Real Estate houses and individual brokers alike can provide their website visitors with added value by offering them the ability to search additional properties in their area via MLS plugins for their wordpress site. In theory, adding this plugin to your wordpress powered website is going to create more pages that will rank in the search engines for those listings and ultimately generate more buyer and seller leads which can and will happen. With that being said, most MLS plugins do more harm than good.
The Problem:
When you add MLS plugins to your site, you are essentially adding hundreds (or thousands) of ‘phantom’ pages that appear on hundreds of sites across the internet with the same duplicate content and information on every single site. So yes, you are adding more content to your visitors, however in Google’s eyes, it’s duplicate content.
In addition, Google will often index these IDX listings in search results, which sounds good on paper, however, when a listing is removed from the IDX, Google thinks that page is now dead. The once indexed page that was doing you little to no good is now your worst enemy.
The Solution:
You need to update the robots.txt file to disallow the search engine robots to crawl and index those pages. Here is an example of how can you accomplish this (assuming the directory your MLS plugin is in is /idx/):
User-agent: *
Disallow: /idx/
Disallow: /idx
After you block the search engine robots from crawling and indexing your site, please make sure you visit the Google webmaster tool link removal request tool — https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals — and add the individual URL(s) or directory you wish to block the search engines from crawling and indexing.
Social Media Week LA is nearly upon us… we’re less than 4 weeks away!
In case you’re unfamiliar with Social Media Week, it’s a multi-platform conference that allows hundreds of thousands of people all around the world to connect and discuss emerging trends in mobile and social media. Social Media Week is hosted in cities, such as Bogota, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Milan.
While the schedule for SMWLA is not completely set yet, we’ll keep you updated with the latest news and where we’ll be. The Highly Relevant Team is helping to organize a couple of the events for that week — and I can tell you that there are definitely some “can’t miss” events that you’ll want to attend if you’re in LA that week.
There’s going to be some fantastic speakers, panel events, networking events, and parties going on — and for all my fellow Trojans out there, there’s even going to be SMW events taking place at USC.
In addition, our very own Alex Becker and Rex Freiberger will both be panelists on a couple of the panel events that week.
To get you all pumped up about SMWLA, check out the latest version of Socialnomics’ “Social Media Revolution:
Please drop us a line if you plan on attending any of the events, and we’ll be sure to connect — see you all there!
Monday was another big day for Apple. All over the world, Apple fanboys rejoiced. His majesty, Steve Jobs, took the stage at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco and officially unveiled Apple’s latest creation—the iPhone4. This newest Apple release is sure to be the most sought after gadget in the tech space since Jobs last showed us the iPad.
The most anticipated feature of the iPhone 4 is its front facing camera. This feature allows for what Apple is calling “Face Time.” Face Time allows video chatting over the phone using its front and rear facing cameras. This feature will be limited to Wi-Fi hot spots, at least in its early stages. Although, we can be sure the developers are hard at work, scouring the iPhone 4 SDK for ways to make Face Time work over 3G. Could this be the reason that AT&T recently announced caps on its subscribers monthly data consumption? That point is up for debate, but there is no doubt in my mind. Much has been made about mobile video chatting in the weeks since Gizmodo revealed the new phone to the world.
Apple's Promo Video of iPhone Features
I must admit that at first, I was really excited. It will also be nice to talk to friends and family, face to face from anywhere in the world. In a business sense, this will be a great tool as well. You can tell a lot about what the person is saying and thinking through their facial expressions—good or bad.
That said, it is a cool feature and will certainly change the way that we communicate with each other.
Some of the other features the Apple unveiled were:
• Multitasking
• 720p HD video and editing on the phone
• The front and back is made of aluminosilicate glass held together by a custom alloy band that also acts as a antenna
• 960X640 LCD display that is said to be the highest resolution phone screen ever made.
• Other features.
All told, this past Monday was a great day for Apple and its legion of fans. The iPhone 4 represents another huge step forward for the mobile industry. Apple has once again set the bar. It is now up to everyone else to catch up.
Your move Google.
Before I get started, I think I should give a brief description of what a Content Management System (CMS) is. It is software, implemented as a web application, which allows users to create and manage HTML content. In short, it is a program used to build a website.
Okay, now that that’s out the way…I’d like to compare arguably the top CMS players out there right now – WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. In the last couple years, WordPress has gone from being a blog publishing application to a full on CMS so I’m definitely comparing apples to apples.
WordPress is deeply rooted in the Blogosphere, so you would be okay to assume that its CMS blogging software reigns supreme to Joomla and Drupal. For the relatively inexperienced web developer/designer, WordPress may be the best CMS to quickly start sharing your thoughts.
