Bing now powers Yahoo’s search…for real.

Once the Bing / Yahoo deal was announced in Joly 2009, the questions were immediately raised…”When would Bing finally start powering Yahoo’s search?” and “What tools of Yahoo’s (such as Yahoo site explorer,etc.) would be still available” or would they scrap them.

Finally, after much research (and messing around) by Bing and Yahoo… these questions have been put to rest…for the most part. (Hat tip to Read Write Web for their article.) Take a moment to read their article.

So we now know that BingHoo has (in effect) a 28% market share of search. And we know that as of today that became unified with Bing powering it. Great. This actually makes it easier to optimize because we are now shooting at two targets rather than three.

We also know that Yahoo Site Explorer will stick around. Splendid. Saves many of us quite a bit of script writing and etc. Good on them.

The real questions for our clients have been…how do we take advantage of this? How can we build our web presence in a way that maximized traffic from BOTH?

Bing seems to reward keyword rich domain names, along with more of the old school on page stuff. (Title tags, etc). That said, Google as well has bent their algorithm in that direction and we are seeing many of the old keyword rich (err…stuffed) domain names do well with them.

(a little tidbit) In Google, my-keyword-stuffed-domain.com does not appear to do near as well as mykeywordstuffeddomain.com in our testing..I am just sayin…

Also Google still seems to have a VASTLY superior methodology for determining the authority of inbound links and to have a far more well tuned approach towards evaluating the authority that comes from them. While that is no surprise, given that was / is what Google was founded on…BingHoo has been surprisingly slow in improving that side of their search engine.

We are preparing some new ideas and techniques for our clients and will be sending them out shortly. In a world of change,the one thing certain is that each change brings opportunity to grow business, to add revenue and to build a more dominant web presence.

Why I am stoked to go to Nanaimo…

It is now less than a month away…and I am ready to go.

The Real Estate Webmasters Summit is my favorite event of the year. Have I been to PubCon? Yes. Search engine conferences. Yep. They are all good and I learn stuff and rub shoulders with people and get to compare notes and network. All of that is worthwhile.

But for my time, the best conference is the one where literally ALL of the folks that are there are rabidly focused on one thing. Getting their sites to the top PROFITABLY. These are a small group of REALTORS who want nothing but the best. This is my third year being there and getting a chance to spend a couple of days with them.

This year holds special significance for me since today is the one year anniversary of a serious surgery followed by what has been a long recovery. I am fine and back to doing what I love with a 100% clean bill of health, but going back to visit Morgan and the REW crew has been a pretty good carrot during the process.

This year is ALSO cool in the sense that I will be bringing my son Craig with me. He is the second oldest of my four kids and he worked on several projects with me with the reward being a trip to Nanaimo BC.

One final thing that excites me about the REW Summit this year is that there will be a lot of new faces there. These are people who are ready to make an impact in the real estate marketplace by building and owning their real estate online marketing assets. They as a rule are entrepreneurial, friendly, kind and hard working.

I for one, cannot think of a better place to spend a couple of days…Morgan, get ready my friend. I am bringing my “A” game . Thanks again for the invitation.

A backlog of information and posts…

I have been literally crushed with the amount of work going on lately.

More stuff has been going on around here than ever before and due to that and my participation in a contest to help a REALTOR started by my friends at Real Estate Webmasters, there are a number of posts that are going to be posted in the coming days.

Some are current observations that I wanted to post but did not have time. Some are as well the results of testing that we have been doing here at EoS that simply finally got finished. So without further ado, stay tuned to the coming posts and we should have some fun….

Syndication – How real estate is different.

I was having a conversation with a Real Estate agent who asked why I have steadfastly been against the idea of syndication , until there was no other choice in the real estate industry (which is where our brokerage is at currently). This same person was quizzing me as to why I do NOT recommend writing “FRESH” content every day 643,466 times a day on my blog.

I thought for a long time about how to explain this and since I did a pretty crappy job of convincing them in our conversation…let me try again here.

It’s ALL about Quality vs Quantity.

