and for the most part, so do the sites.  But tomorrow they could actually start enforcing their own rules, and shutting down blogs, or even just sending you a nice fat bill each month.  How prepared are you to lose months or even years worth of blogging over night?  Speaking from experience, when I accidentally deleted the first 100 of my own posts from my blog, and thought I had NO backup, your heart will sink to the floor, and you will think the world is crashing in around you, if that happens.

The fix for both of these problems is relatively simple and relatively inexpensive. For each, I believe you need to start by purchasing a domain name that you OWN. At GoDaddy.com a domain will cost you around $10/year, but if you are nice, I can show you how to get one for a buck or two less.  So for the cost of 2 cups of coffee at Starbucks (and feel free to cut out two trips this week to pay for your domain, if cost really is an issue), you are well on your way to ownership.

For the email problem, I highly suggest you find a Microsoft Exchange hosting provider for your email.  MailStreet.com is a good choice, with pricing plans starting at $13/month.  For more ideas, Microsoft has this list of Exchange hosting providers.  Why do I recommend an Exchange solution?  Because it works.  And it works well.  With Exchange you’ll get integration with your email, calendar, tasks (to-do list), and contacts all in one application.  Exchange will push your email, contacts, and calendar entries to your smart phone real time.  And of course all of these companies provide web mail support, so you can view your email from any computer anywhere, if your laptop crashes on the day your smart phone is run over by a bus.

For me, the beauty is in the real time integration with my iPhone, although Blackberry users will benefit just the same.  There’s nothing like having your phone notify you of a new email as fast or faster, than your desktop computer does.

For a good, and a bit less expensive solution, you might also consider using Google’s business apps version of Gmail to have Google host your email/calendaring, which allows integration with a smart phone.  I don’t have any experience with this solution, but I have heard it works well, and the full blow business account is only $50/year.

To own your blog, there are a number of hosting providers you can choose from, which will allow you to use download the free software from WordPress and host your blog.  As a side benefit to being hosted, you’ll get to pick any theme and any set of plugins you desire in WordPress, which will further make your blog truly unique, and thus truly yours.  GoDaddy will host your blog for $10/month, however they are not very tolerant of blogs that get a lot of page views for that price, so while it can be a good place to start, with success, you may outgrow them.  Many people believe the leading hosting provider is currently MediaTemple, however HostGator and A Small Orange are each well thought of.

At this point, you may be wondering what I use?  My solution isn’t for everyone, but it works well for me.  In my office, I have a Windows Server with Windows Small Business 2003 installed, which gives me remote access and a Microsoft Exchange server.  Sitting right next to the Windows server is a Linux server, which hosts my blog (actually, it hosts many blogs).  Because I already had a T1 line coming into the office for phones/internet, and I have the skillz to build and maintain these servers, doing it myself was a no brainer.  I know a few agents across the country that self-host, but only a very few of us.

There are more choices than what I’ve given here, but hopefully I’ve given you some nuggets to think about and places to start looking if you don’t yet own your online Real Estate Business.

Tech Classes in December

Courses offered by Bleeding Edge Technology Training, 2456 E. Menlo St. Mesa AZ 85213

Google Search, Right on Your Blog…

Sometimes, especially with blogs, you want to give your readers

the opportunity to search your site with a “Google style” search.  Well, in the interest of sharing, Google will allow you to configure a search widget that will search only your site.  Go to Google.com>more>even more then custom search.  It will allow you to configure a search bar however you would like.

Keep in mind that studies have shown that people prefer to browse your site for information and that if they did find you via a search engine search, they’ll want to see what they were looking for within about 2-3 clicks.  If they are using the custom search, you may need better navigation.

Happy Holidays!
Rob the Tech Guy

WordPress 101: Dashboard basics

My Word(press)! Is it Monday already? Then it must be time for the next installment of our WordPress tutorial series “WordPress 101″, the special series of articles helping you, the beginner blogger, set up your first self-hosted WordPress site! This week, let’s kick* a ball around the WordPress equivalent of the back yard and learn all about the Dashboard.

But first, we need to tidy up a couple of loose ends left over from last week’s WordPress 101: Installation article. This is important, so please pay attention! :-)

Do this: Cleaning up the Install

Hopefully all went well with your WordPress installation and you have a lovely, shiny new site ready for action. However, before we can forget all about installation and get on with the really fun stuff, we need to do the following to help keep our new site safe from nasty hacker types…

Open up your FTP client, and delete (yes, I said DELETE) these two files from your WP installation:

../wp-admin/install.php
../wp-admin/upgrade.php

You don’t need them anymore (any subsequent upgrade of Wordpress will automatically load new versions), and you don’t need them lying around where they could be misused by hackers (unlikely, but you never know).

