Real Estate Website Link Bait Solution

Posted on August 25, 2009
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Realtors Can Approach Link Bait Differently

In my line of work I’ve been exceptionally lucky in that I have almost no real competition. I am a freelancers freelancer so to speak where designers and other web professionals outsource work to me predominantly in the area of converting PSD Files to a fully validating XHTML / CSS layout. A full 90% of all my clients are web masters, designers, hosting companies and those in the mass media (news, entertainment, journals, blogs etc). I have the luxury of taking a designers desired end result, and turning it into a WordPress, Joomla or OpenRealty functional template with none of the necessary preliminary fundamentals required for most freelance related work.

There is a downside to this which is that I end up with NO links back and no design credits even if I originate the design. A hosting company for instance may hire me to build them an inventory of 10, 15, 20 or so free templates, but I can’t expect to retain the footer link-back or design credits as one could plainly see. Link bait is still none the less very important and the method I use involves the development and publishing of FREE OpenRealty and WordPress tools that extend the applications in hopes people will write about them and link back to my site. Writing about this very subject in a forum, I expanded it a bit by suggesting that maybe the way Realtors could benefit from something similar is to have their own inventory of free themes and such published.

After writing that forum post, I’ve seen the idea seat itself in the minds of those entertaining the idea progressively more and more over the past three months. Realtors have contracted the development of link bait themes where they can publish these themes to WordPress, give them away on their blogs and even provide an avenue for discussion about them right on their real estate websites. Give away 500 copies of a theme with your link at the bottom is certainly attractive for those seeking some quick come up in the search engines but it doesn’t stop there. I’ve been contracted to build Joomla and WordPress plugins by more Realtors than any other type of client. Not just Realtors bent on using the plugins for their own use but those that want to publish the products to WordPress as FREE GNU / GPL products in hopes of link-back. I can’t reveal which themes or plugins naturally but the results are starting to demonstrate their effectiveness.

It’s an Alternative to Worthless Reciprocal Linking

Links Back! You simply need them. Period! Every SEO worth his salt will tell you that you really do need a way to have links pointing to your site, preferably one way links from good sources relevant to your objective. Although Google, Yahoo and MSN to a degree have pretty much put real estate sites under the microscope after such rampant link farms and reciprocal link schemes there is still hope for Realtors seeking honest, valued, ethically correct and beneficial link backs without taking part in yet another foolish scheme to trick the Search Engines.

Think about this scenario for a moment. Either of us can intelligently see that there must be something a bit unusual about a Realtor linking to another Realtor. If not a single event then maybe Realtors linking back to dozens or even hundreds of Realtors. Most would gather its little more than a bunch of reciprocal links in the midst of some scheme and they would likely be correct. Link schemes fail 100% of the time once the search engines developers catch on and adjust the algorithm. Penalties are the likely end result.

What can a Realtor do to reap the same or similar positive results from massive links back without getting put on the chopping block? My answer is to publish plugins, addons, widgets, and themes, lots and lots of themes. As I stated above I have had several dozen requests for this after making a post on a real estate forum regarding the subject and it stands to reason why this hit such a positive note. There is a clear benefit to the approach that isn’t likely to be construed as unethical or cheating by any means. So by doing so, the link back stands the greatest chance of being beneficial when compared to other methods being employed. But not just any link backs will do, you have to be intelligent how you approach this. Although I’m not really in a position to reveal how a few of my clients are doing this I can however suggest a few ideas for you to consider.

If a Realtor were out seeking links back from other Realtors then designing a theme that can be used by Realtors would seem to be the natural avenue. But experience and time have demonstrated that this is not always the most productive or effective way of getting the types of links that the search engines consider "legitimate" for lack of a better term. It would be my suggestion that a Realtor seeking to reach the ideal types of link back that the themes they give away be fitting of the ideal target audience. Community portals, news blogs, mortgage sites and the like would seem to be the ideal approach. Giving away a theme that results in downloads exceeding 500, a thousand or several thousand doesn’t require a great deal of effort for anyone to understand the power in that link back math. But what are the costs compared to the value in doing so. Here is a small menu of my costs associated to doing this that you may compare to your other efforts and the cost to benefit ratio associated with your existing methods. I will say this, having your own theme which you can distribute as link bait is most often at or about $450 on average. Images, custom code, and other features naturally increase this especially if you plan on including royalty free images or icons. In each of those listed below you retain copyright, license and footer link back to your real estate site.

