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
This post was originally written by Jim Davoren, Senior Analyst, Data Products, at Apartments.com
When asked to contribute to the blog on the topic of data, web analytics and other hip, rad math stuff, I grew excited. The scholar (nerd) in me declared, Finally, a medium to engage our wonderful blog readers with insights into all things data. The average guy from the Northside of Chicago said, Make. Data. Cool? Yes, I shall make data cool. Can it be done? I mean a blog contributor that writes about analytics and numbers, what could be more exciting, right? Rest assured, before I have myself a prolonged, 10 minute, nostalgic moment about all the joys numbers bring me, I’ll instead use this first post to introduce web analytics. I’ll save strange math and numbers for another day. 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.
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.
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
This post was originally written by Kerry Sugrue, former Social Media Specialist at Apartments.com.
We have talked a lot about tracking, analytics, SEO and reporting on our blog, which has prompted customers to ask questions about what all this means (We love questions! Keep them coming!). So I thought, who better to ask, than the experts? There are many different resources available for website tracking, both free and paid services. A well-known tool, which also happens to be free, is Google Analytics and I had the pleasure to talk with Jesse Nichols, the Partner Program Manager for Google Analytics & Website Optimizer at Google. We discussed the basics of analytics and how to get what you need to know from all those reports. Below is our interview for you to learn from. If you have any questions, please write them in the comments below. A big thank you to Jesse and everyone at Google from the Apartments.com team! Make sure you follow @GoogleAnalytics on Twitter for updates, and view this product tour for more information. Read More