Comments, blogger profiles, trackbacks, and pinging services are default features already built into the CMS, so getting viewers to your site and analytics on this traffic is pretty much a click away. You can get your site or your clients’ websites up and running in little time.
The Cons of WordPress:
- Currently a smaller community of users than Joomla or Drupal
- Not the most developer- friendly CMS. Sometimes upgrades by WP developers can make your site disappear.
- Upgrades and plug-ins can sometimes render more glitches than fixes
Joomla is probably the most favored open source CMS amongst web designers. Joomla’s engine has the ability to make websites look amazing. Some developers like it because they feel it provides them a lot of freedom to develop and customize. Joomla has an incredibly large community also, so it’s really easy to find support with the creation of websites.
One cool feature that separates Joomla from the pack is that anyone with even the most modest of developing skills can override the default Joomla CMS without actually modifiying it’s original code.
The Cons of Joomla:
-When compared to WordPress or Drupal, Joomla has a lot to catch up on especially with being user-friendly.
- Coding is inflexible
- Can be confusing for someone to integrate into especially their experience with building sites is minimal.
- Many users rather stick to the old versions of the system
Drupal is the open source CMS of choice for web developers who rather hand-code content than use a “What You See Is What You Get” Editor. Yes, it’s fair to say that Drupal is for the quintessential techie web developers more so than the everyday blog site owner.
Because the community using Drupal is predominantly web developers, there are many out there to really help you with building a really powerful website that can really stand out from the majority of them out there.
The Cons of Drupal:
- The design/theme element of Drupal can be lackluster, perhaps because Drupal attracts web developers instead of designers.
- Not designer/user-friendly.
- Publishing on content with Drupal can be time-consuming, frustrating, and expensive.
My Preference
While I see the advantages in all three, WordPress is my personal favorite and that’s primarily based on the fact that its easiest for my clients here at Highly Relevant to use. The other two are great for the reasons mentioned above but my goal is to get clients setup so they can change or add content to their sites. It’s important for clients to share their thoughts on their site and because many have former experience with blogging on WordPress, it’s actually pretty simple for them to navigate through the CMS.
That’s right, Goo Goo over Google Analytics, and excuse me for the lack of better phrases, was definitely on point. The event hosted by Social Media Club – Los Angeles was streamed live to over 46,746 people (108,807 total views) on TechZulu.
Update: Watch Video Below!
Below is information on what we learned. Check back on Monday to see the video of the event in its entirety.
1. It’s easy, 5-minutes easy, to setup Google Analytics – As John Shiple mentioned…it’s easier than going to your local café and ordering coffee. Many content management sites such as WordPress and Blogger make it so easy to track the behavior of your visitors by allowing you to copy + paste a tracking code in the headers or footers of your site. You’ll be collecting analytics data in no time!
2. Having the Right Goals in Mind – Many people focus their energy towards driving large volumes of traffic to their site, which is great, but what you do with that traffic is even more important. Is your bounce rate high? Are you experiencing a drop-off on certain pages? Google Analytics tracks all that. By making your conversion goals more deliberate and spelled out such as “collect an email”, “add an item to shopping cart”, “spend X dollars to buy my product”, and “confirm sale” , you greatly improve your metrics and are more enabled to make more informed decisions to improve your company’s online marketing campaign and overall bottom line.
3. Tracking Inbound Traffic – Learning where your traffic came from and how they got there is just as important as what they do once on your site. So make sure you code your links to be human-readable. Use us for example; we over here at Highly Relevant like to comment often on interesting social media blogs found on Mashable as well as other blogs regarding online reputation management. In this case, of commenting on Mashable we would use the http://www.highlyrelevant.com/social-media-marketing.html as s opposed to http://www.highlyrelevant.com/online-reputation-management.html.
This helps online users on Mashable know we are part of the social media community plus it also helps us determine where most of our traffic is coming from – social media blogs or online reputation management blogs.
4. Need Help? Don’t fret. GA help is Everywhere – The panel members provided the following resources:
- Avinash Kaushik – the GURU of Google Analytics has a blog on the subject: Click Here.
- Google’s Conversion University has a bunch of training guides. Here’s the link: http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/
- Google Analytics works within Facebook. See this link: http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2010/google-analytics-for-facebook-fan-pages/
5. Creating Funnels –Funnels are great (and illustrative) tools for building the steps towards your company’s goal. They also show you how to identify your user drop-off rate at each step. Essentially, if there’s drop-off for every step you will want to limit and simplify the number of then in order to successfully convert into sales.
A special shout-out to the very informative speakers– You guys were great!
Check them out on twitter to see what other projects they are working or if you have any questions.
Serena (Host): @serena
Erica: @SnowboardWomen
Alex: @aybecker
Andrew:@andrewhahn
John: @FreelanceCTO
