It has been a good long while since I offered any updates on client work that we have done; namely because we’ve been so busy with it all. Blog post frequency has suffered as well; a sin I intend to atone for.

A few weeks ago, we launched a new Wordpress site with a Paypal shopping cart for Barbara M. Siemens, author of The Piano Workbook, a 10-part series of handbooks that helps piano teachers and students with the study of their instrument.

Rob Masefield designed the site, which seamlessly incorporates the blog, a tool that Barbara is getting great use out of. We’ve already received a ton of great feedback on the site, including a glowing testimonial from Barbara. Here’s a quick excerpt:

To say that we are merely proud of feedback like that would be an understatement. It was a tremendous pleasure to work with Barbara as well, and to see her embrace blogging like she has is also very satisfying.

We have also put the finishing touches on www.champlainheights.com, an area-specific niche real estate website for James Hampton; the top performing Realtor in the area, and mentor to my brother Wes. When you search for Champlain Heights, you find James. Cruise through the Champlain Heights tour, or see the slideshows for any one of the 22 building developments in the neighborhood. That’s right; floorplans, images and stats for all 22 of them. Smart guy!

James’ site is built with Ubertor, a real estate CMS software application that makes managing sites incredibly easy. With a number of Realtors (and one brother who’s an agent) on our client list already, partnering up with Ubertor to help even more Realtors just made good sense. Stephen Jagger, who blogs daily on the subject of real estate marketing, (see his Real Estate Channel interview here) is Co-Founder of the company, and has introduced us to such terrific clients as Mike Andruff of Team Andruff, and Ian Watt of the Ian Watt Real Estate Team.

For Team Andruff, we created one of our trademark SEO campaigns, which included a keyword-rich re-write of much of their site, and of course a number of social networking sites to help them connect on a personal level with a bigger audience using the tools of the web. Mike is an avid blogger, and has devoured every last bit of advice and strategy we’ve presented him with. Mike and the Team can now be found on their blog, on Squidoo and on Technorati. They also have their own YouTube channel for video home tours, we created a very cool photo-tagging project on Panaramio to show some of their sold properties, and Mike even has a Facebook profile he updates regularly (no link, Facebook is private folks). Lastly, we also created a stand-alone social networking site for Team Andruff using Ning, a very user friendly site that deserves a blog post of its own. We have it set up with a forum, a slideshow of images and their YouTube videos. The whole thing took just minutes to set up, and has more functions than most other social media sites out there. Watch out for this one.

That’s all for now (or all that we are allowed to talk about without being restricted by NDAs) but there will certainly be plenty more news to come, plus a newsletter very soon as well.

Via the Ubertor real estate marketing blog by Stephen Jagger, I discovered this “Keyword Density Checker” tool that shows you the frequency of keyword use at any given domain, displayed as a very cool tag cloud.

If you’re not familiar with tag clouds, they display the most frequently used tags or terms for a site, using the size of the displayed term to represent its frequency. If this doesn’t make sense, just check the wikipedia definition, or better yet, enter your url into the box below and see for yourself:

If you’re expecting to come up in a Google search for a term that you can’t seem to find in your tag cloud, then you have some work to do. When you’re done checking your own domain, have a look at your competitors’ domains. All of them.

It pays to know what you are up against.

What follows is a case study of sorts; a real “look-behind-the-scenes” at some of the web marketing strategy we employ here at Tell Ten Friends.

A few months back, I replied to a Craigslist posting indicating that the poster was looking for some help with SEO. I replied, as I often do to postings of this nature in Vancouver, and a few days later Eric Burke followed up with a phone call. Eric is a local artist and professional graphic designer, and has for the last three years been working on a collection of prints that feature cityscapes and landscapes of Vancouver. To launch his new online gallery, Eric wanted to get his page rank up fast.

I was excited right away, because here was a client who already understood the value of the web and social networking, and he was gracious enough to listen to my harebrained SEO tactics:

• We started the same way you always do with a good SEO strategy; by first doing some keyword research, and later writing a list of keywords to be used in the meta data of the site, and in the copywriting on the home page. (I luuuv the optional flash presentation with music in the banner, don’t you?)
• Eric already had a blog, so we built into his existing domain, added the RSS icon, and he’s been posting regularly about Vancouver, the city that serves as both the subject and the inspiration for his art. View his latest post here, where he discusses the process of creating one of his prints.
• To increase his online social network and generate a few more incoming links, Eric went about building several online profiles to promote his site and blog:
  
  eric burke | MYSPACE

  eric burke | LINKEDIN

  eric burke | PANARAMIO

  eric burke | SQUIDOO

• We also submitted Eric to a number of artist directories online (too many to list) to open more doors to his site, and of course to generate even more incoming links for the sake of SEO.
• Perhaps most importantly, all of his prints plus his “photo-journalistic” shots are available at his Flickr account for free, under a Creative Commons license that requires attribution to the artist.
• Lastly, we embarked on a PR campaign that was exactly the right scale for a release of this nature. I submitted it to a number of my local press contacts (only the most relevant ones, and the ones I know personally), and we also distributed it online, with free submission to PR Leap (very cool, very “2.0″ PR site) Fast Pitch, and the Grandaddy of them all, a paid submission to PRWeb.
• We’re tracking Eric’s incoming links and media “traction” with just two simple tools: Eric’s existing Technorati account, and Google News Alerts, which update me “as it happens” every time an item is published on the web with the search terms I’ve specified. (Eric’s name, plus “Vancouver” in this case)

Admittedly, we had it easy in this example; The client is a very accomplished graphic designer with access to a web developer, and luckily the marketer (third person here) was able to get his ideas across very easily to these two industry experts. That said, these ideas can work for anyone who shares a few very vital characteristics with the client in this example; Eric is web savvy, and understands the value of joining these communities, making himself accessible online, starting and engaging in conversations with his expanding network of online contacts.

I hope you’ve found this little case study helpful; both myself and Eric welcome your feedback and input, and I’m sure Eric would be especially pleased if you subscribe to his feed.

Roland is in the middle of an interesting SEO/content management debate, and I have to say I agree with him:

Yes, a static website is much better than no website. But with modern blogging software like WordPress and content management systems like Drupal, Joomla, Plone it’s easy to setup static pages as well as blogs and you then get all the advantages of blogs (ease of editing, RSS which leads to higher search engine rank) and traditional static websites. This means you have a system where anybody can update the content without needing a webmaster or FTP which means the site is more likely to be up to date unlike most static websites.

(self portrait by Roland)

He continues..

Technical people and web designers who recommend to clients to use static pages with FTP, Front Page, Dreamweaver, etc. are doing their clients a disservice! It’s 2006 not 1999!

Better to use WordPress (even though I work for a Drupal company I’ll continue to plug WordPress for blogs and simple static sites; use Drupal if you want a comprehensive web presence including a true community site) and just use its static web pages features and make the blog part invisible) than to use some custom or hand coded static site.

I couldn’t agree more. Perhaps it would be too blatantly self-promotional to remind everyone that if you need a site built with Wordpress…