Lake Powell Real Estate Blog Help

Submitted by Megan McGonigal on April 1, 2008 - 10:59am.

Hi Heather,
I just checked out your blog. Lucky you to live in such a goregeous place. We were there in September for the first time and LOVED it. It was my favorite part of the trip. One suggestion for your blog. I tried to leave you a comment on your blog and it said I had to be logged in? I could not figure out how to log in although I only quickly glanced the page looking for a log in button. The one at the bottom asks you to log into your word press account. You may want to change that so anyone can comment, but set it up so you moderate the comments before they are posted. May get you more comments because I would imagine some people will not want to have to log in to comment or spend the time figuring out how to do this. Very nice and professional blog though.
As for the photos I agree Lake Powell is an awesome place I would want to show as many pictures as possible. I would do both sprinkle them through your posts and have a photo section because the scenery is so amazing.

If you get a chance check out mine below and tell me what you think. It is new. I started it a little over a month ago so it is still a work in progress. I have been thinking about changing my template to something similar to yours. A white background w/ a scenic picture of Cecil County, MD at the top. I have to figure out how to do this first. lol.

Megan McGonigal
RE/MAX Integrity
My blog : http://cecilcountyconnection.com/blog.cecilcountyconnection/

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Submitted by Langrealtor on April 1, 2008 - 12:23pm.

The reason for the log in was that I was getting alot of spamming from sites that were not connected to real estate, but sellng certain types of drugs. I was moderating 5-10 comments a day. Wordpress has developed a new program that is supposed to recognize this and cut down on the spamming.
I find your blog very eye catching the way it is. Actually after looking at yours, I realize that mine needs a lot of work.
Regards,
larry
http://www.southfloridarentals-homesales.com/blog1.html

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Submitted by Heather Rankin on April 1, 2008 - 5:11pm.

Megan - I am just getting the hang of this and apparently responded to you in a e-mail!

Larry - so far, I've not had enough traffic to get a lot of spam - but we shall see.
Thank you so much for the nice comment on the blog. Having never done anything like this, I must say it has been a huge learning experience.

I keep hearing about a "call to action" but I can't seem to figure out what to do for that!

Heather Rankin, Realtor
ERA Utah Properties
928-691-6444

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Submitted by Megan McGonigal on April 1, 2008 - 9:17pm.

Hi Larry,
The plug in that you want for spam is askimet. I have it and it is great. Knock on wood, I have never had a spam comment get through. I checked it earlier today and there were 35 comments in there that it had caught. Definetly get it. Thank you for the compliment on my site. I still have a lot of things I want to do as well. I think I could spend months locked in here doing stuff and learning stuff for my blog.

Heather,
I did'nt get your email? I'm just getting the hang of this as well, it all can be a little overwhelming huh? Are you on Active Rain? I have learned a wealth of knowledge on seo and all of that other fun stuff just on that site alone.

I have heard of the call to action as well. I think it is getting people to do whatever it is that you want them to do on your site. For example mine is going to be doing a contact form for potential sellers to fill out on getting the market value of there home, for buyers it will be a contact form for them to fill out signing them up for auto emails of listings matching there search criteria. That is my guess though and I could be way off base because I too am new at all of this.

Best of luck to the both of you!

Megan McGonigal
RE/MAX Integrity

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Submitted by Heather Rankin on April 1, 2008 - 9:46pm.

Megan - Yes, indeed, it is a learning curve. Apparently the email went to inmannews@inman.com (oops)

I changed the setting on the blog so that a person need not register to post. Thanks for the heads up on the plugin.

Yes, am on ActiveRain I have actually learned enough there to figure out what I wanted on my Lake Powell blog and then go get it done. My blog there is
htt://www.activerain.com/heatherr.

Your blog looks great and is chock full of information. I am just figuring out the whole SEO thing. Today I registered for Inman, and yesterday Technorati and Feedburner. I've been on ActiveRain about six weeks I guess. Did a Linkedin Profile last week. I feel whelmed (don't know if that is under or over) but whelmed.

