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 the Yahoo directory is obvious. $300 is somewhat expensive - one of the highest review fees out there and it’s annual too. Many webmasters measure the benefit of a directory by direct traffic - it’s farily well-known that the SEO aspect of many of them have been reduced over the years. However, there are a few that still generate some benefit - including the Yahoo Directory. However, when it comes down to it, is the benefit worth the cost?

For now, I am fairly content to continue paying the fee. I justify it by thinking of how much I pay every time I send out a mailing - $299 per year is a drop in the bucket compared to some of the costs of print advertising. In the future, I might review this decision and if there are better options out there, I may choose to discontinue my membership - only time will tell.

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 a link to your site by placing it into the “context” of the article. This is often seen as a higher value way of building a link than other forms such as directory submissions or text links.

There are a couple drawbacks to link building through articles. First, due to the fact that you generally are going to be submitting the same article to hundreds of sites, it will be duplicated hundreds of times all over the internet. This is sure to present some duplicate content issues with the search engines and you might find diminishing returns as the numbers grow. Second, writing an article takes time. Some have gone the route of hiring professional writers to generate topical articles for link building.

One of the final obstacles with articles is the submission process. Most article sites that accept free submissions require some type of registration. It begs the need of a program to help you coordinate all of the submissions you’ll be doing. I find Article Submitter Pro to be a great option for this - easy to use although not as fully-featured as I’d like at times. Plus there are over 1,000 article sites pre-loaded with the software.

Despite a few drawbacks, article writing still continues to be a popular way of adding relevant website links. Of course, serious website owners will seek a variety of linking options, but articles should make up a decent segment of your efforts.

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 get crawled more often. Third, the one way link always helps. And finally, because there are lots of options out there for both free and paid submits.

I do understand that directories are not considered as authoratative as websites in your niche with the same them. It’s hard to relate a general web directory with a subject such as Real Estate when there is probably only a single category and perhaps a handful of subcategories related to the subject. Also, many of the free-submit directories tend to go defunct or never rise above the crowd, meaning that your listing will probably never count for much.

However, there are several large directories that are useful - the Yahoo directory for one. This authoratative directory is bound to help drive traffic to your site and also lends weight to your page as being an authority site. Some other directories have gained good traffic and are very worth it to submit to.

Now that reciprocal linking is greatly de-valued, one way links are very important for building the value of your website. Directories often represent one of the best ways you can capitalize on one way links. Plus, many of these directories being free to submit to, you might get on one in the early free stages and wind up with a solid backlink in a year or so. Can’t beat the price of that!

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 is the king of the hill right now - driving much more traffic than Yahoor or MSN. It’s also no secret that links play a big part in Google rankings.

Essentially when a website links to yours, it casts a “vote” for your website. The more votes, the more popular your website is seen. Now, this is a greatly simplified view as Google supposedly uses over 50 different calculations to rank your site, but linking is a big part of it.

The goal in linking is to obtain a solid 1-way link from a website that has some authority in your subject to your site. Reciprocal linking (I.E. - putting a link to a site on your page in return for a link to your page from theirs) is now considered a redundant form of linking because search engines have been devaluing those links. So, since obtaining one-way links is considered much more valuable in terms of search engine rankings, it’s worth a look at some of the ways you can obtain one way links to your site.

There are several well-known ways of getting one way links to your site:

• submit your site to paid or free directories
• write articles about your subject and release them to various article sites
• write press releases about your business and release them to various PR sites
• attract natural links through “link bait” or other tactics
• sponsor wordpress or link directory themes
• pay for links

Some of these are more valuable than others and over the next few posts, I’m going to be talking about each of these methods - how they’re done and how you can start doing them.

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 need a real estate website that a user is going to be able to easily navigate, find what they’re looking for and, ultimately, contact you. Remember, a website’s main function for you, the agent, is a lead generator. If users are so confused with your entry page that they don’t click through, you won’t get any leads. We’re talking about conversion here - how well your website converts visitors into leads. Often, when we optimize for SEO, we ignore content, but that can really hurt in the conversion department if the public sees your site as convoluted or childish.

However, if you have the best website in the world and noone knows it’s there, how will you even be able to convert visitors to leads because no one is visiting? You need to play the SEO game at some level but that often means sacrificing content. But is there a happy medium? I believe there is to a certain extent.

The key is to narrow your scope. If you’re talking about Aurora Real Estate, your website should mostly be about Aurora Real Estate - adding other communities to the picture means you have to *say* something about those communities, thus dilluting your scope. Why is a narrow scope so important? Well, in the SEO world, keywords are of ultimate importance. It’s about how often you mention a few key words and how they are displayed. The key to optimizing naturally is to dedicate your entire website to a particular word or two. That way, your text should naturally revolve around those particular subjects. And, since you aren’t dilluting the theme with extra text not related to those keywords, it should be easy to stick to the main point and not drift.

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 browsers that may not be able to property display IFRAMES. In many cases, webmasters place something like, “If you’re seeing this your browser is not compatible with IFRAMES”. For browsers that can display IFRAMES correctly, that text is never seen, however, to a search engine, that text forms a visible part of your page.

If you are using IFRAMES, make sure you check your alt text. If it’s close to the top of the page, search engines might actually be reading that text as part of your page description. Also, if you use IFRAMES in different pages throughout your site, as I do for my seperate regional real estate sites like Geneva real estate or Batavia real estate make sure to vary the alt text from page to page to avoid problems with possible duplicate content.

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, searching for Aurora Real Estate in Google brings up a site with a PR of 0 as the #4 organic result. Granted, this is from a site with high traffic rank, and probably high trust rank (two statistics that I’ll probably discuss later), but still….

 The Google algorithm remains a mystery for most of us and the way Page Rank fits into the SERPs is even more unknown. However, many webmasters still see page rank as a valuable tool. Page rank is a desierable factor when requesing reciprocal link exchanges - many sites want a certain page rank in order to consider a trade. While it’s possible for a large corporate website to get a high ranking based upon traffic and trust and zero page rank, it’s fair to estimate that it’s going to be important for the little guys - me and you - to get a fair page rank in order to compete. If the Google algorithm is a combination of factors, having a low page rank might be fine if you’re in the top 1,000 sites for traffic, but if you’re not, you need a combination of factors to help bring your site to the top of the SERPs.

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 powers many secondary search engines. My main concern is the plethora of new entry directories with absolutely no page rank - most pages sit un-indexed and your listing will likely never be seen by anyone, especially not the search engines. There is actually a directory code that you can use to easily build your own directory attached to your own web site. In this situation - as more and more useless directories pop up, the value of actually being in a directory diminishes. If you are going to list your site in a directory - especially if you are paying for the listing - carefully consider the value that particular directory will add to your listing before you click.

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 lists of websites. However, there are now so many directories out there that directories have now become the new links pages. Some of these directories charge a fee for inclusion. For example: Metrobix, InYahoo, InGoogle, Geodale, Surfbot, Bivlo, Botseeker, Indextogo, Intoguide, Junglesnoop, Kazlist, Linkrelief, Surfcomet, Trafficlink and Ylink.

Early in my website development when I was struggling to get pages indexed, I paid for inclusion in these and other directories. But, how useful is that inclusion. Take the above examples - most have no pagerank, most are probably not even indexed in the major search engines. So why would you pay to be included in a directory that no search engine knows about?

I’m not saying that directories are useless. There are many out there that will do a webmaster a lot of good - the Yahoo Directory for instance. Another is the Open Directory Project. Before you pay for submission in these or other directories, make sure the directory is worth it. How can you tell? Well, hopefully the directory itself has some sort of page rank. Your link should also be on a page written in HTML - not java code. If you have doubts - choose “View - Source” and see if you can find your link as text within the code. Finally, make sure your directory entry can be found by the search engines. Hopefully the directory is indexed already. If not, you might want to re-think paying much for inclusion.

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 in to interact with other real estate professionals around the country.

Perhaps one of the most popular aspects of Active Rain is that members are ranked based upon a point system. Members gain additional points for interacting with community members - posting blogs, commenting on blogs, participating in forums and also participating in Localism.com - a website focused on local real estate niches. If you gain enough points, you can become a featured agent in your city, county, state or even the country.

Blogs are especially popular on Active Rain - you can find information on a variety of subjects related to your business or the real estate community. If you’ve never done your own blog, the interface is easy to use and you are also provided a free blog as part of your membership. If you’re looking for a great way to interact with your fellow real estate professionals, check out Active Rain - I’ll see you there.