Syndication in MOST media is a good thing…even a GREAT thing. Why? Because a “syndicated” talk show host or a “syndicated” columnist gets their name in front of EVERY Tom, Dick and Harry in more cities each time they are syndicated. Each additional radio station adds MORE exposure and takes away a potential competitor.

Unlike a radio talk show host (who does not OWN a radio station in every town – thus each new town = a bigger microphone), websites are global in nature and one website CAN be the dominant voice for real estate in your city worldwide.

Does Syndicating Real Estate listings do that? No. HECK No, 1000 times NO. Why? Because you are not syndicating yourself. You are syndicating the listing. In essence you are handing what once was YOUR bait to other fishermen and having them fish in what used to be your pond. Does that sound like BUILDING your marketing capabilities? Didn’t think so.

All you are doing is building the competition’s ability to compete with you.

The argument from some is that syndication “differentiates” you from the competition. Once everyone syndicates, there is ZERO differentiation and the only one who wins are other fishermen who you gave the bait to and invited them to fish in YOUR fishing hole.

Need a graphic to explain this? It looks like this:

Graphic Credit

The bottom line is that we are now at a point where EVERYONE is syndicating. Noone is getting differentiation and (at least in Louisville, although not true in some other cities) the syndicators are not generating much buyer traffic at all and their main concern is how much of the REALTOR advertising dollar they are receiving.

A final thought. Zillow traffic: 10 million visitors per month Ummm..OK… Accepting that at face value 10 million visitors / 5 million listings = 2 visitors PER MONTH PER LISTING on average – and you have to take out the number of visitors that visit their site looking for Joe Blow Celebrity’s new home for sale AND you also need to subtract a large percentage for persons looking for home values, as well as sellers looking at their own listing… – so its not even generating near that much on average.

I can think of many other advertising venues that generate greater exposure and have a significantly better long term ROI (because NOTHING is free forever ).

So are we syndicating? Yes. Competitively we now must (and we will.) Do I think it is good for the industry. No. Never have.

Carolyn Capalbo – why online reputation management matters

Why does online reputation management matter? And why do I urge people to protect their online reputation? Well, if you Google Eric Blackwell, you will see this blog, and several others that I do. And you will see another Eric Blackwell who is a gospel music singer.

I am happy to share the stage with him!

There’s also another more unfortunate Eric Blackwell who died a few years back and a tribute page to him is on the first page as well

I am happy to share the stage with him, too!

But what if you are:

Carolyn Capalbo

Carolyn (the one I am referring to), is a hard working REALTOR in Northern Va. Carolyn invests in a web presence that reflects her desire to serve her customers by providing them the best search for their homes. I respect any person who cares enough about their business to invest in themselves and their business to do it right. No shortcuts. No gimmicks. Just great service.

If you have read Carolyn’s recent account: “How many Carolyn Capalbo’s are there anyway?” of what it is like to have your good name taken from you, it is a textbook study in why reputation management is CRUCIAL.

She did nothing wrong and yet because there is another person with her name who is the mother of someone infamous, her business has been damaged.

Some people look at this as Google’s fault. I do not. Google and the other search engines MUST algorithmically determine who is the most relevant site for a given search.

Notoriety often brings more searches and relevance than a small business person, working hard and doing their job everyday. SERIOUSLY. Let me repeat that. Notoriety often brings more searches and relevance than a small business person, working hard and doing their job everyday.

So how do you combat that?

You make friends and have your friends write about you. The community at Real Estate Webmasters started an Online Reputation Management Contest to incentivize REALTORS to help her out. Including some bodacious prizes! And folks have responded.

Will it work? I think so.

But as EricOnSearch, I want to go a step further. It is time to

Help Carolyn Capalbo

I want to fill the first three pages of the search engines with all of the contestants and I want to reward ALL of those who pitch in to assist Carolyn in a significant way.

Anyone who finishes on the Top 3 pages of Google at the end of the contest wins an hour of consulting with me. That’s potentially $3,000 worth of my time. (well…$2,900…you KNOW I am gonna be up there…grin) While it is nowhere near the sweet package that Morgan has put together, I hope it helps.

