I’ve been playing with QR codes for the last couple weeks after my first introduction to a Droid Eris by a colleague of mine.  Any smart phone with a barcode scanning app or a qr code reader can simply open the app, point their device at the code and the app will automatically do whatever the “bar code like image” tells it to.

I was thinking about ways to play with these, and while cooking up creative ways to try to help sell my house, it occurred to me that qr codes may have the possibility to play a major role in real estate marketing – if executed properly.

Consider the many places you could easily place the qr code:

• On printed brochures
• Print newspaper ads
• Upload the image of the code to the main data feed as an “image of the home”
• Billboards
• TV spots
• Website banners
• Craigslist

The possibilities are almost literally endless – and with the increased availability of smart phone devices, there is some great potential.

For those of you with a smart phone device, scan the code below and share this post to help me sell this damn house

If you don’t have a smart phone with a barcode scanner or qr reader installed – click the text link below to see where the code would take if you bought a nicer phone.

Sioux Falls House For Sale

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Yesterday I decided to take a well deserved day off. As some of you may or may not know I have made a decision to move to the Twin Cities area to work as a consultant for the Web Advantage team at FindLaw.com. I checked my daily “to do” list yesterday and had a couple small tasks that were finished before 9:00 am.

I then had the whole house to myself until noon, so I figured it was a good opportunity to play some Tecmo Super Bowl.  Rather than hooking up the old NES I decided I would just download the game to the virtual console on my Wii.  Unfortunately, Tecmo Super Bowl was not available for download, however the original NES version of Tecmo Bowl was available for download for only 500 points ($5), and since I had been given a 500 point credit recently from the Wii people, it all seemed like to much of a coincidence to pass up.

I got the game, started a season with the L.A. Raiders (nobody stops Bo Jackson) and began wooping up on the computer.  After somehow getting backed up to my own 1 yard line, I stumbled upon a glitch in the game that allows one to pass to their own guy in the opposing team’s endzone and get a touchdown for it.

I tried it several times in a row and it worked everytime (of course it doesn’t hurt that Bo catches every screen pass).  I decided to shoot a quick video of it so I could share it.

Note:  I was too lazy to hook up the NES and see if it works on it, or if there was a glitch in the Wii version of it.  I am guessing it is probably new to the Wiiware version of the game, because I don’t know how I wouldn’t have stumbled upon that with the hundreds of hours I spent playing this game as a kid.

Today the search giant Google began discussing ways in which it can begin crawling Ajax based websites.  This would be a welcomed change for webmasters that are forced to choose between the usability benefits of an Ajax based site and the necessity of sticking to website designs and functions that are more search engine friendly.

There are some challenges that Google would be faced if this were to be implemented.  One that comes to mind would be some of the more “shady” webmasters manipulating the code to serve different information to search engines than to site visitor’s, similar to cloaking methods currently used by many “blackhat” webmasters.

The announcement was just made today and the idea is still somewhat in its infancy.  It is certainly a step in the right direction and would be an excellent enhancement.  Google is welcoming any feedback on ideas / concerns with this.  Feedback can be provided here.

Below is a slideshow of the proposal:

Over the last couple years Google has been moving more towards a universal search model that provides searchers more diverse results than simply listings for related static pages on the web.  Over the course of the last year and a half you have probably noticed YouTube videos, Google Shopping results, book results, blog posts and many more different types of results returned for certain search queries.

The most recent addition to Google search engine results pages is related forum posts.  Google introduced these types of results on September 30, 2009.  For certain types of search phrases, you may now find a series of recent (or in some cases not so recent) forum posts.

Here is an example for a recent search for “cooking chili in a crockpot”:

I have also noticed that the same exact thing is happening with Yahoo! Answers posts for several “How To” types of questions.

Google has made mention of placing more emphasis on returning relevant “real-time” results for search queries… this seems to be a step in that direction.

This opens up an additional reason for webmasters and Internet marketers to add forum marketing to their overall strategy.  Not only does having an active forum presence in your market beneficial for ranking easily in organic search results as in the example above, it provides a great opportunity to establish a voice of authority and build some nice backlinks from high page rank authority sites.

Online businesses (the smart ones anyway) have been tracking clicks for several years.  The information provided by common analytics applications allows companies to not only understand where their visitors are coming from and what they are doing upon arrival, it provides webmasters a deeper understanding of opportunities for improvement and lends insight to strategies that are currently effective.

Tracking conversions online is simple with common, out of the box analytics packages like Google Analytics if you are lucky enough to define your conversion as an e-commerce purchase or visit to a particular website page… but if the goal of your site is to generate a phone call, unfortunately it’s not as easy to track.

Many webmasters settle on tracking the number of page views of the contact page as a “good enough” metric for determining site visits that generate phone calls… but there is a much more effective method.

In order to get a true measurement of  “phone call conversions” one should set up a couple virtual phone numbers that are set up to simply forward to your regular business phone.  Most companies that offer these are able to provide statistics on the number of times each unique number is dialed, which provides valuable insight into which pages site visitors are “converting to callers” from.  Many carriers offer these virtual numbers for $10 or less per month.

