I don’t know if you know this, and hopefully, I won’t get busted for spilling the beans… but a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, before he was a Realtor, Guy was <hushed tones> an IT guy. Which means, in addition to the MBA, he has many, valuable, hidden talents.
Lately he’s been looking into our worldwide web rankings. Unfortunately, it’s not pretty. Website Grader has given us a marketing score of 19/100, which means that this site is only more effective than 19% of the general population submitted to their rigorous testing algorithm, which takes into account over a dozen different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic and site performance.
Dude, that’s like, failing. We’ve got to at least get into the 50th percentile to be taken seriously as a real estate blog. Alexa ranks us as the 4,015,729th most popular blog on the web, while Technorati, whom I’ve actually heard of, ranks us at 3,485,803. I’ll take that number, thank you very much. Still, how do we get into the top 100? I guess we’ll have to start talking about more than just Reno Sparks to improve our rankings.
Apparently, we have no meta keywords, no page description, no heading summary and a complete absence of permanent redirects (like, that matters?). So, after poo-pooing the value of SEO optimization for all these years as the web’s biggest scam, I’m probably going to have to pay some web geek $100 per hour to fix all that for me, because, I guess, it still matters. (Eating my words… mmmm, they taste good!)
And while Google links back to us zero times (unbelievable given the amount of money I spend on Google AdWords and the fact that most random searches that end up on my blog come from Google), Yahoo links here 8,863 times. Okay… I’m not sure I’m trusting this test, but given the mere 27 cents a day I make on Google AdSense clickthroughs, I guess there’s something to it.
The only cool thing about this humiliating report is that they rated the readability level at Advanced Degree, meaning (allegedly) you need a PhD to follow the conversation. I’m thinking, yeah baby, we’re smart. (I have a BA, while Guy has an MBA, so where does this PhD thing come from? It must be Reno Ignoramus, Green NV or some of our other mysterious contributors who actually work for the University of Nevada.)
But then Guy pointed out that this was not a good thing… Apparently it’s better to keep things simple so that the majority of the target audience can understand it. Which means I guess we need to dumb down and write for sixth-graders like the newspapers do? (Funny, I thought we were already doing that, already.) Whatever…
Happy Fourth of July, Everyone. I am sincerely grateful for the creative freedom that comes with being a citizen of the United States of America. Thank you to our troops. I sincerely pray for your safe return.
MikeZ
Some advice:
Change the format! This layout stinks.
Allow more HTML for better readability and formatting.
Whitelist posters you trust to eliminate the delays from post to appearance.
Solicit more posts from contributors (eg: “Jaded”).
Dharmesh Shah
Hi there.
First off, thanks for trying out Website Grader. I’m the developer of the application.
Though a 19/100 is clearly sub-optimal, the good news is that there are a number of relatively “easy” fixes you can make to your on page SEO to bump up your score. This falls into the category of “good clean (web) living” anyways, so there’s little harm in making these changes. Shouldn’t really cost that much money either.
Good luck with the blog, and keep at it.
Tom
Bah, humbug! If you glitz it up with flash and features, plus dumb down the text of the discussions, it will then just become another “me too” adolescent play site. It is not the quantity of viewers that matters, it is the experience and education of the viewers and their economic situations that contributes most to interesting and informative discussions.
Add a bunch of bells, whistles, moving screens, menus on all the margins, pop-ups and other junk to navigate through, plus lower the discussion level to a junior high newspaper-type common denominator, and I’m gone.
Tom
Pat Kitano
Hi Diane, my blogsite has consistently scored poorly on website design evaluation… to the point where I don’t bother too much with testing it out. The reason for poor performance is the blog platform is on godaddy’s blog app and it’s not very good for SEO purposes. Anyway, I checked out website grader just to see what’s happening now and it gave me a surprisingly good score despite the lack of metatags etc. Blog architecture and the compilation of articles and keywords over time seems to generate its own SEO.
smarten
Hang in there Diane. I think your site is fine just the way it is, and besides, it’s the content which is really important. Realistically, how much traffic can you expect to generate related to Reno residential real estate [is it such a hot commodity that all of cyberspace is interested in what’s going on in this very little part of the world}? Trust me; you’re performing a valuable service to the segment of the population that really cares, and the people who are here are the ones you, Guy and your blog want to attract.
Also, don’t take the negativity personally. There are a lot of astute contributors to this blog and they’re coming from places far different than the agent whose job it is to be positive. I suggest you use the tool you’ve created to learn from your bloggers.
