If you’re looking for cheaper online alternatives to try and rent your house, here’s my own case study that might give you a few ideas.

Rather than pay £400 plus for a local estate agent (that’s what it’s cost me in the past), albeit that they’ve been very good, I decided to try and rent a house myself online as cheaply and quickly as possible.

The house was given a lick of paint, and scrubbed up and in better condition than it had been in a few years, so it was a matter of getting people to view it, and setting a decent rental price.

Pictures

First thing to do was get the pictures taken of all the rooms & garden. Took 10 mins and some Photoshop cropping.

Adwords

Working with client accounts for Google Adwords everyday I kinda know my way around Adwords. The wife set up an Adwords account, got a free £75 Adwords voucher and we began advertising on Adwords.

I didn’t spend alot of time creating the campaign. The keywords were pretty obvious and mostly broad match with a few negatives thrown in. I went for as many eyeballs as possible.

The Ad was pretty specific and included the Area, the amount of bedrooms, the price and a view pics online message.

Wordpress

The Adwords campaign took the visitors to a free Wordpress site that I created http://westondrive.wordpress.com/. It took about an hour or two to set up.

Results

First call was within 3 hours of the Adwords account going live. The caller said she would get back to me after she spoke with her husband, though never did.

Within the first week we had 3 viewings. All liked the property, and the second viewer wanted it. They texted me the next day saying that they wanted to rent the house, though it was a case of whoever got the holding deposit down first of all got it. Rather than wait for them to get back to me, I decided to press on.

Gumtree

With the free Adwords burnt out and a few extra quid spent, not much though, I decided to change tact and see how Gumtree compared to Adwords.

To set up a Gumtree account and add the photos I had didn’t take long, an hour tops.

Straightaway I got a viewing, again they were interested but didn’t commit. On Gumtree there are quite a few listings added daily, with Estate Agents even listing their properties in bulk, so your listing falls quite quickly down the pecking order. After a day or so I quickly decided to go for a featured ad that stayed on the front page for a week above the normal listings. For £27 this worked a treat.

The house was rented through Gumtree within a few days of the featured ad going live and within 2 weeks of the first Adwords campaign going live. The day after a couple had put a holding deposit down, one of the viewers that had seen the house through Adwords phoned and wanted to pay the deposit, too late

Total cost to rent online was Adwords activation fee of £5, and an additional spend of £5 (this obviously doesn’t include the free £75 voucher) and £27 on Gumtree.

So in total £37 to rent online, compared to hundreds for an estate agent.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam was kind enough to give a warning of an over optimisation penalty, (now dubbed the Penguin update). So when the update came on the 24th April it wasn’t a great surprise.

According to Google they ‘can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users’.

However it didn’t take a genuis to work out that exact match keyword rich domain names would be in the target line as they’ve been gamed so much.

Here’s a non comprehensive list of some characteristics of sites that I noticed that got penalised by the Google Penguin update.

Sites with:

1. Exact Match Keword Rich Domain names
2. Light weight to fairly light weight in terms of content with little content updates
3. Links where the majority of the anchor text is exactly the same as the page title & domain name and the links are easily attainable.

If your site has all three of these characteristics then you may have noticed and expected a drop, possibly a minus 50 penalty.

What to Do

The logical step to lift the algorithmic penalty would be to build a strong authority site centered around a content strategy. Easier said than done.

For the 1st client the issues seems to have been resolved within a 2-3 month period. So here’s the steps that I followed and will follow to see if I can get the second client’s Google Places listing issue resolved and note how long it takes.

(Below is a Screenshot of 2 listings for the same business, the 2nd listing which is the incorrect listing also has the reviews attached to it.)

Here’s the advice that Google gives:

1. Log into your Account
2. Click on Help
3. You’ll See ‘Fix a Problem’
4. Select Editing, Transfering and removing listings
5. Then select ‘Duplicate business listings’

You can view what Google has to say on Duplicate listings and which one fits your dilemma: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=183009&topic=1656742&ctx=topic

Make sure you’ve only 1 claimed listing in your Business Listings.

6. In my client’s case it’s scenario 1 and ‘multiple results for your business’.
7. Follow the 3 steps, which involves finding the incorrect Google Places listing, selecting ‘The Report a Problem’ or ‘Correct Details’ link and going through the wizard.