From here on out, consider using different virtual phone numbers on different marketing campaigns to allow for more specific lead generation tracking.  It may cost your company an additional $50 a month, but it’s a safe bet that after a couple months you will be amazed by the data and will have a more “clear focus” going into the future.

Google announced today that it has added an enhancement to the seach snippet that is displayed to users on search engine results pages.  Prior to today, search snippets were only comprised of the META description provided by webmasters, a snippet randomly taken off the page by Google, or a combination of both.

From today on, seach snippets on results pages can also include named anchors in a contextual text link format to help users jump directly to specific locations on the page rather than always being taken to the top of the page and being forced to scroll through all of the page content in order to locate the desired information.

Here are examples of 2 search snippets that include the new named anchors:

What Does This Mean For Search Marketers?

It appears that there is now a good reason to include named anchors in page content.  It would be a safe bet to assume that search snippets containing a relevant named anchor that is now clickable and blue instead of an entirely plain text snippet could lead to an increase in click throughs from organic search results.

Most folks involved with search engine optimization have had a hunch for a couple years now that Google doesn’t give much weight to the Keyword META tags.  In a recent video by Matt Cutts, Google’s voice in search engine optimization matters, it was stated that Google does not use the keyword META tags at all when ranking pages.

Keep in mind, there are other search engines that may… but it’s highly doubtful that either Bing or Yahoo! places much value on them either.

Here is the video from Matt Cutts:

There is some debate amongst the professional SEO community as to whether or not “first link priority” is or is not observed by Google.  For those of you that are unfamiliar to “first link priority”, it relates to observations made by several SEOs over the past year and a half that claim Google places a higher level of “importance” on the very first link it crawls on a page. (You may notice the anchor text of the first link on this blog is ‘home’…. not exactly what I should be targeting with this blog… but oh well, this is just for fun)

The phenomenon of first link priority is important to the internal linking structure of your site because the anchor text and link URL you choose to put in this location allegedly get the majority of love from the Big G.  If I were to tweak one thing on this blog to ensure that I was adhering to all SEO best practices, it would be to change the anchor text in the first navigational tab at the top of the page from ‘Home’ to something like ‘SEO Blog’… of course, since my logo is also clickable I would need to utilize some fancy CSS work to ensure that the ‘SEO Blog’ link is appearing above all other links in my blog’s code.

I have not personally been able to determine on my own whether or not “First Link Priority” is reality or simply “guru talk”… though to be safe I tend to to observe it and structure pages accordingly during the site development phase for clients.  This can be done via CSS or in tables if using HTML.

Google Docs, the free suite of online office tools will start being crawled and indexed soon.  According to a post made by a Google employee on the Google Docs help forum, “This is a very exciting change as your published docs linked to from public websites will reach a much wider audience of people.”

Google Docs, which is being used by millions as a free alternative to the pricey Microsoft Office suite, currently offers programs for creating and editing word processing documents, spreadsheets, slideshow presentations and forms.

How To Keep Your Docs Private

It is important to note, due to Google Docs being crawled, if you create a document that you do not want to potentially show up in search results, make sure you choose the “stop publishing” option under the “publish / embed” settings under the “share” tab…. especially if you are one that keeps a spreadsheet of  usernames and logins for websites and software programs.

It will be interesting to see whether or not organizations will be able to benefit in terms of SEO from this change.  PDF documents have been crawled and indexed for years, and in my experience tend to rank even higher than standard html or php pages for certain types of keyword phrases…. looks like it’s time to run some tests!

In the current search engine marketing climate, it’s no secret that a large number of relevant (or semi relevant) external links pointing back to your website can help give you a leg up in organic search engine rankings.

Unfortunately, it’s not exactly easy to secure a large enough number of relevant links, so creativity is a must if you plan to edge out your competitors in organic search rankings.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing have been known to reward sites for certain types of backlinks one day and then “slap” the sites the next day, causing a significant drop in search engine rankings.  In order to ensure that your website’s traffic is not solely at the mercy of particular algorithm change, make sure you take time to plan out a link building strategy ahead of time that utilizes various link types.

How Is This Achieved?

To make sure your backlink profile has enough variation to weather search engine algorithm updates, one should keep a few things in mind:

1. Stay away from individuals or companies that offer to submit your site to several thousand website directories.Not only is directory submission rather pointless in my opinion (aside from about 50 solid directories), companies that offer these types of services rarely vary anchor text, page titles and descriptions which is essential to developing a natural looking backlink profile.
2. Be creative! One of the most important keys to successful link building (and online marketing in general) is creativity.  It pays to secure links from sites that aren’t linking out to hundreds of other sites.  Step outside the box and think of ways to get links from these authority sites and your rankings will thank you.
3. Always be ready to leave a link!Some of the best opportunities to leave a backlink come when you least expect (and most likely don’t actually have time to drop a link).  Keep a spreadsheet of potential places to drop a backlink and make sure to check it weekly so you don’t get behind.