  • Converting a Photoshop PSD file to a fully functional WordPress template (providing its compliant width) starts at $300.
  • Converting or cloning from a static HTML to a fully CSS XHTML valid WordPress template starts at $150 – $180
  • Creating a custom template for WordPress based on your design artwork or sketch starts at $350
  • Creating a custom template for WordPress based on a link list of example sites you submit, starts at $350 and usually never exceeds $600.
  • Converting your existing theme, template or site to a WordPress powered site starts at $380 and content is usually pretty affordable at or about $2 per page but can go up quickly with complex content.
  • Designing from scratch and then building for WordPress to include coding for an options panel usually starts $500 with an average being $650. This is the ideal although an options panel can be added to any of these theme scenarios.
  • Custom Design, conversion and then porting to include an options panel – Email for Quote.

How much time, effort and money are you willing to spend trying to get 50, 100, 500 or more links back to your site. If you feel that you could get hundreds of links back for under $500 in terms of effort and dollars spent then the idea of publishing a free theme will be a moot and pointless avenue to pursue. If however you can see that an entry level theme starts at barely $250, the cost to benefit ratio is exceptionally reasonable. Please feel free to contact me via the Contact form.

Hobo Spider Bites

Posted on August 25, 2009
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Hobo SpiderHere is the mug shot of my blog post subject today. Its called the Hobo Spider aka the aggressive house spider and for good reason. My recent encounter with this infectious parasite makes me wish it was on the endangered species list. The bite a full 50% of the time is not toxic, go figure the odds were not in my favor since both times they bit me, both were venomous.

How ugly can these bites really be? Well let me give you just a brief idea and you decide for yourself. I had originally written this post as a quickie, no great detail and no effort to highlight anything in particular. Two days after this original post I was told that if the infection and swelling in my foot did not recede in a few days that they would amputate my toe where one of the bites were. I had originally thought that the bite, although painful, was actually in check and not advancing at all. Therein lies the deception with these types of spiders. You think its just a little red mark that itches, some mild infection and swelling and it reduces and you think its nothing. Then the destruction of all the flesh around the bite starts to take place and you end up with a hole that gets bigger and bigger until it gets to be alarming. This is no misquito bite or mild bee sting, this is much worse.

The Hobo Spider is rather infamous for this kind of destruction. Even the feared Recluse spider has nothing on this devil in terms of reputation. There are even sites dedicated to it beginning with the HoboSpider.org and many CDC related sites at universities where they study the effects and health issues surrounding the bite.

I’ve done a fair bit of research about this arachnid and discovered that the bite is as deadly as the Brown Recluse, more random, more frequent, and most often between the month of August until the first freeze. In my house I managed to kill one every single night for the past two weeks. As I’ve read, they hunt at night and have poor vision adding to their aggressive behavior and chance encounters with sleeping victims. They say that they are attracted to sound and movement. So, I decided to locate one and test the idea that sound attracts them, so a few feet from the spider made a little noise with a spoon to see if it would come running. No such luck, it actually scared it away. Apparently its stealth they prefer.

One interesting fact I found was that even though only 50% of their bites are venomous, they still account for a full 75% of all hospital visits for stings, bites and injuries caused by bugs during the same seasonal time period. It has also been suggested that spraying for them may not be good because the hobo spider unlike others is rather resilient and durable and can survive many things that kill other spiders and insects. By spraying you tend to exterminate its primary enemy and natural predator the giant house spider.

Anyway, enough of the post revision to correct a few things and detail about the effects of this guys bite, time to get caught up from 4 days of not working. Remember, my nemesis is your nemesis and every chance you have to kill one, do it, you are doing the world a favor.

Updated WordPress Plug-ins

Posted on August 20, 2009
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Quick note on the updates to the WordPress plugins today are listed below. I’ll be adding these to my download section later as well. It could take a few for them to show up on WordPress however. Form Creator is published by UltimateIDX and the documentation can be found on their site. Form Creator should be considered BETA release. It has bugs for sure, just need people to test and direct us on what features they want. PayPal support and multi form will be in the final release as well as the ability to export the saved contact form data to a csv file.

