Do you want your website done ASAP?
Filled with hundreds of pages of useful and compelling information? Do you believe it should take no more than a few weeks to accomplish this task and very little of your own time? If so, maybe you could learn a little about tenacity from my neighbor Delia.
A few mornings a week Toby (the Wonder Dawg) and I share our morning walks with this amazing woman. At 75 Delia has quite a spring to her step and keeps us both on our toes. She has lived in our small neighborhood for 40 plus years and in addition to knowing everyone's history (good and bad) she always shares the latest local gossip.
When I first started walking with Dalia I noticed her picking up a few rocks and carrying them home each day. What's up with that? Turns out she has a rather large potted plant in her backyard and is filling the top up with beautiful stones.
Now most folks would just go out and buy a bunch of rocks, but not Delia. Nope, she would rather take the time to search each day and collect a few perfect stones. No instant gratification for her. Her finds a spectrum of colors ranging from burnt orange to deep blues as she builds a beautiful foundation for her plant.
And you know, I think the same idea applies to your web pages. Sure you could just fill up your site with a bunch of words, but wouldn't it be better to hand pick and polish a few pages each day, week or month.
In the long run I believe with this strategy, your bucket will soon be brimming with unique well-written content designed to make your site the best of the bunch.
Are you preoccupied with your Google PR and Alexa results? It seems that all too many people are preoccupied by these methods of "scoring" their site success in an effort to move up in the search engines. It is a internet epidemic.
If you are preoccupied with Google PR and Alexa results, step back for a moment. What do you really want, to be on page one of search results or a high Google PR, but on page one of search results or have a low Alexa number. The answers to these questions vary with different business, but, for a realtor, I think the answer to both questions is, "I want to be near the front of the search results, on page 1."
It is important to realize what you really want. For a realtor, Google PR and Alexa results are not necessarily meaningful or helpful. Google PR is a scoring of your site that tries to let you know how your site appears to Google in terms of two primary features ... (1) how nice the invisible infrastructure of your site looks to Googles webbot and (2) how many back links there are to your site. The Alexa number provides a relative number that suggests how important your site is to EVERYONE on the internet.
As it turns out, while having a high Google PR is nice, to a realtor this number is not a truly valid scoring method. Searching real estate site, frequently, you will find that a realtor with PR of 0 will position closer to the top of the search results than a real estate site with PR of 3 or 4. Why would that be true. The answer to that is the sites with PR of 2,3, 4 may have spent lots of money, hired experts to increase their invisible infrastructure and they may be affiliated with a group that has thousands of back links .... but, their site does not contain information that Google deems meaningful to a searchers search request.
Though Google provides a PR value, during a search, Google actually is searching for site content that matches the searchers search criteria. PR only becomes involved if there are two sites with an equal amount of quality content related to a search .... in which case the site with the higher PR will be selected for higher positioning in the search ranks.
What does this mean to you? Have good content, better than the content of the competition and you will get a higher position in the search results. Once you have good content, go out and work to get backlinks just in case you need to break a tie with someone else ... but, don't be preoccupied with PR .... Quality content is the king.
As it turns out, the Alexa number is nice, but, not as important to realtors as the Alexa number is to YouTube. Why? YouTube cares about the fact that everyone in the world should like them. If you had a website with an Alexa's number 9801, this would imply that only 9800 other websites get more traffic than your site.
Would this be as important to a realtor as to YouTube .... no you don't care about having every internet user in China, Australia or the UK likes your site if you are in Crescent City CA, you simply want the people interested in living in Crescent City to find you. If Crescent City CA has only a population of 9000, and everyone in town checked your site daily, your Alexa value would still be very low ... your real estate office is just not important to the world, there would be millions of sites getting more visitors.
What is even worst, for sites with an Alexa value over 100,000, it is easy for your Alexa number to fluctuation up and down by 1,000,000 points easily. Why? For simplicity lets pretend there are only ten websites in the world.
Assume you have 30 visitors in one month and all the other websites get 29 visitor in that month .... you are NUMBER 1. Assume that next month you get 30 visitors, but, 8 other sites (and they are not realtors) get 31 visitors ... you are now NUMBER 9 out of ten ... that is quite a fluctuation and your personal performance did not change at all.
In the real world, the number of people visiting sites each month varies wildly. It will be easy for a website to end up millions of other websites to one more visitor than you have in any one one month and knock you down by a million. At the same time it is easy for millions of sites to end up with 1 less visitor than you have and pop you up by 1,000,000 in any particular month. The only things an Alexa number provides you is the fact that your are either a world contender or you are not, you are in the top 1/3 or you're not .... it provides no significant value for the typical individual realtor.
Well, what you you think? Are Google PR and Alexa rating important to your real estate website, or are you just interested in positioning well in web searches for real estate in your area?
Dave