A few days ago Facebook announced that they would be stepping into the search engine arena by releasing an experience that delivers personalized answers to your questions. It’s called Facebook Graph Search, and I want to point out immediately that Facebook Graph Search is not entirely a search engine the way Google is. However, Graph Search will incorporate Bing search results when relevant – more on that later.

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I had the opportunity to attend one of the best search engine conferences of the year: SES Chicago. The conference runs the first week of November and brings together the top minds in the Midwest and abroad. I should mention that SES is a well-known, traveling conference that builds incredible momentum as the year goes on – and Chicago happens to be one of the last stops. This means a wealth of knowledge is collected by way of speakers and social media coverage that comes to a boiling point in the Windy City.

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By now, most of us have heard the term SEO. You might even know it stands for Search Engine Optimization. But, what exactly does that mean? If your response is along the lines of something about showing up in Google, you’re on the right track, but there is so much more! SEO helps your website be found, read and favored by search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Many of us shy away from SEO because it sounds confusing and hard to manage, but it’s not. With a few tips, you can take control of your SEO!

To prove our point, we asked Amado Candelario, SEO Manager of Apartments.com, to host the Apartments.com Training Series Live! webinar on search engine optimization. In this 30 minute session, Amado covered a lot of ground, explaining why SEO is crucial for small business web design, how to implement an SEO strategy and what to avoid. The recorded webinar is available for you to view here. A few of the highlights from the Q&A session are: Read More

We hear it all the time – I just don’t have the time or energy to stay current with Google or I don’t know the first thing about Facebook marketing, or worst yet, I have a website, that’s all I need to do.

While my post will touch on the latter two points, I am not here to endorse Facebook or scold you for abandoning your website like a bad habit. My goal is to provide you with easy-to-implement pointers on how to build a solid yet simple website that is both search-engine and user friendly without making your web developer burn the midnight oil. Let’s dive right in. Read More

Does the thought of optimizing your website make you wake up in a cold sweat every night?  Do you hear the phrase SEO strategies for ranking number 1 in Kentucky and think to yourself, someone got it wrong, what they meant is SEC strategy falls on no. 1 ranked Kentucky (let’s go Wildcats!)?  My apologies for throwing a March Madness reference in there, but it is that time of year again. Or, simply put, do you just not have the resources to keep a well maintained website according to Google’s standards?

If any of these questions resonate with you, then I would like to talk about a product Google has been pushing rather aggressively for some time now and the potential impact it may have to you, especially if SEO and website maintenance are on the same level as quantum field theory in your book.  The product I am referring to is Google Places and if you have not yet claimed your Places, it’s a good thing you are reading this post. Read More

Most people know that SEO is important, but not many know how to get started.  In this episode of our Got a Minute? video series, I am going to walk through the SEO and SEM tools I use every day to monitor Apartments.com.  Hopefully some of these work for you, but there are lots of tools available, so you can find something that fits your needs.  If you have any questions after watching the video, please leave them in the comments section below.

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The social media panel discussion I participated in at the 2012 TransUnion Property Management Summit last week in Denver was astonishing for what did and didn’t happen.  What did happen: The audience of multifamily professionals seemed surprisingly – if not a tiny bit begrudgingly – accepting of property ratings and reviews. They’re here to stay and there’s nothing we can do to stop it, was the prevailing attitude.  Begrudging acceptance will never be confused with warm embrace, but what I witnessed was a giant leap from the outright resistance prevalent in the industry up until now.

And that’s a good thing.  There’s plenty of research indicating how important reviews are in making a big purchasing decision, and there’s none bigger than deciding where to live. Read More

Last week Google announced on their blog that they would be transforming their search experience into something rich with people and personal content.  Today, Google claims search is limited to public webpages that are created by people you’ve never met.  At the heart of this new ‘search,’ Google is looking to bring your social world closer to you than ever before:

“Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.” – Amit Singhal, Google Fellow Read More

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

We’ve all been there. You have this great piece of new content; a fresh article or updated information about a property or model type and you don’t want to wait for the search engines to take their sweet time finding it and getting it indexed.  Lucky for us, Google has recently provided a couple of options for getting that content discovered a little quicker.  You need a couple of things set up in order to take advantage of them.

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

This is the first edition of our Got a Minute video series.  We are going to be tackling topics in about a minute with videos from experts at Apartments.com.  Today I am going to show you how to get reporting for groups of keywords in Google Analytics.

Let’s say you’ve been focusing your recent SEO or SEM efforts on the city in which your property is located, so you may be buying Chicago-related keywords.  Or perhaps you’re focusing on the property name itself, so you buy keywords like “ABC Apartments.”  I personally know that phrases containing the word “goddady” have driven traffic to my site in the past, so I used that term as our example in the video below.  You are going to want to know how these SEO and SEM efforts have impacted traffic to your site.  By following the steps in our video you can highlight traffic driven by a particular keyword or phrase. Read More