UPDATE:

It is great. People Are Joining the Our Effort to Help Carolyn reclaim her name. They are:

The not so real Carolyn Capalbo Website.

We will update this list as more people join in.

UPDATE #2:

Contests are a GREAT way to play around a little with onpage optimization. When I first started the contest, I “over-optimized” my post. It was horrible for the reader and was basically mostly formatted for the search engines.

I now have taken the time to write a proper post. Titled it correctly and will promote it effectively…and we will see how I do.

WordPress Themes matter for being Search Engine Friendly…just like any other CMS

I continue to get asked a pretty interesting question by folks who are looking to make sure that their WordPress blogs /sites are search angine friendly. While they get to the point from many different directions, the final destination is always the same.

Does your choice of themes MATTER?? or do the search engines just inherently LOVE WordPress?

The answer is simple. Themes matter. Seriously.

Let’s think about it for a second…WordPress is a great CMS (content management system). It is based on blogging and now has expanded to allow MANY other niceties and conveniences that come with having a HUGE developer base. The problem is that with the flexibility of the WordPress framework that allows for developers to use hooks and other tools to have great latitude in design, comes the flexibility for someone (a theme developer) to develop code heavy, SEO unfriendly navigation, less than optimal site structures, and in general, take all of the inherent WordPress goodness away…and leave something that we refer to as a search engine turd in its wake.

How can you keep it clean? Over the next few days, I will be posting some tips on how to construct WordPress blogs and sites that are Arachno-centric (grin). Here’s a quick teaser. The next post will involve the structure of the index page. You can expect it within a day or two.

Before you read it, here is some homework…go take a look at MOST WordPress blogs and see how they are currently structured. Evaluate how they do in the search engines. Google their posts. Google the titles of their pages. And Google for the keywords that are in their title tags…

How are they doing?

OK, now take a look at my next post once I post it…(grin)

Speed now a factor in search results? Well…kinda

With Matt Cutts’ announcement that the speed your website loads at is a factor (albeit a small one) in ranking on Google, my guess is that we are going to see a lot of people doing the right thing for the wrong reason. What am i talking about?

Why SHOULD you want your pages to load fast? Well, because that is a HUGE factor in keeping readers and more importantly keeping them happy. Period. Point. End of Story. This is WAY less ambiguous than the question of why should you write every page about 1 subject and make it clear what it is about. (Write for the reader and NOT for the Search Engines…). This is common sense.

Even at that, Google gave us clear signals that this was coming.

That all said, some people will now have a renewed focus on speed for whatever reason. They want to know…how does this impact me. While it is too new to provide a definitive answer for sure outside of conjecture based on statements from Google (and that ain’t my style), here are my empirical observations to date and I will be adding more as I go along.

Google APPEARS to be using this as a ranking factor mostly on the slowest of sites, and far less as a factor among sites with reasonable load times. So the thing to do is to look at your load times in Google Webmaster Tools under “Performance”, see how your major pages are doing and work on the slow ones to speed them up. Google also provides links to other useful speed tests.

In WordPress, this may mean caching plug-ins, less images on a given page, lighter images all around, etc, etc…you may even opt for better hosting, but something to keep in mind is this. Better hosting is usually LESS of a factor in speed than is poor construction of the theme / site.

I will be detailing some how to’s in the near future so that you can pick up the pace of page loading.

HomeGain Nation 2010 – San Francisco

Some days it is just good to be me. (grin)

These are days you are grateful for. The kind when everything goes right and life is good. I just landed in San Francisco after a great flight in from Cincinnatti. The weather when I left home? 30′s and cold. The weather for HomeGain Nation 2010? Perfect.

Very nice ride in on the plane. Hooked up to the in flight internet and connected with a few clients while I was in the air. i sent out 5 leads from our website in three hours that we SOLID people looking to see homes plus 15 others that we just looking. All during the flight.

HomeGain put the Live Nation event up at the Fairmont (top of Knob Hill in San Francisco) again this year. It is classy and tonight only gets better. I get to hang out with people that I really like and have not seen in quite a while.

