What is the “The Long Tail”?
The Long Tail has a detailed definition at Wikipedia, which goes into quite a lot of detail that gets a little bit too detailed, but the opening paragraph is useful for this discussion. It goes like this:

The phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities. Anderson elaborated the Long Tail concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (ISBN 1-4013-0237-8).

So we know that The Long Tail is a phrase that describes selling a large number of items, in realatively small quantities, that add up to be a large volume. In other words, the web makes it possible to sell a large number of items in small quantities, which when added up exceed the amount of more popular items that are sold. Amazon.com is an excellent representation of a company that sells way more unpopular books than it does popular books. The problem for Amazon, of course, is that it has to keep an incredible inventory of books in its inventory.

The point of the graph is that overall, Amazon.com makes more money (the yellow area) selling unpopular books overall, than it does selling popular books (the green area). This yellow area, is the long tail.

How does this help my website with search engines?
You probably thought I was going off track talking about books and Amazon.com, but I needed to explain that to lead you up to this next point. You and I can’t go out and build a warehouse and stock more books than Amazon.com, but there are things that are in virtually limitless supply that will help you sell online, and these are your keyword phrases and terms that your website contains. In other words, most website owners focus too much on a small number of phrases that they believe customers will enter into Google. The more popular phrases, or the first thing that comes into their mind, and they stop. If more time was spent focusing on a larger number of phrases and terms…. targeted words that coincided with each and every page in the website, they would have much, MUCH more success with less frustration. Lets take this further….

Focusing on Keyword Quality AND Quantity for SEO
Lets say that you are a Realtor. And you live in the state that I live in, Delaware. An you want to come up high in Google under “Delaware Real Estate”. So in your real estate website, you target the phrase “Delaware Real Estate” and you put it everywhere in your website. You might even hire an SEO guy to “optimize” your website to get that term in there everywhere. But nothing happens. You don’t really get a lot of traffic to your site, and when you search for this term in Google, you aren’t on one of the first couple of pages in search results. Something must be wrong with your website! Well, not really. It is more likely that something is wrong with your approach, because unless your website has an extremely high Google PageRank (discussed in a future blog post in detail), you aren’t likely to come up under that search term. So lets analyze why that might happen.

From the detail that Google gives us above, we can see above that 60,500 people searched Google for “Delaware Real Estate” in February 2009. The solid green bar also shows us that more than likely, quite a number of people are bidding on that term in Google’s AdWords system. This means that if you want to pay Google to have an advertisement under that term, you will probably need to budget into the thousands of dollars per month to both rank high in the paid listings, and have enough money to have staying power month to month. But lets face it – an individual Realtor won’t pay that. More people click on the free listings anyway, and since they are free, that is the place where Realtors want to be – at the top of of the organic (free) search results. It could also be argued that this term is too broad, so paying a premium for it or chasing it in your SEO might not be the best use of your time and money, since people that are searching for very broad terms are much less likely to be your ideal customer. This phrase (Delaware Real Estate), because it gets a significant amount of traffic, puts it into the green area of the graph, and it is not part of the long tail. Lets look at another phrase.

Now I did a search for “Dover Delaware Real Estate”. All I did is add the word “Dover” to the search phrase, making it 4 words long. You can see that Google shows “not enough data” for the month of February, but overall, they have statistics showing an average of 2,400 people per month that are searching for this phrase. Obviously this is a lot less people than the number that was searching for “Delaware Real Estate”. You can also see that not as many people are bidding up the value of the phrase, because the vague little green bar isn’t all the way full. If I were a real estate agent in Dover, Delaware, I would be targeting the crap out of this phrase. This phrase does not get a lot of traffic, but it is VERY targeted. There is also less competition for it, which is VERY important. It gets enough traffic to make it relevant to your website, so it should definitely be in there. More importantly than just including it, is WHERE you include it. Instead of being stuffed randomly throughout the website, it would make a lot of sense to make a page designed solely around this one term. The title of the page, the heading tag in the page, the content, the inbound text links, meta tags (not as useful, but not dead), and other attributes of that page should all have that term in it. This is where Delaware.Net shines, because we are very good at this, and we can automate much of it for you.

The Bottom Line
By targeting a larger volume of terms and phrases that are more specific, but less popular, will help you to cast a wider net with Google. Since there is less competition for larger word combinations, it is easier to dominate those phrases and come up number one. Understand that it is still sometimes worth the effort to target a two-word popular phrase, but as the popularity goes up, so does the work required to get noticed by Google for those popular phrases.

Action Plan For Using The Long Tail
Here is a “to do” list of things that you can do to use this technique in your website.

