Free Website Marketing Advice from Freelance Marketing Group, Inc.

Having multiple domains is great since it keeps your competitors from registering domains similar to yours and in the event you start another website in the future, you have a great domain specific to your business. However, it is not good to allow all of those domains to load up a current version of your website, even if there is truly only one site out there and believe it or not, this happens often. In fact, if you run multiple domains, check to see that each domain is either parked with the hosting company or redirects the visitor to your primary domain.

301 redirects are the only search engine friendly way of making sure that your domains or pages within a domain are being properly redirected to your primary URL.

Why Do I Need To Use 301 Redirects?

You need to use 301 redirects because extra domains displaying your current website are considered to be duplicate content and duplicate content is considered by all search engines to be a form of spam and that could eventually get your site penalized.

According to Google, the penalization for duplicate content is not the removal of your site from its index but rather they may choose to display one form of the content from one of your other domains rather than the primary. You say, “Well at least my content is showing!” Yes, at least it is showing but when you are focusing your marketing effort at yourdomain.com, you don’t want to devalue it by having the engines give you listings for myotherdomain.com.

Remember, ‘content is king’ and the more unique content you have focused at your primary domain, the better your search positions are going to be.

How Do I Redirect Domains?

Redirecting a domain is pretty easy, if you understand programming and have access to your web server, otherwise, leave it up to your designer or hosting company to do this.

Below are some common redirect codes for various programming languages:

PHP:

<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );
?>

ColdFusion:

<.cfheader statuscode=”301″ statustext=”Moved permanently”>
<.cfheader name=”Location” value=”http://www.new-url.com”>

ASP:

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”;
Response.AddHeader(”Location”,”http://www.new-url.com/”);
%>

ASP .NET:

<script runat=”server”>
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”;
Response.AddHeader(”Location”,”http://www.new-url.com”);
}
</script>

JSP:

<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( “Location”, “http://www.new-url.com/” );
response.setHeader( “Connection”, “close” );
%>

You can even redirect a domain by incorporating a little code into the .htaccess file (apache servers only):

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

For more information on 301 redirects, give us a call or talk with your hosting company but be sure and check to see that you don’t have more than one domain showing the same website.

Trevor Walter - Freelance Marketing Group, Inc.

Freelance Marketing Group, Inc. has developed a new real estate marketing program designed to bring special attention to higher priced or unique properties.

The advent of the Internet has definitely given real estate agents a platform to display, advertise and sell property at the same time giving the buyer the ability to view property without the pressures of traveling to each location. But, with the amazing amount of real estate available these days, agents are finding it harder to get some of their more profitable or unique properties viewed online and buyers are finding it tiresome wading through hundreds if not thousands of listings.

Our new real estate marketing program provides a way to draw attention to specific properties via “mini-sites”. These mini-sites are basically a single page layout that includes:

Property Details
Square Footage
Acreage
Amenities

Financial Information
Asking Price
Seller Flexibility

Seller Agent Contact Information
Company Name
Agent Name
Phone / Fax
Email
Primary Company Website

Photo Gallery
1 primary picture
10 additional pictures

Additional Property Information - ie. your sales pitch, description of the area, etc.

Each of these mini-sites is hosted on a “state specific” domain name and promoted via paid advertising to the top search engines, Google, AOL, Yahoo, MSN and if commercial property is being sold, your listings will appear on Business.com (a premiere B2B directory).

Promotion for each property runs either until property is sold or until the listing agent requests the property removed.

For questions about Real Estate Marketing, please give us a call toll free: 866-862-8135

Trevor Walter - Freelance Marketing Group, Inc.

With the new Google Universal Search coming up in the near future, social media is becoming a much needed and very important part of your website marketing program. There are a lot of avenues you could choose to pursue in the social media arena but the easiest and most effective maybe something that you already have – Articles.

The search engines have long like content, in fact the phrase ‘content is king’ has been around just about as long as the Internet but it has never been so true as we will see over the coming months when Google finally implements the long awaited Universal Search. From now on, results displayed in the natural listings of the engines will not only include web pages but articles, blogs, podcasts and much more. The upside to this is that most of you probably already have at least a few articles that you have written about your company, products, services, industry, etc. and those articles can be used to your advantage if marketed properly.

We call it Article Marketing and it is just what it sounds like, the marketing of important and informative information that you have written relating to your industry. Most of the time, we see these in the form of whitepapers, press releases or full on new articles. With a little effort and some time, we can have your articles optimized to utilize keywords important to your business and promoted across the web through several of the top article distribution centers.

Trevor Walter - Freelance Marketing Group, Inc.