This post was originally written by Ken Shafer, past SEO Manager for Apartments.com.

Everyone’s heard of finding a keyword and trying to rank for it. Next thing someone does is put that keyword in their Title Tag, Description Tag and throughout the copy someplace like their homepage.  As far as on-page keyword optimization, what else can you do? Turns out, there’s more you can do on the page to let the search engines know that your page is about a specific keyword or phrase.

Allow me introduce you to latent semantics. Latent semantics is just the technical term for using surrounding words to gain or provide meaning and context.  Placing relevant and related words and phrases in close proximity to the keyword you are targeting can actually be a stronger signal to search engines than simply repeating the targeted keyword over and over again. Let’s take a look at an example of how to research and implement latent semantics. Read More

Are you investing in mobile advertising? Well, someone sure is.

According to an eMarketer study released yesterday, mobile ad spending will be up nearly 80 percent in 2010, to $743 million (which is revised from a $593 million estimate released earlier this year), and in 2011 will top $1 billion. Therefore, says eMarketer, “Mobile has broken through to reach the mainstream of digital advertising.”

This growth is driven by the explosion in smartphone usage. At Apartments.com, visits to our mobile sites have more than doubled year over year and the trend can be traced back to the 2009 holiday season when the proliferation of Android-powered handsets and iPhones, not to mention the steady sales of Blackberries, caused an unmistakable hockey stick-style spike in traffic. Those trends have continued through 2010, and throw in the expected surge in mobile-enabled tablet sales this holiday season, and it’s safe to agree with eMarketer’s assertion that ad spending – which, let’s face it, always follows consumers – in mobile is going mainstream. Read More

We’ve been talking a lot about how October 1, along with May 1, are traditionally the biggest moving days of the year, and naturally got a lot of folks asking why that is. Our assumption was that it was pegged to the seasons: That no one in his or her right mind would choose to move in the extremes of winter or summer. But we decided to do a little digging – internet-style – into the origins of the fall and spring moving rituals, and found we were not too far off. According to Wikipedia, the May 1 tradition got its start in New York:

Moving Day was a tradition in New York City dating back to colonial times and lasting until after World War II. On February 1, sometimes known as “Rent Day”, landlords would give notice to their tenants what the new rent would be after the end of the quarter, the tenants would spend good-weather days in the early spring searching for new houses and the best deals and on May 1 all leases in the city expired simultaneously at 9:00 AM, causing thousands of people to change their residences, all at the same time. Read More