WP Random Elements

Posted on August 18, 2009
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I wrapped up the final code and style features to another free WordPress plug-in we are calling WP Random Elements. I built this plug-in after having faced many dozens of changes at the request of a blog owner where we literally spent 5 or 6 hours endlessly modifying and changing hard coded methods to randomize certain content items on the project site. Knowing that it would never end I finally decided to put the hard code method to rest and just build a plug-in that would allow the blogger to add, change and essentially customize the random elements presented on his site.

WP Random Elements is ideal for sites where you wish to randomize things like quotes, testimonial snippets, paste in advertisements, random images, link items and maybe even things related to shopping cart items as was the case in this particular project. Having built several WordPress ZenCart cross integrated solutions in the past year, its not too uncommon for a person to want to display items or products randomly in their blogs. This plug-in makes that possible, among other things.

Once WordPress approves the new plug-in for inclusion I’ll draft the quick install guide and add it to my download section. Please feel free however to ask for it in advance should you so desire. As with all my WordPress or OpenRealty contributions, its 100% GNU / GPL free for both commercial and non commercial use. Feedback naturally is GREATLY appreciated.

NEW CMS Like Widget

Posted on August 18, 2009
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For the longest time I’ve wanted to create a widget that would allow the blogger the ability to assign widget elements anywhere on their site and then specify what pages that widget would show up on. Popular CMS solutions like Joomla have this feature and its been a personal goal of mine to see it as a feature I could use in client sites so they could have a more CMS like feature to their blogs. Spending the day with my coder we decided its time to get this off the project list and published as our 23rd free plug-in / add-on to date. Released as fully GNU / GPL, this new widget achieves a few very important basic features that can make a widgetized theme stand out from the rest.

I’ll start the introduction with a question; Wouldn’t it be nice to create a widget that the end user could add content, php, menu’s, ads, images, and other elements that could be assigned on a page by page basis? With my new free WordPress widget you can assign the widget to pages, posts, categories, tags, or has tag easily. Similar in characteristic to the upgrade to the WP Menu Creator, you can now assign custom elements to multiple widget locations and specify where that widget will show up.

Once approved by WordPress, please download the widget and provide feedback on additional features you wish to see included in our next release. If however you are a little impatient and want this widget right now, please send me an email or visit the contact page to request a copy. I’ll add it to my download page in the morning after I wrap up a project I’m on.

2 More FREE Addons Released

Posted on July 13, 2009
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Only a moment to introduce this post, I’ve released the WP Dwellicious on WordPress for download, once approved you can download it there and the OpenRealty Dwellicious. Each of these essentially have functionality for placing either bookmarking links in your listings details pages or displaying Dwellicious content in your blog. Each is free, each is new and each is un-branded. You may have noticed I’ve been working on my downloads area, well that is where the OpenRealty add-ons will be.

I need to pack up the OpenRealty one with a little documentation but its actually super easy to use. One tag is all that is required for making it work. Once in your listings details page, people can “social bookmark” your listings. With the WP Dwellicious, agents or mortgage people or anyone for that matter can subscribe to a dwellicious feed and display a specified number in either a blog post or page. A sort of quick and easy “Featured Listings” per se. An example of a dwellicious bookmark page would be like http://dwellicious.com/jaredritcheyj. Anyway back to work.

Itronix IX250 – IX260 Rugged Laptop Software Drivers

Posted on July 12, 2009
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Itronix Laptop Software Downloads Have Been Updated!

Itronix IX260 Atlantic Computing posted a whole slew of the Itronix IX250 and IX260 rugged laptops on ebay a month ago and they have been selling a spank load of them. I’ve followed a few of the auctions and it looks like some people are grabbing these for about $300 on average, most of which are in like-new condition. These were announced as lease turn-ins from General Dynamics in Spokane Washington. As a result of so many being offered, I’ve had some pretty active downloads in the last two weeks even though, on occasion some have encountered download issues with the larger files. What I’ve done is broken the downloads into smaller parts for those with slower connections to the files.

Who uses the Itronix IX250 and IX260 Laptops?

Who uses these semi-outdated Itronix Rugged Tough Books and why bother? The simple answer is price. New they run for about $3,500 but with so many lease returns the availability of tough rugged computing is very affordable. These little tough books are military tested and are still in use by many divisions of the Armed Forces as well as law enforcement agencies around the nation. But its not just the police and military that buys and uses these Itronix Rugged Laptops; its city offices, the water department, the utilities companies, cable companies, corporations, sattalite dish technicians, delivery services, security companies and more.

Anyway, I’ve updated the software and documentation download with the following..