• Use Free Keyword Tools - There are a lot of tools online for generating keywords, and for researching keywords. You can get a good start on your own, but these tools sometimes expose ways that people search for your products that you are not aware of.
• Create a Larger List of Keywords – Don’t stop at 20 or even 50 terms. The more keyword research you do, the longer your list should be.
• Don’t Worry - You can always add more and more detailed keywords to your site as you go, but the sooner they get in there the better. Moving up in Google and changing your PageRank value can take months.
• Automate Where Possible - I mentioned in my example above that the Realtor should have a page in their site for ever city in their state. This could be done by manually creating each of those pages, or, it could be done by making a dynamic city page. In other words, one city page whose content changes on the fly, depending on how you link to it. Using this technique, I was able to make a page for every state in the country for a client in minutes. Be smart and plan this out with your web designer.
• Use Long-Tail Terms Everywhere – Google reads only what you give it, so these terms should exist in your links as well as your content. Also consider adding these tags to your image alt tags, and your link title tags.
• Add Pages – If you are able to add pages and content to your website on your own, then keep in mind that beside the cost of your time, those pages are free of charge to you. So the more content that you put into your website the better. This doesn’t mean that you should indiscriminately add pages and pages that have nothing but keywords in them. If you aren’t able to add pages and content to your website on your own, then consider adding a Content Management System (CMS) to your website. Almost every site we build now contains a CMS system so that clients can add and edit content on their own.
• Ecommerce Tricks
  
  • Informational Products- If you have an ecommerce store, then you should be able to add detailed descriptions of products, and also have the ability to add informational pages. In other words, it is possible to add pages into an ecommerce store that behave as articles, even if they are within a product page. In our store engine, we built the ability to hide the checkout and “add to cart” icons on certain pages. We call those pages “informational pages”. This was done so that customers can embed articles into the product catalog.
  • We also created “informational options”, which allows customers to add keyword-laden instructions into the options area of the product pages.
  • Always mix up your keywords in your custom page titles. The page title is the text that appears at the top of your browser window, and this can be edited on each product page. Instead of using the same keywords over and over in your store, add a custom title that reflects the make, model, part number, and keywords that reference each product.
• Blogs – If you are an expert at what you do, then you should add a blog to your site. Most importantly, you should keep it updated. Blogs are an easy and inexpensive way to add supplemental content to your website. I charge only $50 a year to host a blog, and there are free alternatives online as well. Blogs can exist as a site on their own as well, like this one. Adding articles to your blog that have long-tail phrases in them are very helpful.
• Add Product/Services Pages – get into detail about what you do, so that you can have more rich content in your site.
• Use Tagging Features – Blogs, Ecommerce Stores, and our new CMS system contain the ability to add keyword tagging links to each page. Use this feature to mix up how you are describing the content in your site. If you don’t know what this is, please ask me.

Problems with The Long Tail

• More Keyword Research is Required- Leveraging this technique requires more research time to find phrases that work. There are many resources online for generating keywords and phrases. You can’t be effective by only using one tool, so you see why this takes a lot of time. I can steer you in the right direction if you want more information on them.
• More Pages Need to Be Built – You might need a page for every city in your county if you were a Realtor that was following my example above. Also, you would need to know another dozen tricks or so for how to add those words in your site the right way. Many website owners forget that traffic can come from Google to one of your deeper pages (not your home page). So each page should be a little bit different and highly targeted to a small group of phrases, instead of stuffing lots of phrases into one page.
• There are Exceptions – Landing number one on a popular phrase can make you rich. I have seen it happen. But since Google shuffles up the index from time to time, that easy money can quickly vanish. Having a larger catalog of terms in your website that you target is like balancing your stock portfolio.
• It Requires Time – If you aren’t looking at your traffic reports and your inbound link performance from search engines, then you have no basis for measuring your performance. If you want to experiment with strategies like this one, you have to schedule monthly reviews of your traffic, to make sure that it is working for you.
• Fresh, Unique, Targeted Content is Still King – This isn’t what most website owners want to hear, but it is the truth. Search engines like fresh content. Stuffing your website with terms and walking away from it won’t necessarily help you in the long run. You should instead focus on how to adapt the long tail strategy into your overall strategy of adding and updating content in your website in an ongoing way.
• There is More – A solid website that has a solid SEO effort involves work in a lot of areas, so this is in no way a magic bullet.

I hope that this article will help you better optimize your website content better, and help you focus more on what will help you to get noticed. If you have questions about this article, or you have a related question, please reply using the comments under this post. I promise to answer every one.

My wife Kelly and I are currently building our absolute dream home in West Dover, DE, and the neighborhood already has Verizon Fios installed. I am giddy to get Fios because of the Internet speed. Greg Austin, one of our project managers at Delaware.Net, already has the Fios triple play (internet, TV, phone) at his house and he loves the quality. My only concern about using using Fios for TV will be the number of true HD channels, and the availability of true on-demand shows. Greg says it works great.