The government regularly uses something called a consumer confidence index – are consumers bullish or bearish on the future of the economy? Here a large number of contributors to this blog appear to be negative on the short term future of the Reno residential real estate market. I submit “learning” from this sentiment and incorporating it into your business is a good thing, and it should give you a “leg up” over the competition [for instance, when you do a listing presentation you can refer to some of the comments on this blog to convince the unrealistic seller that if he/she/they really want to sell his/her/their property, their pricing must be aggressive and realistic. If not, you’re better off in the long run telling him/her/them you’re not interested in spinning your wheels – that is, not unless they’re willing to compensate you for your expertise on an hourly basis in lieu of a commission that you will likely never realize in any event (that way you’ll soon find out how realistic they really are)].
Save your money on fancy web tools; forget about the “so called” professional traffic numbers; and keep doing what you’ve been doing! The people you really want to reach have figured out how to discover you, and those in the future you really want to attract are smart enough to replicate our efforts.
Gina
Don’t change the site. The layout is standard and the content is excellent. I agree with Tom – quality, not quantity is important for this type of site.
If you just want a high-traffic site to derive Google income from, this probably isn’t the type of site to do it.
It’s easy to optimize for search engine listings. You can learn to do it yourself or pay someone to do it – it shouldn’t be expensive. Make sure to have the person you hire explain what he’s going to do and how to make changes in the future, so you can learn to maintain it yourself.
Move to Reno?
Much ado about nothing. The bottom line is that this blog deals with a serious evaluation of the real estate market in Reno, NV, and that means a limited target market. I suspect that any one who does a search for *real estate market Reno* will find this blog.
I like the format of the web page as it is. Nice to have contributions from guests once in awhile.
Mike Van H
Greetings Diane and Guy!
Blogs, in their raw form as a blog, rarely rank well except for minute terms here and there, unless that blog is an authority site.
FYI I have been doing SEO, web design, web applications etc. for over 6 years. I lurk at the SEO conferences, I happen to know a google engineeer who occasionally slips me information, spend 2+ hours a day researching a learning of the latest changes to algorhythms, and I have a proven track record. That’s how I catapulted 16,000+ monthly UNIQUE visitors to my site in less than a year of existing on the net. Lemmy give you a couple pointers.
1. Google actually has algorhythms in place to detect and identify blogs, and they consider blogs and/or feeds as a separate animal from web pages. It’s VERY difficult to get a blog to rank well unless it’s an authority site, which yours is far from. So, you need supplemental informational pages that are not in a blog format. The problem is google requires a certain amount of finessing of on-page optimization; keywords in your h1 tags, keywords in the few few paragraphs of text, proper title tags and more importantly, keyword density. I ran a few density tests on your home page, and there is so much text and so little trigger keywords, that even the term ‘real estate’ only comprises .25% of all the words on your page. Its generally known among SEO specialists that you need a specific keyword density of at least 5% for that keyword and page to rank well and/or at least compete with other well-optimized pages. That’s about the percentage at which google says ‘hmmm this page must be about that certain subject’ So, google looks at your site and doesn’t see a specific subject. There’s no ‘guidance’ for google.
2. Google gives less weight to blogs linking back to you, unless the blog linking to you is an authority site, with the exceptions of blogs about the same subject matter. Yahoo is much much more liberal about this, so that might explain the diffference in backlinks between google and yahoo. I’m not sure where you saw zero backlinks from, because I checked and you have at least 128 backlinks from google, including my site. You have enough backlinks to rank well for google, and your pagerank (which is just a general barometer and not meant to be the end-all-of-end-all rank reporting) is significantly high, high enough to not worry about obtaining backlinks. It’s the on-page optimization that you are missing.
3. What you really need to rank well, if that’s your goal, are topic-specific pages under the same domain name, which can be tricky depending on what blog software you use.
One suggestion would be to only post the most recent blog post on your home page, instead of the 10 or so you currently do. This would increase the density and narrow the focus of each of your posts.
Another simple suggestion is the only h1 tag you DO have on your page read like this: ‘r e n o . r e a l t y . b l o g’ Thats horrible. A search engine bot can’t magically delete the spaces in between each letter and form words by itself. Simply deleting the spaces in between each letter and deleting the periods in between each word and replace with regular spacing could yield significant results.