Louis Cammarrasono – from HomeGain
Russell Shaw – someone who I aspire to be like. Simple as that.
Brian Brady – from the Bloodhound Blog (looking forward to chatting with him big time.)
Eric Bramlett – who will be speaking with me.
Jay Thompson…
The list is long and I don’t want to offend any others by not mentioning them. (Just trust me that there are dozens more to add to the list).

The HomeGain staff takes care of everything and makes is EASY for someone to work with them.

Oh, yeah… And the University of Louisville just beat UCONN. Last second shot by Edgar Sosa.

Good grief, does it get any better? For me these types of events (where I can pick the brains of the experts and trade ideas with valued colleagues) are an upper. They are what I need to clear the fog and get to the business of my business.

I guess I just want to say that I am grateful to get to be me. Today it is good to be me. Very good. I have learned to appreciate these days and savor them for what they are. And to say thanks, as well.

If you are at HomeGain Nation 2010, ping me.

Mark Jaquith gets it…and SEO’s should too.

With this post, I could really get into the technical nitty gritty of “how” some people do their SEO. I could get into link injection, spinning content with Markov generators, sneaking code (read: links ) into every possible crevice of someone else’s WordPress site through surreptitious means. But I won’t.

Doing these things is not right. Period.

I read this morning Mark Jaquith’s post about what is and is not acceptable in the way of WordPress plugins staying in the directory. I could not agree more. Somebody that does SEO agrees with that? ABSO-doggone-lutely. Every word. Especially the part about credit links being by default turned off.

HERE’S WHY:

In 2007 I wrote a post about online communities needing to have clear rules and lots of police. WordPress is a community not AT ALL unlike the real estate communities that I mentioned. Anytime you facilitate letting people write on your site OR you facilitate (via plugins) the ability for people to (possibly) write on other people’s sites as well, clear rules and good enforcement are CRUCIAL.

I applaud Mark for clearly stating what the rules of the road are. I agree with them. Even if I did not agree with them, they are his rules because they are WordPress’s road, and WordPress is apparently taking these steps to manage the rules of participation in their community, the same way that the folks at Real Estate Webmasters take seriously the conditions of when and how they will let people write on their site. Clear rules build communities. I said it in 2007 and I still believe it today.

BUT I AGREE w/ Mark FULLY ANYWAY. The entire value of links is the extent to which they are an accurate measurement of a site’s true authority on a given subject. That is why search engines use it as a factor. That is why the BEST search engine optimization efforts are long term TRUE AUTHORITY building efforts and not the trickery.

This means if you want to optimize really effectively, form long lasting and solid relationships with lots of reputable people in an industry. Make sure that the search engines can SEE the relationships you have formed, and you will over time build a SOLID online presence that is truly an asset.

This does not happen by surreptitiously playing “hide the link” sausage with as many other folks as you can. Seriously.

WordPress has developed into a powerhouse blogging platform / website platform / CMS. Those who develop plugins can either choose to develop them for the community (or not). If they are developed under GPLv2, then (in my opinion) they should not turn links on by default.

There are so many ways for folks to build true authority out there, why resort to less than “Do unto others” level of business? I will admit that I have not ALWAYS done everything that I would put into that category, but I can tell you without hesitation, that is my goal and it has been my goal for quite some time.

Good works. Seriously. It does.

For those who disagree with my take on this, that is fine. Either way, clarity as to the rules of the road is commendable. Kudos Mark for taking this one on head on.

What does Eric read?… more like “Who do I learn from?”

I had a client ask me the other day a pretty insightful question…what do you read? Actually it is more like who do I learn from. I read this people, follow what they do and learn from their efforts. Well, since my business / professional life revolve around a WIDE variety of things I kind of have to break them down into categories, but here goes:

Internet Business Planning:

GrowMap – Gail Gardner is amazing. If you have not read this blog, you should. What I am learning from her is about working sites with a purpose to make money. (Thought I had that down to a science already, but part of that science is continuing to learn!) She is part of running the following successful sites: 1)  golf store 2) a  personalized gifts blog 3) an online  wedding store 4)  a blog about  horses and 5) a  healthy living site. Why am I sending you to them? Go visit them and you will see that they are GROWING assets. That’s what you want in someone who does internet business planning…someone who can GROW stuff! So get growing!