Our new house has complete structural wiring with CAT5E in pretty much every room of the house, so it will be great to stream music and movies throughout the house. We used SmartIS to wire the home, and they worked with us to make sure that the home would be future-proofed. We will be able to send HDTV signals over the network, and terminate the signal at remote HDMI ports. I’ll put more online about the home soon, and our current home which is now on the market.

• FrontPage was a beginner tool, that professional web designers shunned.
• Adobe Dreamweaver is the defacto tool for professionals.
• Company Intranets became more critical to businesses, and yet most businesspeople are not web designers. So it made sense to make FrontPage into something even easier to use for web design newbies.
• Due to the last point, FrontPage because the built-in authoring tool for Microsoft Sharepoint (Microsoft’s limited Intranet product).
• Professional web site design requires tools that generate standards-based code, which FrontPage could not do.

Microsoft replaces FrontPage with “Expression Web”
For users that wish to build a web site, and who don’t need a basic corporate file-sharing Intranet like Sharepoint, Microsoft created a replacement tool for FrontPage called “Expression Web”. So far, it appears that this new program has been a colossal failure. Why do I say that? Because no one (and I do mean no one) asks for it. Back in the day, folks would go to Staples or their local office store and purchase FrontPage so that they could put up a web page quickly. Those days are gone. Those that need nothing more than an extremely basic web presence today can use online page-building tools to generate simple template-based web pages quickly.

More about template sites
Template sites built through a web interface have widened the divide between building a basic web presence, and building a professional web site. This divide means that it is both easier than ever to build a web site, and it is also harder than ever to build a web site. It all depends on what you call a “web site”. Domain registrars make a killing selling those template sites, and yet they really are hideous to look at. Superpages web sites that you can buy from the local phone book are also just as bad, and they fall into the template category. I stopped trying to talk first-time web site owners out of those template sites a long time ago, because if a quick and dirty web presence is all they feel that they need, then it will take a year or two of enduring zero business from the web before those web site owners smarten up and purchase professional web services from a firm like mine (Delaware.net). In a strange way, those template sites actually gain us customers because they serve to educate future customers of the value of a custom web site. Features like search engine optimization (making your site come up in Google) are sorely missing from template sites, and more web savvy customers realize very quickly that their template site is under-performing and is actually costing them money.

Web Video Overtakes Microsoft – Microsoft Responds
With the wild popularity of video on the web, thanks to sites like YouTube, Microsoft has been left behind in this important era of the web. Since Microsoft’s arch-enemy is Google, and Google bought YouTube, the situation has looked even worse for Microsoft. This is another reason why FrontPage went away. For example, you can’t even VIEW the web site for Expression Web without installing a “Microsoft Silverlight” plugin into your browser. What the hell is Silverlight? It is Microsoft’s attempt to complete with Adobe Flash – the web’s standard video player. Once Adobe got Flash to play video, it put another nail into Microsoft’s Media player (my least favorite video player). For Microsoft to get adoption of SilverLight, they have tied it very closely with ExpressionWeb.

If you still use FrontPage, its decision time
Since FrontPage is going away, you are going to need to get a new tool for building web sites. If a low-tech tool for a simple web site is what you want, then I would use Adobe Contribute, which is an easy to use tool for Creating simple web pages and Intranet content. Several licenses of Contribute can allow a small team to create a static Intranet that is a good start for having a basic Intranet. If you want to build web pages for a living, or if you are learning web design in college, then you need to start using Dreamweaver, Adobe design products (Photoshop, Illustrator), and Microsoft Visual Studio. Those are the tools that the pros use.

Lastly, there are other alternatives and hyrbids to all of these choices. It is now possible to have a web site designed fairly inexpensively, which can also have robust applications to help your business run. At Delaware.Net, we have many of these applications ready to install in your web site – like calendars, e-commerce, signup forms, file management, and more. If you have a site built in FrontPage, we can help you to come up with a newer, better way to manage and improve your web site.

Do I hate Microsoft?
No. We have a lot of Microsoft servers in our data center, and we are adding more every month. Most of the workstations in our office also run Windows, with the exception of some graphic design workstations that are Macs. But when it comes to the web, web authoring, or Microsoft’s attempt to compete with Flash, they don’t have a chance. Even their Internet Exploder (Explorer) browser is a CONSTANT headache for web designers because it is not standards-compliant. So how are we supposed to believe that MS will make their developer tools compliant, when their web browser isn’t? The answer is that they won’t. You can see the frustration of web developers over Internet Explorer in an article that Computer World just released, and if you read the second part of it you can see how much hassle IE causes developers. Every chance I get, I try to encourage customers to use Firefox instead of IE.

