Last year around this time, I took the plunge for the Yahoo Directory - paying my $299 review fee. I was reviewed and added here: http://dir.yahoo.com/Regional/U_S__States/Illinois/Cities/Aurora/Real_Estate/ Since then, I can honestly say, the amount of traffic I have received from being listed has been minor - likely in the single digits. For many webmasters, the dilema of [...]

Another popular way of building links for your website is through writing and submitting articles. This has become popular for several reasons. First, articles tend to be long so pages that include your article have a higher chance of being picked up and indexed by the search engines. Also, it’s a great way to include [...]

I’ve gone back and forth several times about the value of submitting to directories. Right now, I feel that directories are a good option for site submission for several reasons. First, you might get some traffic because of your listing. Second, it gives your site good search engine exposure and means that your page should [...]

Perhaps the goal of any website owner is to drive traffic (and in the real of real estate - convertable prospects) to your page. Perhaps the top way to do that from a broad based audience is through gaining positions in the search engines - namely Google, Yahoo and MSN. It’s no secret that Google [...]

There are a few basic dillemas that every webmaster eventually comes to in the design and implementation of good SEO (search engine optimization). The biggest is likely: 1. Should I sacrifice rankings for content or (gulp) content for rankings? The answer to this question is probably the single biggest issue with designing for the internet. On one hand, you [...]

Just a few weeks ago I happened to check my Aurora IL real estate website out in MSN and lo and behold, I found that the search engine was actually pulling in part of my IFRAMES not compatible text to build the description. When using IFRAMEs it’s common practice to include a blurb of text for [...]

As many of you know, page rank is a statistic assigned by the Google search engine and is intended to represent the importance of a certain page. However, there is a lot of controversy surrounding this statistic. For one, it seems to have an unknown bearing on SERP (search engine results page) rankings. For example, [...]

In my last post about directories, I realize that I might have portrayed a very negative opinoin about directories. That’s really not my intention. Some directories actually have a great value - for example, the Internation Real Estate Digest directory passes a nice page rank of 4 or the Yahoo Directory which is fairly authoratative and [...]

A lot of discussion has been made about link building. Reciprocal links have had their heyday but are now somewhat discounted by the search engines due to the popularity of link farms and link building software. The new fad is one-way links. Perhaps the best source of these one-way links are directories - basically huge [...]

Lately, I’ve been very active in the Active Rain Real Estate Network - if you haven’t registered, Active Rain is a community of Real Estate professionals - agents, loan officers, home inspectors, etc. It’s growing daily and currently has over 14,000 members. Active Rain is absolutely free to join and offers several activities members can participate [...]