Bill French's (bfrench) Blog

At NAR this week a very nice realtor explained to me how many mispelled words she published to gain a competitive advantage in search - it was an impressive array of analysis and effort. It always amazes me how far someone will go to game the system to beat the competitor - who can blame them - t...

I've started to see a pattern - the real estate industry is very data-centric; this is to say that most conversations and activities in real estate are based on information - lots of it, and very discrete in nature. For example, when helping a buyer, data elements such as price, number of bedroom...

In a separate thread (Open MLS for the Public but still No Complete MLS for Brokers) over on Mitchell Hall's AR blog, I saw a couple of comments that led to a comment that led to this post. Make sure you read the entire post and comments - it got me thinking."Selling a home is not an easy task. M...

We live in a traffic-centric world populated by very intelligent people that blindly assume traffic is the answer to everything and traffic metrics are the only thing we should worry about when measuring our online marketing strategies. This is a delusional attitude and lots of business people su...

In case you missed it, there was a good debate ongoing in the numerous comments of a recent blog post by Mary McKnight. The debate closed in on a basic question - Is there more than one class of index in Google?And if so, if you have a larger percentage of pages in the "secondary index", would it...

I'll be at NAR this year which is uncommon - I typically frequent technical trade shows, not places where actual business people must make real livings. ;-) We have other business units in Technology, Public Relations, Venture Capital, and Automotive (CES, my favorite), and of course Real Estate,...

I see blog posts everywhere and they have really long lists of keyword tags in hopes of ranking high for all of them. Burying your posts with more than a half dozen tags is really dumb because it actually hurts your ability to obtain better search recommendations. It sends a signal to indexing cr...

What impact does your blog have on your business web site?This was a question recently addressed by a company with some degree of bias, but seems to have done a good job of analyzing the data for at least one of their clients. I don't think they have an axe to grind on the blog versus no blog dec...

I recently noticed this comment in AR..."... I know that I also rank for most long tail searches."I don't buy this argument at all. I'm not suggesting this person is a liar; I just don't believe that anyone can know what the long tail comprises for any subject, even the narrowest of subjects.My r...

A real estate agent recently mentioned to me that even though he's still in the top of Google for common terms about his local real estate market, his traffic is down significantly. What would explain this? How could this be possible? All indications are that his market (a southwest US city) is g...