The examples in my presentation included AJAX, ColdFusion 8 tags, Spry widgets, and more. I demonstrated how we are using these technologies in current web projects, and I also spent some time explaining how we win projects, how we manage them, and how we bill for them. Typically this is an area most web development shops don’t like to talk about, but we don’t have any secrets in this regard.

I demonstrated a couple of Delaware.Net’s latest on-demand applications, including our AJAX-powered email newsletter management program called Mail-Logic. During my first web design presentation with Adobe, there were a ton of Q&A questions about our web-based project management system that we use to help us manage our projects. With this presentation, I got into a little more depth on how we use this tool to manage over 100 projects successfully. That system is called Team-Logic, and yes, we do sell it.

A lot of folks sent me emails after this last presentation asking me about the CSS design resource links that I mentioned in the presentation. If you would like a copy of those, shoot me an email and I will send them to you. Sign up for this blog and I will send an alert when the on-demand version of the presentation is also available.

One last thing – the Adobe Acrobat Connect product that Adobe let me use for the webinar is straightup AWESOME. I highly recommend this product for giving webinars.

Recently, I bumped into a local business web site that is the only web site for the business. It is run on WordPress (the same software running this web site). Blog hosting fees and and the cost to launch a blog using pre-built designs is so low, that it is basically free. We charge $50 per year for a blog, and yes, I consider that to be almost free for a business.
So what is so bad about using a blog for your entire web site? Lots of things.

Reasons for NOT using a blog as your company web site:

1. Blogs contain posts in chronological order
   This makes it hard for you to stick product pages and informational pages into your site to promote your products.
2. Dated sections drop in search engine performance over time
   It is indisputable that blogs help you company show up higher in search engines. But not without quality content that is DATE SPECIFIC. Over time, the older posts in the blog lose some of their search engine power, and they become harder to find in the blog. Will the older pages show up in search engines? Sure. I have seen blog posts from as far back as 2001 in Google results, but you don’t want your products and services hidden from view.
3. Think of a blog as a STREAM of data coming from you
   Blogs are great for sharing things as they happen, and for sharing professional opinions and advice regarding timely issues. This is why a blog is a good supplement to a more standardized company web site.
4. Most blog owners don’t modify their blog code
   Out of the box, blog software is great for posting articles, and getting content online quickly. But to make the blog into a company web site means that you will have to install a lot of third-party plug-ins, and you would still need to get under the hood and get your hands dirty with the code to make your site world-class.
5. There are better solutions for posting certain types of content
   One misuse of blog software that I have seen is using them as an image gallery or portfolio. While this is POSSIBLE, it can be done using much better tools that look 100 times better. For instance, my company has a plug-in for web site that allows the site owner to create a handsome Flash image gallery and project portfolio. And it isn’t limited by the date-sensitive nature of blog posts.

It may sound like I am downplaying blogs and their importance – I am not. Blogs are critical to marketing. But like every good technology and tool, people sometimes overuse them and misuse them. Blogs should be ONE tool in your tool belt, not the ONLY tool that you use.
There are some exceptions. Here are some situations where a blog works great as a primary web site.

1. Professionals working for large companies that already have a web site
2. Freelance reporters and authors
3. For a sharing tips (like this site)
4. A content-specific news web site
5. Political web sites
6. Any site that relies on date-specific content

Why people make this mistake and settle on a blog for their business web site

1. Money - I have a saying that I like to use when presented by strange actions by other businesses: “If the behavior of a professional or business doesn’t make sense, look to the money first”. The majority of times this tends to hold true. Really thrifty companies that don’t want to spend money on their web site might opt for a blog to get started. While this might get them online quickly, they will outgrow the blog quickly if they are the least bit successful.
2. Domain Name Confusion – Amazingly, the choice and use of a domain name is STILL a confusing thing for many new businesses. I bump into folks all the time that don’t realize that they can have a business web site at www.theirbusiness.com, and then a blog at blog.theirbusiness.com. Not sure why they don’t get that, but that is an opportunity for me to help them out.
3. Laziness – Some folks simply don’t have the time or energy to do an all-out web site for their business, or they are satisfied with a simple web brochure. The problem with blogs is that they aren’t even a quality web brochure.

If your business is profitable to begin with, then the money your bad web site DOESN’T make will always much more money than the cost of building a great web site. Bad web sites cost companies a fortune. New business is lost. Brand identity and image are tarnished.

Initial impressions are important. I had a customer last year that only spent serious money on their web site after a potential client called them and said “I am interested in doing business with your company, but your web site is so unprofessional, I am not sure that you are legitimate“. We didn’t build that ugly site, but we hosted it. And I had tried to convince that company to let us upgrade their site for months. Only when they plainly saw that their ugly site was COSTING THEM SALES did they get very serious about their re-design. The new site cost them under $10K, and they landed six-figure projects through the new web site. Now their business is booming, and the web site as part of a new advertising campaign is partially responsible for that.

So treat your web site seriously. Yes you should have a blog. If you are professional working for a large firm, a blog web site is a great way to share your expertise. But if you are a small business that needs a professional presence to show off your products and services, you will need more than a blog.

Our new slogan for the company is “World-Class Web Works”, and this has several meanings for us. It defines our goal – to build and host “world-class” solutions for our customers, and to give them the best support around. It also defines our advantage – the fact that our world-class solutions make customer’s web sites work better for them. Even though we are miles ahead of local competitors, we are committed to constantly improving our services across the board. To that end, I am happy to share with you some of the milestones we have reached already in 2007, as well as a sneak peek at our TENTH anniversary announcements that are coming in October.
Our New Hosting Framework – Team-Logic 2.0
We’ve built a Software As A Service (SAAS) web application suite that allows us to launch and manage ALL of our web applications more quickly. We call this new system Team-Logic 2.0. We’ve looked at “foundation Intranets” and hosting panels offered by other web design and hosting companies, and I have to say that our new framework blows away what these other firms can offer.

Our new Team-Logic system combines roughly 30 of our hosted applications into ONE new interface. By creating a new security system for all of our applications, customers can now log into ONE interface to control their web site, handle their marketing needs, and track sales.

This is a MAJOR deal because we can build dynamic web sites faster than other companies, and these applications are easier to manage and improve. Turn-key applications running on Team-Logic 2.0 include; custom web sites, blogs, content management applications, eCommerce storefronts, real estate MLS systems, Intranets, mailing lists, and much, much more. We completed this new framework back in July, and deployment of the system is underway now for some large clients. The new system works for all clients large and small, and it offers a significant performance boost over previous versions of our applications when they were separate. We’ve also invested in new hardware for this system, which will run much faster than the virtual servers that other companies use. As you can imagine, it has taken over a year of planning to build this new framework, and now that it is complete we will be able to offer an incredible amount of value for web site hosting customers that they will not be able to find anywhere else.

New Email Marketing Newsletter Server – Mail-Logic
Our newest on-demand application is called Mail-Logic. Mail-Logic is a complete re-build of our email newsletter application, and it is now complete and undergoing testing for a large client. Mail-Logic makes it possible to send out your newsletters, special flyers, and more to a very large audience easily. Mail-Logic will be sold as an on-demand product that can be used within minutes for any client that we host. Existing Delaware.Net newsletter clients will get a free upgrade to Mail-Logic. The feature list for Mail-Logic is very long, and there will be a new web site for it soon. We have designed Mail-Logic to compete with Constant Contact and other email marketing vendors. Mail-Logic can be used as a standalone solution, or it can be used within ANY existing web site. Pricing will be very competitive with national solutions. Mail-Logic is built as a module that runs on our Team-Logic framework, which means that it takes only minutes to deploy the newsletter server for new clients.

New eCommerce Engine – Store-Logic 2.0
Our Store-Logic engine is undergoing a complete upgrade. The store administrator will work as a module under our new Team-Logic 2.0 framework, allowing us to deploy eCommerce store with new features quickly. Store customers will enjoy new data migration features, as well as enhanced UPS shipping, AJAX, XML, and other features. The new eCommerce administrator is much faster than before, and busy stores will be able to manage their stores more easily due to the AJAX technology. Since our CRM, eCommerce, and Mail-Logic programs all run under the same framework, we can custom-tailor an eCommerce solution that includes email marketing and sales tools for any size company.

More!
There is much more coming that we will release information on soon.

Folks are now waking up to the power of blogs, and how they can help their company’s image, their search engine optimization (SEO), and how to better communicate with customers. Unfortunately, most people setting up blogs are too lazy to realize their true benefits. And guess what else? Mediocre web design shops profit from this laziness.

People always want a quick fix – like taking a diet pill instead of eating right and actually doing the exercise they need. Hey, that sounds like me! So… when most folks realize the power of blogs, they say “I need a blog”, and there are many hosting companies that are more than happy to set one up for them, just like me (I sell blogs like this one for $50 per year, which includes a domain name). But here is the bad news. A good, useful blog isn’t just software. A good, useful blog is one that has information in it that clients actually seek out because it is useful to them.

Web 2.0 web technology, such as blogs, is changing the way information is being distributed around the net, as search engines now process this content differently than regular web sites. In fact, entirely new search engines are emerging that threaten Google and Yahoo because they work differently, put the collaborative search power into the hands of the people, and they are VERY effective. While I can tell you all about these engines and how they work in another blog post, this whole new genre of search and marketing power is called social networking and social bookmarking.

Do hosting companies and little one-man web shops take advantage of all of these features for their clients? Of course not. They just say – “we can give you a blog, it will help your SEO”, and most people unfortunately take the bait and set it up without any additional help or consulting. What happens next is an inevitable one-way ticket to an empty blog web site. Gartner recently did a study where they announced that 200 million blogs are abandoned, and while the number sounds high to me, I can easily see why so many blogs are abandonded.
Some examples of how NOT to deploy your blog

This week, I checked out the web site of a company located near me, whose name I prefer not to mention. Their web site was recently redesigned by a graphic designer that doesn’t really understand SEO, social bookmarking, or Web2.0 programming. How do I know this? Easy – from my years of taking drab web sites and making them work better. What this company’s new web site became, unfortunately, is nothing but an online print brochure, with some free blog software and photographs thrown into it. They probably think it is great. But 4-5 years from now, if they are lucky, they will realize that they missed an opportunity to have a site that could have added a lot more value to their company.

This company’s web site has a blog in it that says it is a knowledge base for answering customer questions. But it is empty! All this does, is send web site visitors to a dead-end, and it shows the world that this company is not really serious about their web site. Lesson: An empty blog or forum is worse than no blog or forum at all.

The Realtor Blog

Then there is a Realtor that has a “blog” in his/her web site. This Realtor has an under-performing web site, complete with an annoying Flash intro movie. If you really want to self-destruct your web site, put a flash into in front of it. The Flash intro fad disappeared (thank goodness) almost as soon as it started, waaay back in 1999. After you suffer through the flash intro, you are greeted with a very basic web site that has a “blog” in it. It can barely be considered a real blog, because it doesn’t take advantage of any of the latest Web2.0 features that blogs need to work well, like tagging.
Why is this blog useless?

• It has only three posts in it.
• Someone along the way told this Realtor that a blog is a diary (that is how blogs originated), so he/she uses it as a personal political soapbox. It is OK to have some of this kind of content in your blog, but it shouldn’t be the only content in the blog.
• Instead of educating folks about real estate, the area, schools, financing, or home improvement, the blog has three negative posts that complain about how the media affects the real estate market.
• All three posts say “I am selling more homes now than ever, even though the media says things are so bad”. That may be true, but it smacks of desperation.
• As I mentioned above, it doesn’t have social bookmarking or social networking technologies in it. This means that no one will find the site from alternative search engines.
• There is no SEO technology in the blog, so traditional search engines such as Google won’t index it well.
• No customer-focused content

Everyone has heard of the old famous saying in real estate – “The three things that matter most in real estate are; LOCATION, LOCATION, and LOCATION”. Well, in the world of blogs and Web2.0, the saying goes like something like this: “The three things that matter most with blogs are; CONTENT, CONTENT, and CONTENT”.

Before you start writing content like crazy for your blog, remember – it takes the right combination of design, technologies, content, time, and persistence to get the most out of your blog. Don’t just blog because you feel that it is something you HAVE to do to market yourself online. That isn’t true. If you write your blog content with customers in mind, they will repay you with their business. If you would like for me to help you with your web site, give me a call.

This new release of ColdFusion server will bring many new features and improved performance to our applications, such as our Team-Logic CRM application and our Store-Logic eCommerce application. Team-Logic is now being moved to these new servers, which use a fiber channel connection to a large storage array network (SAN) for storage. These hardware upgrades, combined with a new security framework, will make Team-Logic faster and more robust with features, such as integration with mobile devices and Microsoft Exchange.

.Net Integration
ColdFusion 8 server also has native support for .Net objects, so we will be able to use .Net with our applications as well.

PDF support is improved
This is great news for us because we are dynamically generating PDFs in several of our applications now. We are winning a lot of government and municipal projects now, and we are seeing more PDF workflows in those environments, so this will help take our municipal web application further.
AJAX
We are upgrading all of our applications with AJAX, and they all have AJAX technology in them now in one fashion or another. With server-based AJAX integration, this will simplify how we use the AJAX libraries in our ColdFusion applications.
Improved Uptime
There are additional features to the new server platform’s administration and debugging that will give us more information on any problems that may arise in hosted applications, making them easier to debug. This will help with response times.

I’ll give a full report plus some sample uses of the new features in ColdFusion 8 as we launch them.