Do this: Change your admin password

Unless you have the memory power of a super-computer it is unlikely that you will remember the admin password created for you during the WordPress installation. So let’s change it!

Login to your WordPress site in your favourite web browser using the username admin and the password provided to you by WordPress during installation. You did write down that password, didn’t you? For future reference it’s a good idea to bookmark the link to the login screen which, typically, will be:

http://mydomain.com/wp-login.php

Look for the menu item called “Users”, click on it and you should see this:

Click on the User admin and you will see the profile page for the admin user. Change the password to something “strong”, ie a mix of letters, numbers and characters, but memorable. Once finished, click Save and your new password will be set.

Ok. All done? Let’s get on with this week’s tutorial!

The Dashboard

Think of this as the nerve-centre of your site. The Dashboard is where you access all of Wordpress’ administrative tasks, be it writing/editing posts, managing plugins, approving comments, or even editing your template theme files. You will be spending a lot of time working in the Dashboard, and although it won’t be long before you can zoom around it like an expert, as it’s still all new to you (and perhaps a little daunting), let’s take a quick look around and see what’s what.

So, login to your Dashboard using your admin username and (new) password. You should see something like this:

I am not going to go into detail describing every single menu item, for two simple reasons. Firstly, “doing something” is often better than “reading about something”, so take a look around, open up some menu items and see what’s there. Don’t worry, you won’t break anything - just don’t click “Save” or “Update” or “Delete” unless you mean it! Secondly, a brand new version of WordPress, version 2.7, is just about to be released. Whilst the basic functionality and organization of the new-look Dashboard is very similar to today’s version, the layout and look and feel of the Dashboard is radically different. No doubt this will be the subject of a future WordPress 101 article.

Here’s a brief run-down of the key menu items:

Write

This is where you write new Posts and Pages. You can also create new Links here, for example for your “blogroll”, should you choose to have one. We’ll look at the differences between Posts and Pages in more detail in a later instalment of this series.

Manage

This is an important section of the Dashboard and you will spend a fair amount of time here once your site has some content. Basically speaking, this is where you edit content you have already added via the Write menu. Editing Posts, Pages, Links, Tags and so on, is all handled here.

Additionally, the Manage menu gives you access to two important features - though perhaps not used very frequently - and these are Import and Export, very useful tools which enable you to download or upload a copy of your database in XML format. Don’t worry too much about what “XML” means, other than it is a way of formatting data by organizing it into a text document using XML markup, not dissimilar to HTML, so that it can be easily “read” by software that understands XML, for example your web browser or text editor. Import and Export are very useful because they enable us to move the contents of one WordPress database to another WordPress site, or even import the contents of a database from another blogging platform such as Blogger, Typepad, etc.

Design

The Design menu is where you select the Theme to be used by your site. Upon installation, WordPress loads 2 basic themes but it is unlikely that you will want to use one of these given the vast number of Themes available, generally free to download and use. This section of the Dashboard also gives you access to setting up and displaying Widgets and, depending on the current Theme being used, access to any Theme Options that may be available.

Wotsa Widget? A Widget is a small predefined piece of code that you can easily configure and add to your theme sidebar, for example. They are very user-friendly, generally self-explanatory to configure, and enable you to add many of the typical things found in a sidebar: category lists, recent posts, calendars and more.

Comments

Comments are postings made by visitors to your site in response to the articles you have written and published on your site. This section of the Dashboard is where you manage comments, specifically whether to “approve” them or not, or mark them as spam.

Sadly, comment spam is inevitable. You will receive comment spam. End of story. For example, at the time of writing, this very site has already received almost 2000 spam comments since its re-design a few months ago. Luckily, WordPress provides an excellent anti-spam system called Akismet, a plugin automatically installed with WordPress and which is, generally, very good at catching comment spam. We’ll look more closely at this in a future article.

Settings

As you can see, the Settings menu gives access to several sub menus, all of which control various aspects of the configuration of your WordPress installation. As a rule, you will set these up once and then forget about them. The default Settings are perfectly fine for the moment and, for now, I recommend that you leave them as they are. Again, we shall come back to this in a future installment of this series and adjust some of the settings to fit specific site requirements.

Plugins

Plugins are an essential part of any WordPress installation. Whilst the basic WordPress installation provides most of the functionality we need to run our site, Plugins provide additional functionality or make an existing process easier to use. I shall be devoting an entire article to Plugins. Yes, they are that important. In the meantime (and in a shameless plug) I’ve assembled a brief list of what I consider to be “essential” plugins, which you can see here.

Coming up next…

In next weeks’ WordPress 101 article I shall be running through some important Dashboard Settings and explaining what they mean and how to use them.

Until then… Happy web developing!

This article is syndicated from Studiograsshopper.

Footnote: * That’s what we do with footballs’ in my part of the world. :-)