Ken Shafer's Blog

We’ve all been there. You have this great piece of new content; a fresh article or updated information about a property or model type and you don’t want to wait for the search engines to take their sweet time finding it and getting it indexed.  Lucky for us, Google has recently provided a couple of options for getting that content discovered a little quicker.  You need a couple of things set up in order to take advantage of them.

The Essentials

Google’s Webmaster Tools provide you with detailed reports about your website’s visibility on Google. Simply, visit Google Webmaster Tools and follow the instructions to get it up and running.

If you haven’t already heard about this site, let me introduce you to Quora. What’s it all about? Well, I’ll let their “about us” page do the talking:

“…One way you can think of it is as a cache for the research that people do looking things up on the web and asking other people. Eventually, when you see a link to a question page on Quora, your feeling should be: “Oh, great! That’s going to have all the information I want about that.” It’s also a place where new stuff–that no one has written about yet–can get pulled onto the web.”

I have found this site absolutely addictive and spend a lot of my free time answering questions about SEO. But, it’s not all about technical stuff here. Take a look at a sample of just some of the multifamily-related topics I found:

So you’re considering adding a blog to your website. That’s great! But hold on a second. Where you put that blog can have an impact on search engines and how they view all that great, new content you’re providing them. When you or your developers are building the blog, more often than not, this question comes up:

“Should we put the blog on www.companyname.com/blog or blog.companyname.com?”

Putting the blog at “companyname.com/blog” would be classified as using the “subdirectory” and the “blog.companyname.com” format would be “using a sub-domain.” When you replace the “www” in your site with something else, you’re adding a sub-domain.

Everyone’s heard of finding a keyword and trying to rank for it. Next thing someone does is put that keyword in their Title Tag, Description Tag and throughout the copy someplace like their homepage. As far as on-page keyword optimization, what else can you do? Turns out, there’s more you can do on the page to let the search engines know that your page is about a specific keyword or phrase. 

Allow me introduce you to latent semantics. Latent semantics is just the technical term for using surrounding words to gain or provide meaning and context. Placing relevant and related words and phrases in close proximity to the keyword you are targeting can actually be a stronger signal to search engines than simply repeating the targeted keyword over and over again. Let’s take a look at an example of how to research and implement latent semantics. 

I don’t know if you’ve heard of “search hacks” but they can come in handy. Let me show you one that helps us do a little research. The “tilde(~) search” in Google will highlight words the search engine believes are related to the word you’re searching. Let’s try searching “~apartments.” See how some words throughout the page are displayed in bold type? Google is telling us which words it believes are related to the word “apartments.” That’s a pretty powerful sneak-peek into the brains of a search engine. For example (and let’s exclude the obvious “apartments” and “apartment”)… 

Unless you’ve been living in a non-WiFi-enabled cave for the past few weeks you have heard about Google Instant, the latest “innovation” from Google. (I say “innovation” because Yahoo actually tried to do this in 2005 but couldn’t pull the trigger on their main site).

I just wanted to scratch the surface of what Google Instant is and how it could impact how you choose what keywords to use  for your site.

Essentially, Google Instant renders search results as you type, attempting to predict what it believes you are looking for. The common consensus is that rankings have not changed as a result of the Google Instant. It’s more to do with how the results are displayed. Google Suggest was the precursor for Instant and was the part responsible for that drop-down of suggested phrases that would appear as you typed. It seems like Instant now acts as the visualization of what results are sitting behind each suggestion and that the rankings for that suggestion have not changed.

If you’ve been following search engine optimization at all in the past year, you’ll have undoubtedly heard the term “real-time search.” One aspect of real-time search refers to search engines using the social media pipeline, including channels like Facebook and Twitter, to provide up-to-the-minute results. There is a growing contingent of bloggers out there who believe that real-time is the “next big thing” for SEO. I decided to run a few experiments to help illustrate how this all works.

So how DOES it work? If we take an extremely newsworthy topic that is “trending” right now, you might see Google employing real-time results right there on the first page. Below, I’ve performed a search for “Prop 8.” Google has taken a portion of its search engine results page (SERP) and inserted a constantly updating box displaying the latest blog posts and tweets.

We’re all busy people and time is short, right? We need to be out there filling vacancies, so time to spend on the website and SEO is limited. Let’s see if we can help you by debunking a few myths that could be eating up valuable time and resources. 

Myth 1: Keywords in your Description Tag can affect your rankings 

They don’t. Search engines stopped placing any importance on the content of these tags years ago. It’s just too easy to manipulate them for the engines to really care what they say.

A web page’s Title Tag can be an important signal, telling search engines what a page is all about. It’s one of the most powerful on-page SEO elements you have at your disposal. Also, it’s one of the first things people will see about your site when it appears on a search engine results page (SERP). If you’re unfamiliar with the Title Tag, you can see it in a couple of places.

In our website’s code it looks like this:

 ...title>Apartments.com | Find Apartments for Rent, Houses, Condos and Townhomes | Rental Listings </title...

On January 22nd, Google announced the inclusion of event-related information in their Rich Snippets. The protocol will be based off the hCalendar microformat and will look like this:

Now, let’s consider another post that covers Rich Snippets as well as something called “Answer Highlighting” which looks like this: