Emerald Isle Rentals and SEO

Living along the Crystal Coast in Carteret County and being active in the IT, networking, and search optimization fields I keep pretty close tabs on local rental companies and their various search engine optimization vendors. I know...I'm a nerd and really need a life, but its just comical to me because I have some basic knowledge of SEO practices and see some big money wasted all too often. So I'm committed to offering free tips and advice through this blog. If anyone finds it and uses it, good on them. I hope they see some positive results. 

So today as I was perusing the Emerald Isle vacation rental listings I stumbled on the Shorewood Real Estate website. I noticed a couple things they could do to help improve their Google search engine rankings. We'll start with the first page. 

First thing I look at when evaluating SEO is the on-page items we can control and make them work FOR us. Shorewood's title tag is good. But I would make one minor adjustment, I would change the part "Emerald Isle Vacation Rentals | Real Estate |" to "Emerald Isle | Rentals | Real Estate |" or something to that effect. I'm a firm believer that Google is really keen (and getting keener) on locations and delivering results that are most relevant to the area the user is searching for. So first establish your location, then the product you are offering. 

Another thing I noticed, is their incoming link profile looks a bit weak. They need more incoming links in a bad way. The Emerald Isle market is extremely competitive, and in order to compete with the big boys effectively for traffic they need about 20 (or more) QUALITY links. Links from the local bicycle shop, restaurants, etc. will do them a lot of justice. Especially if those links were crafted using the terms "Emerald Isle rentals" as anchor text. 

One of the easiest, cheapest ways to generate quality links is to start blogging. Or if you don't have time to blog, pay a local blogger to write articles for you on his blog and link to you from them. I see one of their sales agents is on the ball and has a blog over at Active Rain, but I know they have more agents than that. Plus she's slacking, her last post was from July....of 2007! Who knows maybe she doesn't even work there anymore. Either way, someone at Shorewood should have a blog on Active Rain, and another person should have one on blogger.com. Then while writing articles they need to be incorporating their keywords, and linking to their site from the blogs. So easy, it's funny. 

My last recommendation for them is to generate a custom 404 error page that if nothing else contains a link back to their home page. Just in case they have a broken link somewhere on the site, not to mention in case someone is linking to one of their pages that no longer exists. This will prevent search engine spiders and potential guests from getting the default 404 error and possibly spending their time elsewhere, like a competitor's site.

Emerald Isle Rentals

Do you own rental property in Emerald Isle? Is your rental management company not getting you enough rentals, or charging too much? Well why not rent it yourself? Sure it takes a little effort on you, the homeowners part. But believe it or not, there are already hundreds, probably thousands of homeowners that have figured out how to eliminate their rental management company and getting gouged by their commission. How?

By taking advantage of vrbo.com, homeaway.com, and other rentals by owner sites that's how. I know of a few homeowners that have left their high dollar, large and in charge rental management firms, and went on their own. Guess what? They found their property was rented more weeks, and they made more money during the rental season, because there were no commission, no reservation fees, etc.

I'm in the middle of developing my own rentals by owners site that will focus exclusively on the Crystal Coast area. I will be sure to get the word out to any interested homeowners. Of course it will be free for the first 50 owners. I need someone to BETA test it for me anyway. But after that, it's still going to be a deal at $100 a year to list your rental.

Oh and there's a new maintenance company in Emerald Isle. You can now tell your property management company you are not interested in the $50/month maintenance plan because Emerald Isle Maintenance has you covered for less than half of that. Plus you'll probably actually get someone looking after your property. Good luck this season. I need to get back to writing PHP and MySQL queries for my new site.

Learning PHP/MySQL

Well, I've been playing with PHP and MySQL for a couple weeks now. And I must say that I am thouroughly impressed by both platforms. Especially considering they're free. I always considered them as something for ameteurs and low budget projects. But the more I learn about them, the more I like them. Right now to me it seems these two platforms can do anything I need to happen on my website....for now, until I start playing with JavaScript and AJAX.

But at any rate, they are both very useful for building a dynamic site rich in user generated content. Don't tell anyone, but that is my ultimate goal here. I want to produce a site that the users who eventually will pay for access to my site will also be generating the most valuable content for me. It should be a win-win situation. I'll be happy once it works well and people start using it. The users will be happy, because they will be able to market their product in a cost-effective way.

Well wish me luck, I have two other blogs that need attention and I need to continue whipping up some more code.

Love or Hate Google

On one hand I am the biggest Google fan one could hope to find. Yet on the other I almost hate them to the point I wish they would just go away. Obviously they're not going anywhere, and if they did it would probably bum met out pretty badly. I mean I use G everyday. One of my blogs, my main email, my tracking stats for any blogs I track, and now my documents are all stored on Google servers. While that is pretty awesome that they are kind enough to let me store so much crap on their networks, I sense there is a an ulterior motive.

Now they have a lot of my precious data, and a lot of other people house vast amounts of data on their servers. Sometimes I wonder if they are secretly monitoring and watching everything I do with them. For example, I often wonder if they maybe have some tracking code on their free toolbar that I always install. They could be tracking EVERYTHING I do in a browser! Not that I'm worried about what they may see. But it is a little unnerving.

The latest thing I noticed is there are some new buttons on SOME of my G search results pages (SERPS) Check them out:

You'll notice a little upturned arrow. This will move that result up (for your searches, not everyone's....yet). There's also an "X" to remove it from your results. There's also a comment button at the bottom-right of each listing, these comments are public. While it doesn't seem like much right now (to me at least). I have a feeling the data pack rats at G are storing all of the info they get and will eventually apply it to their algorithms. Thus hopefully improving the relevancy of their index.