Here’s an edited version of what I wrote to Google:

Hello, I’m reporting an issue on behalf of my client Peter Thomas Photography.

There are duplicate listings for Peter Thomas Photography on Google Places/Maps. You can see this if you type in ‘Peter Thomas Photography Carrickfergus’.

This issue may have arisen as the business address changed.

The correct listing is http://g.co/maps/r8su7

And the incorrect one is the listing for Carrickfergus which is ……….

The incorrect listing is also showing the reviews that should be on the correct listing’s page.

I hope you can resolve this as soon as possible thanks.

Now, it’s just a matter of sitting back and waiting.

(Updated 7th May 2012 – The listings now appear to have merged, only problem is that the reviews that were associated with the old listing aren’t appearing for the updated listing – have report this and will see how long it takes)

In the last couple of weeks I’ve noticed a couple of different sites in separate competitive UK markets absolutely tank. One site has dropped down 7 pages for it’s main keyword term and the other almost 10.

Those are quite big drops considering both sites were on the 1st page and have been fairly solid for 1-2 year plus.

Both of the link profiles of these sites relied heavily on web 2.0 properties, wikis, spun 1 page sites, and were interlinked in classic link wheel style.

At the same time both the sites have tanked. Coincidence??

So I purchased hosting, copied all the files and uploaded them on to the server, edited the web.config (it was .net) and it all appeared to work without too much trouble.

Next I added a new design and everything seemed to run smoothly

After that I verified the account in Google Webmaster Tools, sat back and waited to see what happened. I checked back and in a few days or so all the pages bar 1 had been crawled and indexed even without any links pointing at the site.

So what happened, why where all the pages indexed in Google, bar the most important homepage?

I checked the source code in the browser for non index elements, checked for any canonical mistakes, checked the history of the site to see if the site had been black listed, but couldn’t figure out the issue. I didn’t think the fact that the content had been on another domain and was non on a new and weak authority site would stop it from being indexed, particularly as only 1 page hadn’t been indexed.

So after a week of scratching my head I decided to add the site to Google Webmaster Tools and verified that it was mine. Next I popped into ‘Diagnostics’ and then clicked on the link ‘Fetch As GoogleBot’ to see if Google was picking up a problem that I wasn’t. When I clicked ‘Fetch’ an error message came back with ‘Fetch Status’ unreachable.

So there it was, GoogleBot was obviously having a problem accessing the page, yet when I checked it in every browser going and in mobiles it worked fine.

Next stop was to download the user agent plugin for Firefox. Switching the User Agent to Googlebot 2.1 and trying to access the site brought up the issue, a nasty error message.

Within the source code of one of the template pages that I had written a very long time ago and not checked when quickly moving the site over, it showed that if the Googlebot spider visited the site then a certain bit of code would be run. The file path to the database file into which the information was to be stored had been hard coded, and so when Googlebot visited the old site the code ran fine but with the new site the file path was incorrect and the code didn’t!

Anyway lesson learned, check to make sure Google is seeing what you want it to see, particularly if it’s a new site.

The weekend, possibly a Saturday night and a date in January would suit.

Update – Meetup is on Saturday 21st January @ 5pm in Eglantine Inn on the Malone Road.

However there’s alot of poor nasty looking link farms, that just don’t offer any value whatsoever or have any unique content.

Recently I was looking at a website for a client. His site has been SEO’d by the notorious ‘It’s Cold Outside’ company. There’s a whole host of disgruntled customers on the web that have complained about keyword stuffing, excessive link exchanges, cloaking and other tactics that are outside Google’s guidelines.

Well when I looked at the client’s site, and checked his back link profile with Yahoo Site Explorer it was quite clear that this client’s site was on one of their link farms. I looked a bit deeper into the farm to see whether it was worth the investment that he was currently paying. I went through a 100 or so of the links that Yahoo listed and checked them in Google using the site operator. Website after website had been de-indexed in Google.