Available Software and Documentation

For more reading about the Itronix Laptops I have these previous articles; Itronix Software Drivers Itronix Laptop Update and the Itronix IX-250 and IX-260 GPS.

PHP Form Mailer With DataBase Support

Posted on July 10, 2009
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You know after having googled for an entire afternoon, I was unable to find a single opensource php form mailer script that would save form data to a MySQL database. Granted there are dozens of scripts that are super close but none that are quite the drop in and go easy to modify type I was seeking. Having need for this for many specialized situations over the years, my partner and I decided its time to build one as a GNU/GPL product that can easily be implemented into products like OpenRealty and WordPress or other types of products without the need for an add-on or plug-in of sorts. So, I now call this new freebie the PHP FormKit.

The PHP FormKit uses the PHPMailer Class, some AJAX, a MySQL Database, Session Token for anti spam, a little jQuery form validation and some basic documentation. Naturally as with all the plug-ins and add-ons we publish, this will be GNU/GPL and 100% free of charge. I have a few tiny bugs to work out and a few custom HTML styled templates to add for things like “Email a friend” or “Send me a copy” that will deliver a nice styled HTML email all of which is template based. Can you imagine adding this to your real estate website wherein someone selects “send to a friend” and they get a nice email with your logo, maybe your mug shot and a few featured listings. Yeah its that cool and you are free to style as you please, create forms as you please, no limitations as to appearance other than your own mind.

I’ll show you a quick (sort of old) example I have from a previous OpenRealty add-on we built about a year ago. First a little background on this because it helps articulate what we are doing in this project. The add-on was designed so that when the agents were added to the OR Database they could log in and select from an inventory of about 20 or so pre designed HTML templates that would simply provide a nice templated look to some basic correspondence features in the add-on. After the agent chose the template of their liking, any emails sent to visitors or those who query about a property would receive an HTML email with the agents photo, maybe a few featured listings and then the standard details already present in the OpenRealty database. Its a much nicer way to send emails in my personal opinion. The nice thing was that it worked with Yahoo, GMail and others that are notorious for stripping styles and other elements from HTML emails. I posted a single example of the type of HTML you could for example use. Its NOT beautiful, but it gives you an idea. http://www.jaredritchey.com/projects/formkitp/ I’m off to the races so to speak, with lots and lots of work to do but I’ll get this posted here shortly for download.

WP Menu Creator Widget

Posted on July 10, 2009
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Quick note and semi quick announcement about an update being added to the Menu Creator for WordPress. We are going to wigetize it for easier implementation. Lots of people using the Menu Creator love it a great deal but struggle with the inclusion of the menu into their themes. We really wanted to keep the tool flexible for theme development so the PHP tag method served its purpose. Now that people are using more and more top end themes, including those that are commercial, widgets seems to be a logical enhancement for our next release.

What about CSS? I’ve struggled with the idea for a while now regarding this feature request and have really no firm idea as to how to approach the feature. When the Menu Creator was built we knew that we wanted it to simply generate output as clean and XHTML compliant as we could. Clients and end users of the Menu Creator are frequently frustrated with how to move to the next step in styling the menus. Our solution for now is a snippet bank of example code and tutorials yet to be published on UIDX. I think in future releases I’ll add in an option where a small inventory of example menu styles can be selected by a drop down list. It will be a bit lofty to include that feature so I’ll reserve the development priority to the multi lingual features and integration of OpenCube output as the priority for now. Below is a quick little snap-shot of the widget.

WP Menu Creator Widget

Link Credits and Site Wide Footer Links

Posted on July 9, 2009
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Are site wide webmaster links necessary or even beneficial?

I was talking with one of my clients recently about the importance of avoiding site wide links that lead to external locations when he had asked me why he could not find any sites on the web with links back to me from client templates after being in this business for about 9 years. The question at first didn’t really register with me as to why it would even matter but I gave him the very to-the-point answer that I don’t retain credits for 90% of my projects primarily because of who my clients are. In all the sites I build even for UltimateIDX or EZProRealty, their policy is to put site credit links pointing first inward to an article about the site and then from the article they will link to their sites as a form of contextual linking. The idea is as clear as a bell to me as to the motive why this should be done, but some people still wonder why having site wide designer links is even necessary. During the development of the UltimateIDX’s template inventory it was #1 on the list that site wide links would likely not be the objective in lieu of the heightened awareness that such links are not SEO beneficial. I’ll explain the conclusion we arrived to below.