Will this be the future of index management? Will users "vote" sites to the top spots for search terms? It should be interesting to see what develops in 2009.

Blogging for Real Estate SEO

"What's a blog?" "Why should I blog?" And of course, "What's it going to do to help me?" These are all questions I'm sure many real estate agents have asked when someone reccommend they start blogging.

Usually blogs are free, and you could think of them as an online diary of sorts (though they take many different shapes and forms). But if you're looking to generate some amount of online exposure you almost NEED a blog. Most blogging platforms like Blogger, Wordpress, and my new favorite, Active Rain, all make it extremely easy to reach your targeted niche of Internet traffic.

I live on the Crystal Coast of NC and am amazed that local Real Estate agents are just now beginning to jump on the blog bandwagon. I guess with the current downturn some of the more Internet savvy agents have realized blogging makes good use of downtime, while providing immense SEO or search engine optimization benefits to your main site.

Although, I'm sure it won't be long before the Crystal Coast area agents start blogging their brains out. But good on them, because the ones that heed my advice will be in great position once we hit the bottom, maybe in June like Kramer says.

Get Your Site to Number 1 in Google

I did a Google search for "Carteret County SEO" and was shocked to see not one local SEO firm listed. I am curious as to what firms (if any) local companies are using for Internet marketing. Could it be that most business owners in the area are not too concerned with SEO? Site optimization that gets you good rankings in the search engines is the cheapest way to get a ton of free exposure to your site. I did add myself to the first ranked page seofinders.com Here's their link: We're one of the featured Swansboro, North Carolina seo firms at Finders directory - SEO directory

Anyway for those of you that are interested in trying to get good Google and other search engine rankings here's my SEO tip of the day. Many companies in our area are overlooking one of the easiest ways to achieve number one or close to top of Google SERPs (search engine results pages) is also completely FREE!! :)

Its called Google Local Business Center. The only prerequisite that comes to mind is it does require you to have a Google account. Which if you're a webmaster and you do not have a G account you are putting yourself at a serious disadvantage. Once you have the G account you can then get your business listed in the Local Business Center, and pinpoint your location on a G map. If you've ever done a local search like this Emerald Isle NC Rentals You'll notice a G map is right there at the top and a few savvy local businesses have found a way to reach the top for this popular search term. And they did it for FREE, well it did take a few minutes of their time.

I noticed a couple of businesses I thought would already be up there were missing. I wonder who they have doing their SEO and Internet marketing, I guess it is possible they don't have anyone at all. Maybe this little tip will help them.

Recabling Local PD

You know how you repeatedly add new devices to your network in a one by one manner as the enterprise expands? Well after a while it can get out of hand. It's no one's fault, most of the time IT is expecected to pull off near miracles on a minute's notice. But anyway using network cables that are too long can make a routine repair take hours longer than needed. That's when a local police department decided to do some spring cleaning in December.

Lucky for me I have the privlidge of working with some of the best IT/Computer professionals in the Crystal Coast area. The fellow I worked with on this cabling project was awesome, and I am glad to extract a lot of new knowledge from him. Plus he's a barrel of fun to work with.

But after a few hours of kicking butt a local police department is better equipped to deal with a network emergency.

Deals on Dell Laptops for the 'Rents

So my parents were in the market for a new laptop, and of course being the Crystal Coast IT guy, they came to me for advice. Fortunately for them, I'm a little prejudice in the way of laptops (or any machines). I would never recommend nor purchase any laptop unless made by Dell, but I'd take a dope IBM/Lenovo, or Alienware (now owned by Dell). So naturally the first place I went was Dell's website.

Having not been there as a buyer for a few months it was nice to see they have modernized, and streamlined their site. It was so easy to find my folks a sweet little computer it blew my mind. I usually have to hunt through three sites like CDW's business site (uggghhh) to find a system for a customer. But Dell makes it very efficient. I mean they're not playing World of Warcraft or anything, they "just want to check email and cruise the web" like ninety percent of my customers.

Right, but that turns into editing photos, videos, building websites, downloading malware/spy ware, and other RAM/CPU/bandwidth consuming activities. Long story short, we found them a $900 sweet machine for about $600 so if your looking, check out Dell.

New To Blogger

This is the first entry in my new technology blog. I will be writing about many topics related to technology in the coming weeks. On a day to day basis I deal with a wide range of software, servers, and firewalls and will have many neat experiences to share.

So sometime last week I was approached by our software development manager to get some pricing information together to upgrade to Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008.

If you've ever looked into purchasing this product you know first hand what a quagmire the Microsoft licensing scheme can be. There are several versions of Visual Studio 2008 and picking the right one may not be as cut and dry of a decision as one would think.

There's Visual Studio Standard which looks like its mainly for students and hobbyists. This will likely be missing key features our development team is going to need.

Then you have Visual Studio Professional. I thought this would be the one we would need, but it too is missing key features our team will need.

Okay then I see the Visual Studio Team Edition Products:

• Team Edition for Software Architects.
• Team Edition for Software Developers
• Team Edition for Software Testers
• Team Edition for Database Professionals

Our team is comprised of professional developers that where all of these hats. So I started thinking we would have to purchase the Visual Studio Team Suite for everyone. But you're talking about a $40,000 investment for a small company. There's no way we could handle that type of expense.

So now we're thinking we can get one person the $9,900 Team Suite with MSDN Premium subsription. And get everyone else the Team Suite minus the MSDN subscription. What a mess. I'm not even sure that will work for us either.

I'm curious what other shops are doing with regard to migrating to VStudio 2008. Any feedback is always welcomed.