This link farm had obviously been discovered and penalised. The value of the client’s presence on these sites was absolutely nil. No doubt the company in question would obviously have been aware of this, yet the monthly payments were still recurring. Why should the client still be paying to be on a failed link farm?? I presume that any additional SEO they offered to make up for this, just amounted to an automated report with very very little work involved. I couldn’t see any continuing on site work, in fact even basics such as stats/analytics tracking weren’t given as far as I’m aware.

So what does this tell us:

1. In the long run simple link farms and schemes aren’t a great strategy, they’re a house built on sand. If you’re using an SEO company that is more interested in maximising their return and is quite happy to cram your site together with totally unrelated sites, then you’ve got no long term winning strategy.

2. If you’re a business person then make sure you know what your SEO is up to and you’re not getting ripped off. Clients were paying £100 a month recurring to be on this link farm. Although not a big budget, with every link in this farm devalued and deindexed in Google that is a complete waste of money. Talk about not getting your money’s worth, and the SEO company in question is presumably doing very little.

3. Even though many link farms go undiscovered for years chances are they’ll get walloped by Google.

4. Automated SEO solutions tend to be cheap and nasty for a reason. Not saying that they don’t work, indeed this farm probably worked for a while. Build your own custom link profile and it’ll have a better chance of lasting, don’t follow what everyone else does, and where everyone else is, otherwise it’s more likely to fail.

5. SEO isn’t just about ranking for your trophy term. Being top of Google for 1 keyword term isn’t the be all and end all of SEO. A more rounded internet marketing approach is better and covers more bases.

6. It’s important to note that being on this link farm didn’t have a negative effect on the client’s web positioning at all. All the constant forum questions about can being listed on a link farm hurt your rankings, well from this case study it’s pretty obvious that Google is clued up on this, and no negatives were accrued to the client’s site. The old adage that there’s not much that a competitor can do to take out your site holds up in this case.

The reason why this client didn’t complain was that he thought he was getting his money’s worth. Reality was that he was in a low competition market and that without the SEO’s efforts he presumably would have been no worse off ranking for the primary keyword.

How can you check if your backlinks count for nothing?

First of all pop over to Yahoo Site Explorer, and type in your domain name and click the explore button.

Next click the ‘Inlinks’ button, and from the dropdown ’show inlinks’ select ‘except for this domain’.

You should see results like the screenshot below.

Copy the domain name, head over to Google and type in the domain with the site operator e.g. site:domainname.com – If nothing is returned then chances are that this has been deindexed. Repeat this. If you notice most of the domains aren’t showing then best speak to your SEO as it looks like you have a problem.

For further reading check this out:
http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=98143&page=1
http://www.ekmcommunity.com/showthread.php?5366-Its-*********-SEO-Beware!
http://aerin.co.uk/how-to-avoid-the-seo-link-building-scam/

On the forums you’ll always get the usual throwaway one liner response that directory submissions are a complete waste of time, and money in the case of paid ones.

Some of the arguments go along the lines that years ago Google clearly devalued this style of site when it took a swipe at some directories engaged in tactics outside Google’s guidelines and reduced their page rank, rankings, the number of indexed pages they had and their ability to pass authority.

Other arguments stress how Google removed their crystal clear recommendation to submit your site to Yahoo and DMOZ and other relevant industry related directories.

So why did Google remove the recommendation and why did they take firm action against some high powered directories?

I’m guessing the reason Google acted was more to do with them trying to put the genie back into the bottle. The amount of poor quality general web directories that sprung up with the intention to pass page rank and anchor text relevancy rocketed almost into orbit.

It seemed like every web script wonder set up a general web directory running off a fairly cheap PHP script and poor template design and began running free and cheap directories with the sole purpose of ranking sites and creating manufactured links. Google’s recommendation of submitting in a selective manner merely fuelled the frenzy.

Arguably Google’s action taken against directories was merely against the abuse of their guidelines, not against the directory style site itself.

With Google’s crackdown some SEO’s abandaned their crap directories and general directory submission fell out of favour, with many moving onto the next method and dismissing directories as an ineffective link building method.

So are they worthless? And if not why not?

Absolutely not. Like I said there are quality directories, gems that just need to be unearthed. General directories that provide some editorial review, that don’t sell links for page rank, that aren’t covered in adsense, that don’t approve all and sundry, that are run and promoted with a passion and committment, can still provide and send quality signals to Google. Niche, regional and industry related directories can also be very valuable resources and places to be listed on and and in many cases haven’t been abused as much as the cheap general web directories form.

