Seo Redefined

I have a little tip for those of you who want to add something different to you blogs.  It is a free Survey tool called SurveyMonkey.com.  This is a pretty cool way to add a survey to your blogs and it is really easy to use.  All you do is set up an account, and start putting together your survey. I promise it is very simple.

You can just use the free account which allows up to 10 questions and 100 responses.  That alone is going to be enough for most people.  It also allows you to manipulate the form you use and the type questions or responses that are allowed.  Such as multiple choice questions with more than one or answer or just a single answer.  If you want to upgrade it is only $19.95 for the next package and that gets you unlimited questions and unlimited responses and a whole list of other stuff the free account does not give you. 

 I have been using this in some of my other blogs and in a few of my websites that do not have a built in Survey tool.  For those of you that use Point2 it has a built in Survey tool that you can use on your Point2 site.  Survey Monkey is really more for platforms that do not offer a Survey tool.  I think it works great in blogs and I have gotten a lot of positive feedback on it.  So if you want to try it out completely  anonymous click on the link below and see how easy it is.  Yes I did a sample survey but they were questions I would really like to see answers to and would appreciate if a few hundred of you would answer them.   I will post the results this weekend and if you all like I will continue to do these on a weekly basis.

 Click here to take the survey!

Let me know what you think.

Wayne

This is going to be a weekly series about the dirty little secrets the Internet may be hiding about you. This subject is so in-depth and interesting (at least to me) that I could write a a Blog a day about it. But who really has the time? Instead I am going to uncover all of the little known secrets of the Internet and what it may or may not know about you.

It is a little known fact to most people the kind of information that is being filed away about each and every one of us. Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) knows everywhere that you go and if forced to be a governmental agency would have to hand over this information, for some people that would be devastating. There have been many well known publicized cases where this has happened. In extreme cases people were thrown in jail and then executed. This did not happen in the U.S., but did happen in China and it was one of the three big search engine companies that was responsible for this.

We will also cover just how safe your information is and how easy it is to obtain, if you just know the right questions to ask. Just this week in the news we saw how easy it was for a hacker to obtain the passwords to Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin's email account at Yahoo. In just a few hours her personal email was posted on the Internet for all to read including pictures from her email account.

Many of the phone companies that control the Internet backbone routinely watch for any data that Homeland Security might be interested in. This info is logged and then shared with the government without the need of a search warrant. Many of the ISP's, most recently Charter, have decided to take the information they have on your surfing and are selling it to companies that wish to advertise with Charter. This advertising will be aimed at the places you surf the most. Gmail does this now and it generates a lot of revenue for Google.

I am not trying to be political or discuss the right or wrong of any of this. Instead I am trying to educate, inform and scare you all into better understanding of how the Internet works and what info is out there for the taking. I will Blog weekly on this if there is an interest for it.

Continue to Part 2

I received a phone call last night from a desperate and potential client who was beside himself about his SEO. In order to save a few bucks, he hired an SEO firm from India. It seems that SEO firm from India did more than redefine the SEO experience...they redefined the English language as well. He had read in my last Blog how SEO services for Real Estate Agents do not need to cost $5000 or more a month to be done properly. His case was just the opposite.

To save a few bucks on his marketing, he decided to search out a better way to get his SEO done. In his case a better way was to only pay $50 to have his site optimized for Google, Yahoo and MSN. So this SEO company from India did just that for him. They redid his keywords, descriptions and titles and also added a few anchor tags for him as well. Sounds pretty good so far, huh? They created several blogs for him and even posted some new articles to get him started.

I asked him how much analysis they had done for him and he did not know what I meant. I asked him if they discussed with him who his target market was and what audience he was going after for his site. Did they look at your site to see if you were promoting certain areas of town or certain neighborhoods? Did they ask if you were going for sellers or buyers or both? Did they give you a keyword analysis or bother to do a competitor analysis for you? Did they discuss a marketing plan with you and what it would take to continue a monthly maintenance plan? His answer to this was the typical answer I hear from many clients who outsource their SEO.

He told me that they did not do any of that but they did promise to have him on the first page of Google, Yahoo and MSN within 7 days. I then asked if they told him what keywords or phrases they were going to use to get him to number one on those big three? He had no clue but said it did not matter as long as he was on page one. OK I said, what if the key phrase was "Gummy worms are yummy"? He got the point immediately.

As the conversation continued I started to look at his site and saw the second problem he was having. Many of the keywords and anchor tags were horribly misspelled and the sentence structure resembled something my five year old son would have done. The work was so bad it will now take someone even longer to clean up the mess. His blogs were worse. There is nothing worse than a Real Estate Agent who blogs with titles like "Home Sweat Home: or "Bying a house today is lieke selling one fum yesteryear". I do not want to even try to figure out what the heck the last one meant.