JR - Good little internet marketing nuggets on this blog. Don’t forget to scroll to the bottom and look up the links to her classic posts.

WordPress Development:

As I start my new business over at Southern Indiana Web Works.com, I am looking for the BEST and most influential developers in the WordPress community and to see what they are doing. The Web Works is ALL about business websites using the WordPress platform – -so I have been spending a lot of time in this sector.

Kristi Hines aka Kikolani. You may think I would read her for  article writing and  Social Media posts. But the real reason to keep Kikolani on the radar screen is that she is a super WordPress designer. Seriously. Check out some of her stuff.

Brian Gardner of StudioPress. Enough said. I watch what he does. Look out kids, he is getting ready to unleash more in 2010.

Derek Semmler: Not as much that I learn from the blog but for WordPress development, Derek rocks. He is a nice guy with a big heart.

Dizzain – These folks do custom designed WordPress themes. Interesting. This is more what I am heading towards…doing full custom WP themes on local Southern Indiana sites that want a specific look and feel.

Real Estate Websites:

The list here would be excruciatingly long to put in here.  Morgan, over at Real Estate Webmasters tops the list.  Also if you look down, you will see the real estate folks on my blogroll. They are all there for a reason. I know them. I trust them  I contribute to their projects. They are friends.  Many of us got together recently in Louisville. It was a blast, guys and I think we all came away better for it!

One more here:

Dave Smith’s Real Estate Blog Lab – Quite possibly the nicest and most decent human I have met to date and a fan of In-N-Out Burgers. That is a lethal combination in my world…grin. And his blog? if you are doing WP and Real Estate, you need to read it.

Search Engine Optimization:

I read MANY SEO blogs (I mean I AM EricOnSearch, right? )…but only a couple stick out:

Rand Fishkin’s SEOmoz – I do not agree with 100% of his stuff (but I do with quite a bit of it). What I really enjoy is whiteboard Friday.

Aaron Wall’s SEOBook – Nice guy.  Good information.

and my favorite read:

Huomah – This guy actually thinks like I do, test things and doesn’t just parrot others. Worth reading.

another addictive read:

Marty Weintraub and his  Search Engine Marketing blog. Good stuff.

Technology

Louis Gray, and his  futurist tech blog – this is my favorite read for trends and etc in Technology.

TechCrunch – it is a blog folks love to hate, but it is one I get something out of regularly.

Social Media

Adam Singer and his  Social Media Marketing blog. Read it.

Marketing

Murray Newlands provides Blog Consulting Services and Word of Mouth Marketing consulting. Basically, the guy gets it, and I think he is one of the guys to watch / learn from.

Miscellaneous Successful Stuff that I am interested in:

You asked for what I was reading so in the interest of full disclosure, here are some miscellaneous stuff that I have been checking out as well:

Barbara Swafford and her dofollow blog registry section on her site. Very similar to Eric Bramlett’s list of do follow real estate blogs. Both provide great resources for do follow bloggers.

Seth Godin. Seriously, I think he is the best known online marketing voice out there, but I have been reading his stuff for years. I do not always agree with it, but it is ALWAYS worth reading.  The main reason I am reading him is that I am finishing up a book on what it is like to be a Dad of children with autism. There is no better bookseller out there right now that Seth. Sometimes it is better to watch what they do rather than read what they say. In his case, do both.

Connie Foggles and her  Product Review blog where she writes about all sorts of products. She is another one that I am watching to see WHAT she does as much as simply reading what she writes! (Hint: Watching what people do is HUGE to finding good strategies online.)

I bumped this stuff recently when researching an article I was writing: Bill Sutton’s Good Millwork, a Florida Millwork company that does architectural moldings and exterior shutters.  Very helpful. Those who know me at all know that folks who are helpful to me get some links, traffic and notoriety wherever I can. To my new small business friend from Florida. here you go!

OK…there. I read a ton of other stuff as well, but those are currently the most influential on my list or those who consume my time due to things I am working on.

Enjoy!

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