• Spry AJAX implementation
  We have been experimenting we different AJAX libraries, including Prototype, script.aculo.us, and Spry. All of them have their pluses and minuses, but it is hard to argue with the seamless Spry integration that is in the new CS3 version. It makes implementing common AJAX implementations pretty much a drag-and-drop affair. We combined the use of Spry with some of our ColdFusion applications and the results are great.
• XSLT and XML Parsing
  It’s now much simpler to parse XML within the Dreamweaver environment, as you can browse the XML tree of any document, online or offline. This makes it much easier to syndicate content into your pages. One of the problems with using live XML, such as RSS feeds with this method is that you should plan to download the XML and parse it at at timed intervals if you expect your application to scale. For example, some sites limit the number of times a single IP address can reload a feed file. Slashdot and other sites do this. So if you had say 30 people or more hitting a news page that consumes a live feed, your server’s IP could be blocked. So you need to make an application page that consumes the feed, writes the files, then DW CS3 can aid you in parsing it, etc.
• CSS
  One of the features I was hoping to see, but it didn’t arrive, is the addition of site-wide design-time style sheets. I hate having to attach style sheets to each page as a “design-time” style sheet to see the styles in my pages. This probably isn’t an issue for developers that don’t use an application framework like Fusebox, but we do so it is an issue. It’s a minor thing, but it is annoying. Other than that, I really like that you can preview CSS for multiple devices, like handheld devices. There is also a new compatibility checker that lets you know if there will be a problem in rendering your CSS in different browsers. Dreamweaver CS3 also adds outlines and shadows to DIV layouts, which is helpful when you are designing complicated nested layouts with DIVs.

• Syndicated Superstores for Manufacturers and Distributors
  It is now possible to have one very large ecommerce web site store that can syndicate its products to other stores. In the past, we accomplished this by adding designs to categories within the main store, or custom-designing categories that we linked to domain names (these were called ‘mini-stores’). What we have now is much better.Here is how syndicated stores work:
  A master store is created, usually for a manufacturer or a distributor that has a large product catalog. Inside the master store, product categories are chosen to become syndicated. Retail stores (or “child” stores) can then be created with Delaware.Net that can seamlessly pull these products and categories as they are added or updated, which saves the retail store owner a tremendous amount of time getting their store populated with products. So drop-shipped or standard items don’t have to be updated. The great thing is, each retail store remains 100% standalone and fully-functional, so retail store owners can have a custom design, and enter additional products to their store. The retail store’s customer data and sales data is also kept private.A retail store example would be a vehicle dealership that sells parts for their vehicles. The company that sells them the parts could offer them a complete up-to-the-minute parts catalog from their master store that is syndicated into their web site.
• AJAX Technology Added to Store-Logic
  AJAX stands for “asynchronous Javascript and XML”. Its the technology that makes Google Maps work without constantly refreshing web pages to make the maps zoom or move. We are using AJAX in all of our new applications, and it really helps to make the Store-Logic administration interface more responsive.
• UPS XML Gateways Finally Complete
  Store-Logic (at long last) communicates with UPS’ XML gateways. UPS recently upgraded their gateways, and these have been implemented into Store-Logic. This allows Store-Logic to be used for international and domestic shipping with real-time lookups, tracking, and more. UPS rates change with fuel prices, and there are also separate rate tables for residential and business addresses. Additional features also include dimensional weight shipping calculations. Testing of Store-Logic shipping with a third-party company is underway and should be complete by early June. This will make Delaware.Net a “UPS Ready” partner with UPS, which many other small ecommerce vendors won’t be able to say because their shipping charges will not be accurate.
• Multiple Photos Per Product
  Store-Logic can now manage many more photos per product than it could in the past.
• Additional SEO Fields
  We have added an entirely new SEO section to Store-Logic, and URLs are also going to be “search engine safe”
• Lots more on the way!
  There is a lot coming to the Store-Logic engine that will be announced soon. One thing that we can tell you is that it will work more tightly with our other marketing and sales applications.

For more information, call Delaware.Net at 888-342-7965 or get a quote online.

The purpose of this article is to explain what is involved in showing real estate listings dynamically in your real estate web site, whether you are an agent or a real estate broker. I’ll explain how it works, what you will need, what is new in 2007, and what the costs are.

1. Understand Broker Reciprocity (BR)

Before you get real estate listings in your web site, you need to understand what broker reciprocity is. First off, Realtors don’t own the listings that are assigned to them – their broker does. This is why Realtors must work for a broker, and why brokers have to start off working as a Realtor for another Broker for a number of years. It is almost like an apprenticeship.

OK, so the broker owns the listings. The broker also has an account with the local MLS system, where they upload the listing data. This is usually done by an office manager or data entry person at the brokerage. In the past, these listings were all that a broker could pull from the area MLS system for their web site. So just a few years ago, you would visit a local broker’s web site and only see their listings. When the market picked-up, it became nearly impossible for brokers to keep a listing inventory populated – enter broker reciprocity.

