Ubertor Real Estate Blog

Check out these interviews with a bunch of search engine personalities. The most viewed one is the one below with Matt Cutts:

2 Things to point out:

1. The importance of an XML sitemap. With a sitemap you are making Google’s job of crawling your site much easier. If you want to get a deep crawl of your site then make sure you have a site map. (*Ubertor offers this functionality)

2. Avoid Flash and Javascript menus. Eventhough Google is getting better at crawling Java and Flash menus, the easiest menus for them to crawl are the menus built with text links and styled using CSS. If you are using Flash, then you are just making the search engine work harder to crawl all their pages. (*Ubertor uses text links and CSS)

Joel over at the Future of Real Estate Marketing is reporting that Google has added embeddable functionality to their street view product. Check out the picture below, put your mouse on it, click and move it around.

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Boston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Detroit, and Providence have been added to list of cities with Street View. More details here.

It takes the average person 5 seconds to identify and delete a single spam message. While that may not sound like much, all those seconds add up. Take a moment to watch this Gmail video that discusses how Gmail fights spam.

Have you played with Google Street View yet?

Here is a video that explains the service:

This is a funny music video made by Google:

Want a quick and easy way to maintain your online reputation?

Use Google Alerts to notify you when a webpage, blog, news, etc mentions you. It is a great way to ensure that you are on top of when you are being mentioned within the internet.

It is FREE and it should be mandatory for all Realtors.

Take 2 seconds and setup your Free Google Alert. You can do it here

We switched. Will you?
Taking your business into Google Apps will bring you into the online world and provide some flexibility that you could only imagine before. Watch this little video to learn more about what Google Apps can do for your real estate business.

Learn more here

Joel Burslem of Inman News speaks with Justin McCarthy, the Strategic Partner Development Manager of Real Estate for Google, chats about the search engine company’s approach to the real estate vertical, how Google Base is trying to deliver relevant real estate content to consumers and where Google is aiming next with property information aggregation.

Google’s Gmail team put together a collaborative video “to help us imagine how an email message travels around the world. All it took was a video camera, the Gmail M-velope, and some creativity — and, wow, did you get creative!”

Google takes a big step forward with their Google Mapping system. Now you can embed a map into any page on your website. This will make a great addition to any neighbourhood page that you have on your website. Check out this embedded map below.

View Larger Map

From the Google Blog:

Today we’re excited to announce a new feature on Google Maps that allows you to add maps to your blog or website just by copying and pasting a snippet of HTML. And once you embed the map, it has all the same functionality of the Google Maps you know and love; it’s clickable, draggable, and zoomable.

Adding a map to your website or blog is now as easy as embedding a YouTube video. No programming skills are required, and there’s no need to sign up for a Maps API key. All it takes is three simple steps:

I have mentioned in the past that we work hard to ensure our system follows Google Webmaster Guidelines. Most times that does not mean a lot to our clients as they don’t understand what the guidelines are or how they effect their website. I received an email this morning from a client in Sooke that recognised the value of our system and how effective it is within Google.

“Just thought I’d drop you a quick note with some feedback. I am really impressed with the service I have received so far, and with how easily my new site was indexed by Google. There is hardly any content on it yet and I was already easily found on several searches I ran. On my old site, I spent countless hours trying to decipher the Google guidelines - with Ubertor I didn’t have to do anything. Thanks a lot and keep up the good work.

-Tim Ayres - Royal LePage Coast Capital Realty www.sellingsooke.ca

Curious about Google’s Webmaster Guidelines? Here are the design guidelines:
- Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
- Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
- Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
- Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
- Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
- Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
- Check for broken links and correct HTML.
- If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
- Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

If you have any questions about these, please feel free to contact us.