Webmasters who publish free themes, templates and the like frequently put link-back links as the requirement for using the design. Most webmasters who do this try to put their best effort forward raising not only the standards but the expectation of what good theme and template design should be (theme and template are terms often interchangable). Many end users using the themes are happy with the arrangement in favor of using the design on their sites. It should be clear that that if a designer puts forth a design that is say, worth a thousand dollars in terms of time and development, that he/she should reap some reward for publishing it not only as an advertisement of their design ability but as type of pseudo payment. Keep the payment part in mind becaue it plays a roll. In simple terms it means, "you can use my expensive template freely providing you leave the design credits and link un-altered". Now although the point is a valid one and it really is the designers right to ask for the use license compliance to his request, many still question the overall effect on the sites ranking ability in part due to the site wide external link. There are newer alternatives being explored.

Our approach to the link-backs

To better demonstrate the characteristic of template link-backs I’ll disclose my own policy and then explain what UltimateIDX and others like them have been doing even with the distribution of free templates. Even though I’m not technically in the business of freelance web design on its surface I do take on private projects for individual websites and in most cases I don’t bother with a link-back in the footer. I do this as a business decision for a few reasons which include the fact that I don’t maintain a plublically viewable portfolio. The reasons are simple, I don’t use Jared Ritchey Design as my primary site for business even though I do some freelance work on a personal level as a result. So its not my objective to rank for anything beyond the things I desire to blog about. That includes design. When I apply my new template to this blog, I wont be adding the "Design" part to the site name any further. It will just be the blog of "Jared Ritchey" the unusually usual opinionated designer type dude, or whatever. I started out in this business working for other firms and today, many years later, I’m still in the same business. I rarely do work for individual companies or website owners as most are publishers of templates or other products that they simply outsource to me. I’m a kind-of freelancer’s freelancer for lack of a better definition. A good majority of my clients are those who are webmasters, developers and third party vendors that outsource template design work or MLS integration with OpenRealty or WordPress or even Joomla which is my self proclaimed specialty. It should be obvious then that I really can’t expect some design firm outsourcing an OpenRealty template to me to allow my footer links in the final product. Nor could I ask a template club or hosting company that contracts me for 10, 15, 20 templates they plan on distributing to give me some sort of credit either. I’m in a unique business with little or no competition. I really don’t compete with designers and design firms or other types of real estate webmasters because of the nature of my business so the links are of little use to me. The UltimateIDX and others may approach the link-backs with the same caution even though the benefit of it is certainly coveted and expected to some degree. But they do it "differently"! I say "caution" in their respect only because they understand that it can be a detriment to a site that harbors site wide external links.

The methods being employed today by our team for UIDX is that we distribute free templates wherein the primary main page or home page template php-file has a design credit link-back by default and a no-follow link back upon request. What we had then done was changed this in the subsequent templates like the page.php or single.php as in the case of WordPress. Those links were certainly be external linksbacks as they are internal pages or internal to the sites as it were. There had been times we expirimented with making each of these links different depending on page or post and the results were simply no difference good or bad in all our tests. What the UltimateIDX had concluded after numerous sites was that they will no longer attempt to distribute alternative links in the individual template files and opt instead for a standard industry practice of just including a regular design credit link-back in the footer. It gets a little more creative as an offer is extended in the template use license to allow the removal of the site wide external providing an article about the template or some other interesting aspect is referred to in a dedicated post. Naturally the link would be required to be added linking back to their site. Its a fine line really if you think about it. The SERPS do not want any type of mechanical manipulation of links which this would not be, but they also do not want paid links which are certainly a dangerous practice. Could the license use option be considered a paid link of sorts? I said above that it is a type of pseudo payment or compensation for use of the theme but at this point I doubt it as such as its not technically a paid feature. This in addition to to the fact that there really doesn’t appear to be a way to abuse it. It certainly solves the "turn-key or boiler-plate" issue many SEO types believe is an issue for the site owner. I’ll place my money on this option being used by UIDX for free templates any day over other methods. In our newest releases all templates now have a new extensible tabbed options panel that includes footer link alternatives and one such being coded now is an option to point the link to an internal page, leave it as is, or remove it after submitting a donation to compensate for the development time. I’m eager for feedback on this practice as its not discussed nearly enough. For now I’ll leave the SEO stuff to the SEO’s and they can weigh in.

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