Maureen McCabe may not be the best Realtor in Columbus- but she’s got the right idea when it comes to getting to the top of search- and building a community around her.
It seems so many Realtors are ready to spend a ton of money advertising in throw away classifieds section- when the web is global, pretty much eternal, and allows you to write as much about your listings- or your expertise- with no additional cost.
The real estate listings in the newspaper are typically nothing more than price and product ads- with a grocery list of “features” attached. Considering a home is the biggest investment most people make, it seems sad that this is the best that Realtors can do.
So- if you are shopping for a Realtor to sell your home- start asking them about how they plan to market your house online- who is in their “Network” – and how big their audience is? If they can’t tell you about the key search terms to their site (not the corporate parent)- or the number of unique visitors (not hits) and show you who links to their site- move on. These are the keys to having a successful web site- and unfortunately, most Realtors still don’t get it.
On Tuesday, we had a full day of seminars. Intro Blogosopher in the morning, and the first WordPress advanced in the afternoon. To showcase the power of categories in WordPress to gather ideas in several posts into a super post- I searched The Next Wave news blog for anything about the super hot agency “Crispin Porter + Bogusky” in Miami and created a new category of the same name.
We searched Google for any mention of The Next Wave when searching for “Crispin Porter Bogusky” and gave up after the 300 th or so reference (30 pages in). Today I added a post about “CB+P” to the site- and then went to Google again a few hours later. We were now number 7! And that is out of 176,000 results. A few articles above ours, was a great article about CP+B from Business Week– so we used the “Press-it” function of WordPress to add yet another post to the site.
The goal is to get to the top of Google, using real content, instead of nested pages, or paid postion, to be next to the hottest ad agency in the world. Of course, we think we’re the second hottest agency- along with half the agencies in America- but the difference is- we’ve figured out the secrets of search- and content management- and even Crispin hasn’t got that part quite mastered.
If you want to learn how to get your site, and yes, we’ll even teach other ad agencies, to the top of Google- without paying for it, you need to attend one of our seminars.
The link above is to an article in Wired about Navizon a really cool combination of several technologies: GPS, SmartPhones, and web 2.0.
Search engines are getting better at localization- ie finding content that is relevant to your specific area- but, there is still a lot of room for improvement. Google Local will be giving the Yellow Pages people a run for their money- however, the key addition of geographic tags to content is still not an established standard.
The Wired article explains how a really bright guy, Cyril Houri, figured out how to augment GPS information by using the locations of cell phone towers and triangulation. The problem with GPS is it doesn’t always work inside buildings – but cell phones do. By coupling the location functions of a cell phone, with the known GPS coordinates of the towers, he’s turned these phones into ways to annotate a site – navizon- or allow you to post data from your cell to a site- complete with GPS coordinates- really handy for a restaurant finder- or just letting people know where you are.
Read the article for another look at the future of the web- and how technologies are converging to create new ways to use data and create opportunities to increase your business.