From my own experiences niche coding directories such as aspin, hotscripts, 411asp.net provided excellent traffic, paying customers for products, deep links and rankings. Almost everything you could wish for in a directory.

In some cases directories can outperform your site, especially if your site is newish, just doesn’t have enough clout or suffers from a poor structure. If a directory is going to outperform your site, then the next best thing is to get listed in the directory so that when someone visits that directory through a search on Google for your main keyword they’ll then pass through the directory and your listing and onto your site. All you have to do is run a local search on Google for a product/service and notice the amount of directories, though this may be to a lesser extent now with Google places merging with the organics.

Like I said, you should never ignore directories that appear at the top of Google for your keyword searchs. Though this might seem obvious it’s not to some. One of my directory sites sits right at the very top of Google and has done for the best part of 2 years now. It’s a fairly moderate term, though I’d like to think it’s a quality niche directory. Anyway there are a number of companies paying up to £2 for a pay per click in this market, while at the top of the organics (a market where there are no Google Place listings) most of these companies don’t bother with a 15 minute free submission that could save them hundreds and hundreds of pounds in advertising revenue and get them relevant traffic. It’s a no brainer, yet most of the companies don’t bother. It almost seems criminal.

Like so many things in SEO, experiences and opinions are made without testing, without qualifications, without context and this simply clouds the picture and message. It’s important to be aware that some people group all types of directories together, making no distinction between poor quality general web directories, niche industry directories, regional directories and so on. Directories are just bunched and labelled together and dismissed out of hand. Others will make a distinction between ‘web directories’, niche, regional and business/industry directories. So on forums if someone refers to ‘web directories’ as being useless they may not necessarily be referring to or dismissing quality niche, local or indeed all web directories en masse, they may simply be referring to the mass of crap web directories on the net.

Directories still provide a backlink to your site, many are still follow, and many directories will pass page rank and anchor text relevancy. Getting listed can improve your overall link profile, crawl rate and send a clear trust signal to Google.

I don’t advocate the mass directory submissions to general web directories that comes with services such as Directory Maximiser. For buttons you’ll get a run of hundreds of directory submissions to unmanned directories with little value. There are many SEO’s that suggest this method still works, and that quantity and mass quantity at that still does work, though no doubt that’s in fairly weak markets.

Do you still submit businesses to General Directories?

Yes, I still selectively look for quality general directories, business directories, regional and niche directories. I think they can still provide a backbone of a linkbuilding campaign and aren’t as time consuming as other linkbuilding tasks.

Aren’t these very expensive, is Yahoo directory worth the money ($299)?

The Yahoo directory doesn’t provide a great deal of traffic for businesses in the UK and Ireland. Some clients I had were lucky to get more than 5 visitors a year, and the SEO value was debatable. So if you are on a limited budget then creating content, getting a content writer to help you and trying to rank for keywords might be a better investment.

If you have a bigger budget, beyond that of most small businesses, then I’d probably recommend it but I don’t think it provides great value. I believe the UK & Ireland version of directory itself has now closed.

Is Yell worth the money?

If you have the money and have Google and other advertising and marketing well covered, and have a product that someone might use Yell for like a trade then possibly. As far as I remember Yell standard listings rotate and prices vary depending on the category. In the listings that I have managed there has been little traffic that comes through them. I suspect that the traffic isn’t great quality based on the bounce rates, and that some of it is casual competitor traffic. I think there would be more value pumping your money into a Google PPC or organic campaign if you were on a restricted budget if there was still room for improvement in Google.

If you’re already listed in Yell you can always use your analytics software and work out how much a cost or conversion costs and tally this up against Google Adwords or other forms of online marketing.

I wouldn’t entirely dismiss some of the bigger free UK directories such as the FreeIndex & Hotfrog. The 10 – 15 minutes that it takes to fill these in can provide a return for small businesses. In low competition markets you can dominate the first page for some keywords with these business listings.

Is Submitting to directories that charge, a paid link of the type Google dislikes?

