I updated the potentially canonical list of real estate weblogs yesterday for the first time since June. One of the benefits of delay is that I get to see who didn’t make it in the long run, saving me some work. Hope is easy. Weblogging is hard.
In any case, I added a form to the page to make it simpler (and, one may hope, quicker) to add, change or remove entries from the list.
Here are two ideas that occurred to me while I was sifting through 3,000 un-dealt-with emails (of all sorts, not just real estate weblogs):
- Naming your weblog with an image instead of CSS-styled text is probably a bad idea. We’re guilty of this at DistinctivePhoenix.com, but it’s something I’ll fix the next time I go after that weblog in a big way.
- Naming your weblog with your most potentially-valuable keyword is probably a very good idea. Here we’re entirely off the reservation. With the exception of RealEstateWeblogging101.com, nothing I’ve ever done is right. But the value of having your most valuable keyword as your URL is so rich that it might be worth your while, if you don’t already have a lot of traction, to consider starting over with a new domain name.
RealEstateWeblogging101.com is a complete category-killer, and Dave Smith is studying it extensively. It’s interesting to Dave because it’s built entirely in WordPress “Pages,” with almost no ordinary weblog message content.
The name of that weblog is an image, also, not styled text, but, of course, the title of each post and the name of the weblog are encoded in the title tag of each page. There’s something else we’re doing on all of those pages: The title of each weblog post or WordPress “Page” is shown twice, once as the heading of the content and once on the “blackboard” at the top of the page. I don’t know if that is making a huge difference with Google, but it doesn’t seem to be hurting anything.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Todd Carpenter says:
I’m not saying it would be smatt from an SEO angle, but I named my blog lenderama because I wanted a word that nobody else has ever used. Every reference on Google to lenderama is in reference to me. The name itself has no SEO value except for the term “lenderama”.
Another thing, I parked lenderama on mariah.com because It was a website that I had for years, and I didn’t want to pay for two hosting accounts. lenderama.com forwards to blog.mariah.com. It turns out, Google likes old URLs. That helped a subdomain of mariah.com, named lenderama, to get some real world short tail search results. Google “mortgage industry” for instance.
I think there’s an argument that using blog.whateveryourexistingdomainis.com might me just as good of a choice as a keyword laden new URL. It might depend on the PR of your existing domain name. Just guessing here.
December 28, 2007 — 10:10 pm
Brian Brady says:
Let’s build upon both ideas. Search old domain names, for resale, that are keyword rich
December 28, 2007 — 10:54 pm
Bob in San Diego says:
>It might depend on the PR of your existing domain name.
It isn’t the PR of the domain that matters, but the trust or authority that the domain has.
The primary benefit of keywords in the url is from the anchor text.
>the title of each post and the name of the weblog are encoded in the title tag of each page.
You are better off if they are not identical.
December 28, 2007 — 11:28 pm
Todd Carpenter says:
Bob, that makes sense as mariah.com had a far lower PR before I started lenderama. I think the SEO value of my sites are based more on being early to the game, than any SEO strategery [sic].
December 29, 2007 — 12:18 am
Doug says:
Sticking to KISS makes the most sense to me. Doesn’t hurt to have the blog name and URL match, then have a variety of domain names point in that direction based off key word searches. Knowing what key words readers are searching for should be a good clue.
December 29, 2007 — 7:01 am
Bob in San Diego says:
>have a variety of domain names point in that direction based off key word searches.
Those kw domains pointing to the primary domain will not be indexed, thus they won’t be found for any kw searches. The only traffic those will generate would be type in traffic – someone typing in the exact name of the domain.
December 29, 2007 — 10:06 am