Hit me up if you want any more free advice…you certainly offer enough free advice on this blog that someone should offer to give YOU some 😉
smarten
WOW! Am I the only one reading some of these posts and asking him/herself where did all of these knowledgeable people come from given no one is purportedly reading this blog? I think you’re seeing your premise is wrong Diane.
In any event, I want to point you to Don Kanare’s website – InsideIncline.com [I already know you’re very familiar with Don’s site, but others on this blog may not]. I call it to your attention specifically insofar as this subject is concerned because according to Don, he has mastered the result you apparently long for [that is, if you can actually believe the man].
Quoting from Don’s July 3, 2007 post: “I am very pleased to announce that this web site is now on the second page of the Google search results for the phrase ‘Incline Village real estate.’ InsideIncline.com is now ranked 17 out of 660,000 web sites that are indexed for that search phrase. One year ago I was not even in the top 300, so I guess all of my hard work at building content for the site along with my SEO knowledge has propelled me high up in the search engine rankings. I have optimized this site for nine different keyword phrases and Inside Incline is now on the first or second page of the Google search results for every one of those phrases.”
I suggest you take a little drive over the hill to Incline Village; buy Don lunch one day; and pick his IT (or should I say “e-Pro”)brain. But you’d better wait a couple of months because according to Don, he’s too busy selling and listing Incline Village/Crystal Bay properties notwithstanding the fact there are over 350 active Incline Village/Crystal Bay agents; there are only 455 current active listings; and YTD, only 131 residential properties [that’s right, 131] have actually closed escrow [how’d you like to be an agent trying to carve out a living in that market?].
Although the task is probably too monumental for a geographical area with 20 times the active listings as Incline Village/Crystal Bay, I’d love to see you provide the raw data Don is able to provide, however, for the greater Reno metropolitan area.
BTW, sorry to be so ignorant but precisely what does “SEO” stand for?
kathleen
Never trust the negative assessment of someone who then offers you “relatively easy fixes” at a fee. I know and work with enough web “gurus” to know that they’re mostly making it up as they go, and none of them really knows what will work until something actually does. They’re throwing pasta at the wall like everybody else.
I like this site because it’s clean and uncluttered and doesn’t dumb down the content (how can you educate readers without challenging them at least occasionally?) or overwhelm me with information I didn’t come looking for. Don’t change a thing.
(Tom, is that you?)
BanteringBear
“Which means I guess we need to dumb down and write for sixth-graders like the newspapers do?”
Boy, that Octerpus shore eees purty, heeheehee.
How’d I do?
NVMojo
I like the site.
A long time ago, in a rural galaxy far, far away in northern Nevada, I worked as a journalist for a newspaper. The first thing the publisher told me was to “dumb down” my writing to about a 6th grade level to make the news more palatable for the community’s mining readers. Such is life.
Cheers.
CBam
Diane-
Don’t mess with the general approach of your site. OK, so you’re not going to get many new clients based upon blind Google searches. You do have a unique resource in the Reno market. You do have literate readers. Those literate readers are likely to have literate, high income friends that need to buy or sell homes.
Don’t ruin what you’ve got by trying to be everything to everyone.
-CBam
longerwalk
[ahem]
As just a lowly homeowner who moves around a bit more than average (haven’t lived in the same house for more than 4 years since I was 17, and sister, that was a long time ago) . . .I log on for the updates of where my castle is in status. PLUS, I provide this website to others I KNOW are moving in to the area . . . it might cause some to rent first, buy later, but Diane, what was your objective? Right now you are (mostly) trusted, probably trying to keep a living going, and honesty will gain you GOOD clients in the long run.
As for the ‘position’ your blog holds . . .do you want quantity or quality? The latter will eventually bring some of the former. You want good readers/contributors or trash? Your site is easy to read, consistent, and the content is what counts. Free speech is best, but some quiet moderating (offlist) for valued clients who seem to want to flame might be in order now & again. I respect quality dialog, including some 10-cent words now & again.
Regards,
Diane Cohn
Everyone, thank you so much for your many thoughtful comments. I think it’s good to check in every now and then just to make sure we’re still on track with our approach… if we ever derail, please slap us (I know you will). And when I get back from my week in the wilderness I’ll get to work on some of the search optimization ideas you so kindly shared. Thanks again!
stjoe
The question is not how highly ranked the blog is but whether it fulfills your goals, whatever they may be. If it brings in clients who are looking for representation, either as a buyer or a seller, then keep it. If it builds your reputation, keep it. But if it does nothing, get rid of it.