Broker reciprocity is a database of listings where brokers agree to sell and post each other’s listings. If your broker isn’t participating in broker reciprocity, then you are missing out because your listings aren’t being shown on all of the other sites that are also participating. You might be saying “but what about Realtor.com?”, and my answer is “what about it?”. Realtor.com IS the National Association of Realtors, so they obviously have special access to data. Their site is also hard to use and randomized to keep listings fair to all participants. This provides a great opportunity for brokers to build their own web site and shine much brighter in local search engine search results.

So before you can put listings from the MLS into your web site, you should check with your broker to make sure they already have their broker reciprocity agreements setup.

2. Understand that Broker Reciprocity feeds are tied to a domain name

This throws a lot of people, and I am really not sure why. I’ll do my best to explain it simply. When you get a listing feed, it is tied to one domain name. That domain name either belongs to the broker, or the agent. It IS possible for multiple agents to have web sites using one feed if the domain is the same.

There are three types of web sites for broker reciprocity:

1. The brokerage web site
   Imagine for a moment that your broker’s domain name is www.somebrokerage.com. Imagine also that the broker has a licensed feed from the local MLS provider(s), which is tied to that domain name. The broker can now have a site for the brokerage, where all of the local MLS listings are shown, as long as the broker of record for each of those listings is also participating with broker reciprocity. So far, so good. Your agency has a fully-functional web site with MLS listings in it.
2. The shared agent site
   What about the agents that want their own site, but who don’t want to purchase their own feeds? It is possible, with a little domain name trickery. Assuming the brokerage has a fully-functioning site with BR listings in it, agents can have a site under what I call a sub-domain, which looks like this: http://joeagent.somebrokerage.com. Here you see that the domain name is technically still that of the brokerage, so the agent is still using the listing feed in an authorized way. By changing the “www” to the agent’s name, a separate site can be setup for that agent. There are MANY real estate web design companies now selling templates to real estate agencies that give individual agents this type of site, but this is how it is done. Most of these templates are not very impressive, but it is a way for an agent to get started quickly.
3. The individual agent site
   The real estate agents that I meet that are really serious about leveraging the web for marketing all use this approach. They buy their own domain name, and then they buy their OWN listing feed from the local MLS service. The cost for the feed alone is typically around $350 per year, which is nothing if you are a successful agent. Agents that balk at this fee that say that they are serious about search engine results and online marketing are kidding themselves. After the feed is purchased, the agents also needs to purchase web site design. If the design company (like Delaware.Net) has already integrated feeds into MANY web sites, then it should be easy to choose between a turn-key templated design, or one that is more custom-built.

Since real estate listing feeds are tied to your domain name, and they are essentially a legal agreement, you can use them with any web design firm. My advice is to go with a firm that has been around for over five years, and that has a lot of experience with hosting and managing MLS listings. I know of several small shops that try to accomplish managing their feeds on their own, with a lot of issues (some legal). Currently, Delaware.Net manages the importing of over 70,000 listings per day from only two area MLS services. This gives us coverage over Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey. Delaware is the only state in that list in which we have 100% coverage, but our MLS integration keeps growing.

Delaware.Net’s RealMLS Broker Reciprocity Application has the following features:

• All TrendMLS listings
• All Offutt listings (both services combined into one search)
• Virtual Tours
• Search Engine Optimization for Realtors
• Google Maps for both city searches and for directions to listings
• New Construction Management (models, features, plot plans, much more)
• Open houses module
• Farm & land search and listing management
• Commercial search and listing management
• Manually add any listing (including rentals) to your site’s search
• Featured Listings (choose which listings show up on your home page)
• Multiple offices
• Dynamic agent roster
• Realtor CRM system with lead tracking (optional)
• Company Intranet (optional)
• Much more!

Contact Greg Austin for more information at 888-432-7965

The site is www.leapfish.com. The domain name that I tested was “ce.net”, which will be the domain name that we are going to use for our upcoming version of Store-Logic, which we are going to call “Commerce Engine”. It’s a nice, short domain name that I have had for some time. LeapFish says that the domain name is worth $450,846.00.

That is really good news for me, right? I own a domain name that is worth half a million dollars. The sad thing is that the estimate isn’t accurate. There is no way that a web site could accurately determine what someone would be willing to pay for the domain name. Sex.com was a domain name that was recently sold for $12 million dollars, and at one point leapfish said the sex.com domain name was worth $60 million dollars. Now when you enter that domain into leapfish it says it is worth $14 million. Who knows?

Another site that has a domain name valuation tool on it is called NameBoy. NameBoy will email you valuations for several domains at one time, and the valuations are a little lower (more reasonable) than LeapFish.

I don’t trust either of these sites, but I think it’s fun to play with them and see what a domain name might be worth. Try out the sites, and let me know if you get a decent valuation on the domains that you own.

$450,846.00