I do agree that a different background on yours would make it more visually appealing. The one I am using was designed for the Clergy (found that interesting, but i liked it). It is
Ad Clerum 2.0.1 by Nate from Refueled Dot Net

Some of what I've noticed in the short time I've been doing this, is that the backgrounds that are "too much" make it difficult to focus on the content and loose the professionalism.

I really like the placement of your buttons linking people to the homes search. That is very effective - yup - I clicked on them twice just to be sure!

Heather Rankin, Realtor
ERA Utah Properties
928-691-6444

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Submitted by Jay Thompson on April 1, 2008 - 10:46pm.

Hi Heather -

You asked about pictures...whether to put them in one page or sprinkle them about. Why not do both?

You could set up an account at Flickr to hold your photos in the same place, and then place some of those pics directly in you blog. Flickr also has some cool tools for showing photos.See http://AvianoListing.com for one.

"Calls to action" are important. Having and IDX search right on the blog, and easy to find/use contact forms work well.

Keep up the great work!

Jay Thompson
Broker / Owner
Thompson's Realty

Blog: www.PhoenixRealEstateGuy.com

.

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Submitted by G Dewald | Union Street Media on April 7, 2008 - 3:06pm.

Hi Heather,

Good for you in getting into blogging!

I'll three quick feedback items from the tech side:

I notice you don't have any analytics package installed (hope I don't sound too much like a broken record). You can install a plugin for getting Google Analytics (free and quite good). Here is one example: Google Analytics for WordPress

You may want to arrange the title tag of your posts to start with the actual headline of the post and then say the name of the blog. Google likes to see the most relevant stuff first. You can edit this from the template set.

Maaaybe bump up the type size a little bit. Ok, that's not tech but it would be good to have it so that around 9 words went across on each line. That's typically considered good usability for online.

Again, great job on jumping into bloggin!

G

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Submitted by Heather Rankin on April 8, 2008 - 11:46pm.

G
Thanks for the input -

I have installed Google Analytics on the main server so I'm tracking that, tho not much visitation.

I am still somewhat confused about tags. And linkbacks as well. I've read quiet a bit but am not keying in on something.

Is it better to only have five to ten tags? Or make each topic of a post a tag and have numerous? Also are you saying put the blog title "Lake Powell Real Estate Blog" in each tag?

I agree about the font size. I would also like to bold, in some fashion, the titles of each blog. Tomorrow!

It is amazing how much there is to learn and while I realize a person does not "get it" in a day, it's still rather daunting.

The help is much appreciated!

Heather Rankin, Realtor
ERA Utah Properties
928-691-6444

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Submitted by Diane Aurit on April 9, 2008 - 5:05am.

Diane Aurit

I have been told to make tags specific to each topic rather than just using keywords as that is how Yahoo searches. It could be one or two short summary phrases. I use some keywords but also explain the actual content. For instance, if I just wrote a market report I would say: 1st quarter housing market report for Lake Norman and 1st quarter housing market report for Mooresville instead of just using my keywords: Lake Norman Real Estate etc.

You just have to keep adding linkbacks a few each day or you will get overwhelmed.

Diane Aurit

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Submitted by G Dewald | Union Street Media on April 9, 2008 - 9:41am.

I think I may have caused some confusion re: tags. There are two things at work here.

For example look at this page:
http://www.lakepowellrealty.net/2008/04/01/page-arizona-gets-a-new-emerg...

At the very very top of your browser, above the address bar it says: Lake Powell Real Estate Blog » Blog Archive » Page Arizona Gets A New Emergency Room - A sign of growth?

That's the title tag. In Wordpress it is common to be set up as BlogName >> Category >> Headline.

For SEO (and people too, the title tag is what is used for bookmarks) it is better to start with the headline of the post, because that is what the page is about. So what you want is probably something like:

Headline>>Category>>BlogName

Kinda geeky. Let me know if that's clearer.

Then... the other kind of "tag" is category type or content tag (useful for semantic non-heirarchies). ;) For that just do what you like. There are strategies for using this for SEO benefit but while you're just getting going I wouldn't worry about it too much. Writing more posts will help your SEO far more than a detailed content-tagging strategy.

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