Real Estate Internet Marketing Week In Review
Posted by John Lockwood on November 2nd, 2007
The Good Learning Stuff:
Last week I started running my blogging platforms material by a few folks at ActiveRain, and several people who are building their ActiveRain points using content from their other blog asked me about duplicate content. In the course of writing my reply to that I came across the closest thing I’ve found to the official Google Position on duplicate content.
This week I was beginning preliminary work on some posts about A/B Testing, which is one of the ways you can test how different changes to a web page improve or detract from your conversion rate. In the course of looking into how you might use Google Analytics to do A/B testing, I found that Google now has yet another free webmaster tool, the Website Optimizer, which helps you do conversion testing on your site. You can check out the video here.
This week I also taught Purva how to use LiveWriter. Well, John, how come you’re not putting together a nice Camtasia Studio tutorial about LiveWriter and posting it here? How come indeed. Stay tuned. Meantime I saw this post to whet your Live Writer appetite.
The Politics and Opinion Stuff:
SEO, it seems to me, is getting a bad rap from a lot of people, including my good friend, Dave Smith, in his article SEO De-programmers Needed for RE Bloggers. I don’t know if I really want to rebut this or just move on to more “teaching” posts.
One thing that can be said about SEO is that it is a fickle beast in many respects. My own favorite search position is in the toilet this week, so I’m resisting the urge to tailspin into a depression and sit around eating Snickers bars, and instead writing this post.
Your welcome.
In a result that may be completely unrelated, the big news on everyone’s lips is the Great Google Slap of 2007. After documenting the problem fairly well, I thought, Andy Beard went on to point out this amusing Surrender Letter from a Webmaster.
November 22nd, 2007 at 1:34 pm
John,
The point of my article was the sacrificing of content to nothing but SEO. I’m seeing so may RE bloggers out there, not writing much at all but spending all their time “tweaking” the blog for better SEO.
Much of what I write at the lab is for good SEO practices and structure. I’m all for SEO, but blogging is about blogging not just SEO.
It is like a club about cooking, that never cooks. Just buys lots of cooking equipment to make food prep easier and better, but never cooks any food. That is what happens when bloggers focus most of their efforts on SEO and not on blog content.
You can have the best SEO blog in the world but once you get them there if there isn’t any content they won’t stick around. That was my point, which it seems I didn’t do a very good job of making.