From my understanding if the payment is charged for legitimate reasons such as business expenses, reviews, and editing costs as opposed to being a payment solely to pass page rank and relevancy with the sole purpose of improving your rankings on Google then it’s fine. Google has other forms of spam and abuse to monitor and paid directories seem to be exempt or not at the top of their priorities. You can watch the video on what Matt Cutts has to say.

Final Thoughts

I doubt you’ll find very few SEO’s that would overlook directory submission as one of their backbone strategies for starting off a link building campaign. For me a quality site is a quality site whether it’s a directory, blog of informational site. A quality web page is always worth getting listed on. Rather than give you a list of directories, learn how to spot the signals that make a site a quality site and webpage, and you’ll have a fair idea whether a directory is worth the submission and money.

The signals are still the same as they always were. Can you add 1 or 2 keywords into the title, are the links do follow, are pages structured and themed correctly, are the pages indexed and what’s the cache cycle, are the descriptions quality, is the page title in line with your site, are the links direct and does the site have the added bonus of sending you potential buyers. Directories for some SEO’s may have gone past their prime, but there’s still a bit of life left in them.

Is Blogging Right For Your Business?

Blogging must have some kind of pay off, but for this to happen, you have to be targeting people who read blogs. Some of the biggest consumers of blog content include the tech savvy, who are hungry for information and comfortable using the Internet, but don’t let that fool you.

You’ll find people are hungry for gardening information, parenting tips, and virtually any other topic you can think of. If you want them to choose your blog over someone else’s however, you have to do it right.

The number one requirement for a successful blog is regular content (I should really take my own advice and post more often but there’s not enough hours in the day unfortunately) — ensure it’s detailed, informative, and full of tips and hints. It also helps if it’s easy to navigate and easy on the eye to look at.

Blog Hosted Or Self Hosted?

When planning your blog, you’ll quickly discover you have two main choices: hosted, and self-hosted. Hosted blogs, such as those found on WordPress.com, Blogger, Tumblr, and Posterous, are stored on someone’s server. You can easily identify them because the URL is often a sub-domain of the main site e.g. (BlogName.wordpress.com).

Self-hosted blogs, like those available at WordPress.org, are downloaded and installed on your own domain or added to an existing website. Both types of blogs are great, but the best option will depend on your needs and preferences.

Hosted VS Self-Hosted: Costs and Site Setup

Hosted blogs eliminate the hassle of arranging web hosting, server maintenance, updating software, and many of the other technical aspects. They are often free as well. Unfortunately, there are downsides to running this type of blog too.

Hosted blogs limit your ability to customize the technical side of your blog. This can make it extremely difficult to alter the structure and functionality of the site as well as hamper usability. You’ll also want to check the platform’s terms of service page. Some platforms can’t be used for business purposes, host ads, or link to sites that sell goods and services.

Self-hosted blogs give you freedom. You can set them up however you’d like, and make the transition between your website and blog seamless. You’re fully in control when it comes to the architecture of your blog, the page titles, URLs, and you can even add plugins and code to extend its functionality. If you already have a website, you likely won’t need to pay for additional hosting.

Before choosing self-hosted, you do need to consider a few things. The technical aspect of self-hosted blogs is usually the first trouble spot people encounter. A blog takes some work to get started, but you’ll also have regular maintenance and upkeep, so if you’re not comfortable with this side of things, and have no one you can call on or hire to do it, self-hosted migh not be the best option. Hosting companies may however offer easy install options so it’ll be worth checking that out with your host.

Hosted blogs are completely separate from any of your other online real estate. Hosted blogs do often have their own network, however, which sends traffic and makes your blog searchable from their own site. This can potentially expose your content to new markets and audiences.

A great example of this is WordPress.com. Right on the homepage, you’ll find an area where they feature blog posts from throughout the network. There is also a search function at the top, which lets you search all the blogs on WordPress.com by keyword or tag.

Self-hosted blogs, on the other hand, can be incorporated into your existing site. Then, you can funnel visitors and page rank through internal linking. All of your site issues can usually be dealt with through the main dashboard for your blog, and the blogging software can even power the rest of your site.