My point here is that outsourcing your SEO to a foreign country might save you lots of money but it will cost you more in the long run. Either because you will have to pay a company like mine, SEOredefined.com to fix someone else's mistakes or noone will be able to find your site because it was not optimized correctly. This will of course directly impact your bottom line.

The point here is simple. There are probably some good foreign SEO companies out there but let the people who are familiar with the English language and the markets here be your lead. The money you spend will be worth it.

In case you were wondering, yes the man in this article is now my client. I am fixing his site this week.

I recently received some email from a couple of "SEO Gurus" who took offense to a blog I recently did about the cost of SEO.  Now I am not sure who declared these gentlemen SEO Gurus but I know it was not me.  The problems they have with me are the statements I made about the cost of SEO.

There seems to be a misconception that SEO firms must charge thousands of dollars a month for SEO to effective.  Now for a company like Coke or Ford it would be more like hundreds of thousand if not millions a year for their SEO.  But for most small business this is just not true.  SEO does not have to cost thousands of dollars a month for Real Estate Agents.

 There are lots of companies that charge upwards of $5000 just to setup the SEO and this does not include the monthly maintenance fee.  Many of the same companies use an out-of-the-box solution to do the initial analysis and the marketing plan.  There is very little hand-on human analysis that goes into what some of these companies do.

 We actually looked at several different SEO Analytical software packages and though some of them have some very good features, they still can not match the "Old School" way of doing SEO Analysis.  Old School is all of the research and analysis is done by hand. Now doing analysis this way is time consuming and costly in comparison to letting a software program do it.  But we believe that the information is more correct and many times can uncover information that the software programs would never see.

 Bottom line is that SEO for Real Estate Agents need not spend $5000 or more for great SEO.  On the same line of thinking, the services that charge a monthly fee under a hundred dollars a month are not worth the money either. 

So by now you should have talked to your Broker and a few more experienced Real Estate Agents and have a good idea of how they came up with their marketing budget.  You should have been able to figure out how much you can budget each month and where each dollar is going.  Now comes the easy part or is it the hard part, either way you have to do the next step.

 You need to talk to some SEO companies and choose the one that will work best for you.  Do not know much about SEO you say?  No problem because you have a couple a few choices here.

 1  Do it all yourself.  This only requires months of research and doing it all yourself but you save lots of     money.

 2. Go with recommendations from other Agents or your Website Designer.

 3. Google an Experienced SEO firm to do the work for you.

 Choice #1 is just not a good choice for 99.99% of all agents out there.  The last two choices work for most people but you need to be careful and choose the right SEO firm.  I will go in to great detail in another blog on how to choose the right firm but will give you some details here.

 Again your budget here is crucial and you do not want to bury yourself here.  If the SEO firm is not willing to work with you and your budget walk away and find someone who will.  One caveat here is that, do not be unrealistic when it comes to your monthly budget.  Do not expect the kind of SEO that Ford or Coke gets for a couple of hundred bucks a month.  It is just not going to happen.

 Many good firms will do a very in-depth analysis of your site, your competitors and what you need to have a good ranking and the ability to turn those visits to leads.   The same firms then have to implement the plan and many times there is a cost involved here in addition to the in-depth analysis.   Then there is of course the monthly maintenance fee that you pay to keep your site ranking well and generating those all important leads.

 To review here the budget is very important.  You need to seek out the more experienced Brokers and Agents and ask good questions.  Then get SEO Firm recommendations from friends or the Web Design firm that designed your site or Google them.  Be prepared to spend money for consultation and setup on top of your monthly maintenance fee.

 Still confused and what help?  Email or call me and I will be happy to answer any questions you may have.

This is a question that can only be answered by you.  Like most hardworking Real Estate Agents I am sure you have a set dollar amount each month for advertising.  You may have a set dollar amount that does not change or perhaps you do a percentage of your income.  Either way you need to have a set number/percentage and stick to that.  Deciding where those dollars should be spent can be a real head-banger.

This is the one area I hear most of my Real Estate friends having the most trouble.  How do you set that number and once you have set it how do you decide where each dollar should go?  I tell many of my Real Estate friends who have only be in the realestate game for less than three years to talk to their Broker or other more experienced Real Estate Agents. 

The Broker is always a great source of information and can really help a new agent.  The Broker is running a business themselves and have a real interest in your success.  Experienced Agents are a great wealth of knowledge.  They have been around the block a few times and know what it takes to be successful through the good and the bad times.  There are some great online sources that can answer many of your questions.  These are just a few I came across doing a quick search.

