AA : What is the #1 most important Search Engine in the United States?
Chris: According to Nielsen//NetRatings, 53.6% of searches queried in the month of August of 2007 where made through Google. This would put Google far ahead of Yahoo and MSN who held just 19.9 and 12.9 respectively.
If I was to pick one search engine to hone in on for my SEO efforts, it would make the most sense to optimize pages for the market leader Google.
Source: August 2007 Search Share for Top 10 Search Engines from Nielsen//NetRatings October 26, 2007.
AA : Should a Realtor exchange links with other Realtors? If so, why?
Chris: Greg Boser responded to this very question in his interview with Advanced Access and as he explained; “to a search engine, a Realtor® in California linking to another Realtor in Maine is not in the interest of the consumer … in most cases the link pages are not indexed in Google, or have gone supplemental.” Google has made it clear that anything done to trick their algorithm is against their quality guidelines and may result in the offending sites getting banned from the indexes.
AA : Are you familiar with Pay Per Click? If so, please explain the purpose of these services and where they can be found?
Chris: Pay-per-click (PPC) is an advertising model where you can pay for hyperlinks to be displayed near the organic search results with the hopes of gaining more viewership. Google’s model is called Adwords and their PPC listings can been seen above and to the right of the organic results.
In the past I have used Google’s Adwords as a tool to measure the effectiveness of my landing pages and keywords. However, when a client cannot wait for SEO to be effective, a strong Search Engine Marketing (SEM) plan that consists of PPC advertising can be very successful in bringing in new viewers to a site almost instantaneously. In addition with the tools found in Google’s Adwords, PPC can also assist you in measureing your return on investment (ROI).
AA : Can Pay Per Click help to obtain organic rankings?
Chris: Google has done a great job at making it clear to viewers where PPC ends and the organic results start. The amount you spend in Adwords will not have any bearing on your organic search results. Sadly this is not true with all search engines. Yahoo has received a lot of criticism with their paid inclusion programs that allows site owners to pay for guaranteed inclusion and more frequent revisits.
The biggest controversy towards Yahoo’s paid inclusion program stems from the fact that these paid inclusions will have no distinguishing marks to alert viewers which listings were paid to be included in Yahoo’s index.
AA : What is a bounce rate?
Chris: When a visitor finds your site but then leaves, we call this a bounce. By measuring the bounce rate of a particular page we can see if that page is interesting to viewers. If you find a page with a high bounce rate I would suggest making revisions to the content and meta tags because your viewers my be finding the page unrelated to their search queury.
AA : How can you tell if a page is indexed in Google or not?
Chris: One of the easiest ways to see if a page has been index by Google is to use the “site:” operator in your search query. An example would be searching “site: domain.com” without quotes. Alternatively, you could copy & paste a sentence (within quotes) from the page’s content, Google will then do an exact phrase search and display any known matches in the SERPs.
AA : Does having a framed website hurt your ability to rank well in the search engines?
Chris: Frames should be avoided when possible, but if one must use frames you should use the <noframes> command and copy the content of the page so viewers with older browsers can still see the main content. Web crawlers will also be able to scan the content within the “noframes” tag and allow for better indexing.
When using a framed site it’s also important to make a clean and well organized site map. You should then insure that every page has a link to the site map so the web crawlers can more effectively scan and index the pages on your site.
AA : Does Advanced Access currently have a penalty against the sites on their network with Yahoo?
Chris: No, the sites are showing no signs of being penalized simply for being an Advanced Access product. Yahoo does appear to pay more attention to a page’s content in it’s algorithmic rank factoring, but the controversial paid link inclusions are what is most likely giving the perception of a lower page rank.
AA : If you were given a client who works out of the Trump Tower in New York, what do you think the best title would be for their website?
Chris: I would go with TrumpTowersNYC.com for the domain name. This allows the domain to appear bold when the words Trump Towers or Trump and NYC are searched in Google. While this may not increase the site’s overall page rank, by having the domain bold you increase it’s visibility and click through rate.
For creating a good title tag I like to compare my keywords to the amount of competing sites appear in the SERPs. I generally settle on two to four keywords and try to place them in the beginning of the title tag. One possible title tag might look like, “Trump Tower International NYC Hotel – TrumpTowersNYC.com” or “Trump International Hotel & Tower – New York – Penthouse Real Estate”
AA: With your keyword research , please construct a meta description below.
Chris: Google’s displays up to 160 characters in their description, while Yahoo is around 165. The best description would be informative, keyword rich, and make as much use of the 160 character limit as possible. My description would look something like:
“Luxurious New York Real Estate for sale at Trump International Hotel and Tower. Apartments & condos available. Trump Tower located at 725 Fifth Ave, Manhattan, NY.”
AA : You are assigned a TypeWriter for a client and they want a page about Jerome, Idaho. They have given you no other information except to say that they want the page to be about the history and current activities in the city of Jerome. Please draft 2-3 paragraphs of content for this client, keeping in mind the information they requested to see:
See TypeWriter Assignment Post
http://cdaniele.wordpress.com/2007/12/05/typewriter-assignment/