Design and Branding

How a blog looks can have a huge impact on its success. Design options are often very limited for hosted blogs. Many of them don’t allow original designs and may not allow you to add branding to the site. Self-hosted varieties, however, are quite different. Because you’re in complete control, you can have almost any design concept you can dream of. You can fully customize the navigation, architecture and branding on your site to meet the needs of your business and your site visitors. For Wordpress there are some excellent free Wordpress designs from sites such as site5.

Hosted, Self-Hosted and SEO

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is an extremely important factor when deciding between hosted and self hosted blogs. After all, if the search engines can’t index and rank your site, no one will find it. And considering the large amount of fresh content and links that can come with running a blog, this can be a very powerful tool for almost any website.

With self-hosted blogs, you can decide whether each link should be “followed” or not, where they appear, how they appear, and even set the attributes for various links, images, and pages. You can determine the URLs, alter the code, and improve page load speed, as well as add plugins to give your pages more clout and more page rank to pass on.

Even SEO royalty like Matt Cutts prefers WordPress for SEO. With a few tweaks, of course. He says 80-90% of all basic SEO tasks are either accessible or already done for you, right out of the box. In addition, Cutts says it offers excellent security and usability. (You can find a good breakdown of things at HowToMakeMyBlog.com.) To make SEO even easier, you can install plugins such as Dagon Sitemap Generator, Platinum SEO Plugin, KB Linker, SEO Friendly Images, and Link Redirection.

In short, hosted platforms can rank, but might not give you enough control and flexibility to compete strongly in more competitive markets. If you do choose a self-hosted blog, adding it to an existing site can give both the blog and the site a boost in the search engines while improving indexation rates, and passing page rank and authority throughout the site.

Lastly, you’ll need to consider how much to spread the link juice around. If you use a hosted blog with your website, the links and page rank will be split between the sites. With a self-hosted blog, however, all the link juice flows to one site where you can use internal linking to funnel it to the right pages.

Both hosted and self-hosted blogs can be extremely helpful, but you have to use the right one, at the right time. If you’ve never owned a site before, are concerned about running the blog, have no budget whatsoever, or are just looking to learn the ropes and experiment, you may wish to stick with hosted platforms. Otherwise, opt for the freedom, flexibility, and additional power of self-hosted platforms like WordPress. Either way, you’ll love the link juice, authority, and relationships that come with creating your own ‘blog community’.

The facility is likely to be every students dream, with the ability to type in whatever can be found in the fridge, and lets Google concoct a delicious quick and easy meal to make Jamie Oliver jealous.

According to the search giant, about one percent of all searches performed on the search giant each day are for recipes. If you consider that they handle about a billion queries per day, that’s 10 million recipe searches. That’s a massive amount of hungry mouths looking for food online.

The search also lets you look at other additional data surrounding the recipe. You can find recipes from particular chefs, or indeed things as abstract as recipes for religious festivals.

From a technical perspective, Google have once again shown their expertise in the parsing of complex data, and the data mining and collation to launch this product is immensely complex. It also hints at the increasing move towards using structured data such as RDFa, and microformats that Google in the past while have begun to ask for from publishers. As and when they want to find out the information to create a new search feature, typically this is the format they ask for, which is more easily parsed by their bots.

Without this additional markup on the page, Google finds it immensely difficult to make a forray into a particular search vertical, and generate revenue from it. Other information they are clearly looking to receive include people (which Facebook and LinkedIn are both using to provide data) and events, hinting that a Google people search and Google What’s on may be services they are planning on somewhere down the line. Stay tuned for that one, undoubtedly one of the eagerly awaited services, with the most far reaching implications is just around the corner.

That said, Recipe search is a particularly nice improvement to Google search, and can be really useful to amateur chefs and pro’s alike. Take a look a the video below to find out more:

Today’s guest blog comes from Paul Anthony, who works as Internet Marketing Manager for Northern Ireland’s largest property website, PropertyPal.com. His role within the company includes managing all search engine optimisation, search engine marketing and social media activity.

PropertyPal.com is Northern Ireland’s number 1 property website, displaying details of more homes for sale and rent than any other website. It has around 95% of all properties for sale and rent, and at any time stocks over 40,000 properties to buy or rent. Including at time of writing approximately 1200 houses for sale in Bangor.