• http://realestate.about.com/od/agentstartupmarketing/ss/newagentmktg.htm
• http://realtytimes.com/rtpages/20050210_budget.htm
• http://activerain.com/blogsview/415999/Should-I-increase-my
• http://seoredefined.wordpress.com/2008/09/12/how-important-is-an-internet-marketing-plan/

Once you have a good grasp of what your budget will be you can then determine how much of it needs to go to your on-line advertising.  I have seen several reports recently that show any where from 60%-80% of home buyers use the Internet to find an agent and a new homes.  But before you start throwing that much of your budget at the Internet do some research on this and talk to other agents.  Your market may or not be different than what the national research shows.

An example would be that if your market area is mostly retired folks then there is a good chance they will be using the computer less to find a home and rely more on the personal touch of an agent.  If your market is younger more affluent folks then they may use the Internet more often than the national average to find a new home.  The point here is to research this.

Please check back for Part 3 in this series

How much should SEO cost?  I heard that question the other day from my friend Jim who is a local real estate agent in my old home town.  Now being the clever guy I think I am, I paused for a moment to give the impression that I was in deep thought, because Jim is very impressed by deep thinkers.  My first thought was that Jim lives in a million dollar home in Country Club Estates and drives a brand new car every year.  He just got back from a 6 week trip through Europe and has one of the largest real estate franchisees in the U.S..  So not trying to take advantage of a dear old friend I told Jim I could do it for $100,000.  Jim is a very smart guy and graduated at the top of his class.  I know he is great with investments because a few of his tips have paid off for me over the years.  So with a big smile on his face Jim stuck out his hand and wanted to know how soon I could start.

I am sure that true story brought a smile to your face or put a knot in your colon.  But far too often I hear this question from folks and then find out what they actually paid for their very ineffective and costly SEO services and quite frankly it puts a knot in 'my' colon.  I am sure many of you have paid too much and gotten so little in return.  Promises were made and not followed through.   Some of you saw your sites rocket to the top of the search engines only to find out that the SEO Guru you hired was using SEO Black Hat Tricks that only later got you banned from a search engine.  What ever the reason, there are no good answers for how much it should cost.  Let me try though.

I think this boils down to four very important factors.

1. How much can you budget for each month? 
2. What are your goals for your site.  What are you trying to accomplish?
3. Does the SEO firm start with an in-depth Analysis of your site?
4. What kind of an ROI do you expect?

It does not matter what the SEO firm charges if you can not afford it.  You must take your budget into account when pricing out SEO firms.  A ballpark figure would be between $700-$2500 for a setup fee.  Monthly maintenance fee will depend upon what services you are looking to have done on a monthly basis.  It is very important that you have monthly maintenance done to your site. Look for companies that offer Package Plans as well as A la Carte plans.  You may find you do not need all of their services to start. 

I will go into more detail in my next blog.

I ran across an interesting article today that made a very striking claim about the new web browser by Google called Chrome.  The author claimed that everything he typed into the address box while using Chrome was sent back to Google.  He was making the statement that it looked to him as though Google Chrome was reporting to Google every word he typed into the address box.

This person was using Wireshark and technically this person was right that everything he typed in the address bar was being sent back out to Google via the "Get" statement which can be found in a Wireshark trace under the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) tab.   But that was about all this person had correct.  The rest of their claims were based upon a limited knowledge that they had in how Wireshark really works.

Wireshark is a free packet sniffing program that anyone can download and use. In fact you can find it at wwww.wireshark.org.  Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer and is used by network professionals to examine network data.  This can be very useful on business networks but can also be used by the home user as well.  Let me give you a good example.

My wife Nancy has a web design company called First Coast Designs and one of the platforms she uses for web design was having server issues.  Several times her sites were unavailable to her so she called the company and they told her each time that it was her Internet connection.  Well to show them they were wrong we ran Wireshark the next time the sites were having issues.  What we saw was a packet trace showing that the problem was on their side not ours.  This info was sent to their IT staff and they then came clean and admitted that they had been having server issues. 

Wireshark has a great many advantages, even to the novice user.  The disadvantage is that you need a basic knowledge of protocols and how they work to use it. So the learning curve for Wireshark is quite steep.  But if you put in a few hours you can get a good idea of how it works.

Ok now back to my original Blog topic...

I ran a trace while using Chrome and I ran another trace while using IE.  There is not a whole lot of difference.  Microsoft is doing the same thing as Chrome.  The difference is you have to dig a bit deeper to see the info that is going to Microsoft.  The "GET statements" are needed and are a part of HTTP.

If you are worried about your security while surfing the net then stay off the net.  If you are doing something on the net you do not want people to see, they can see it.  Does it mean that everyone has Wireshark running and they will be at your front door tomorrow making you explain your Internet surfing? Probably not.

I will go into greater detail in another blog about the kind of personal info that is floating around the Internet on you.  You would be shocked and amazed what is out there and the kind of records that are kept on your surfing and how easy it is to trace it back to you.