Seattle Condos and geocoding with geokit

March 4th, 2008

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seattle condos

Wanting to be more Google-centric, I’ve reworked the mapping API on Seattle Condos to use Google Maps instead of Yahoo’s mapping API.

Why would I do this? It’s up to debate, but I believe that the more data Google has available to it, the better chance you have to appear in their search listings. Using Google’s API will provide Google with more information than by using Yahoo’s API.

Previously, our geocoding was accomplished with Yahoo’s simple, intuitive API. Supplying an address and zipcode was enough to have Yahoo geocode an address and display it on their map. Switching to Google’s API was not difficult, but required a few small steps.

Google does not allow you to map points using addresses, instead you must provide a latitude and longitude. To accomplish this, I choose to use geokit for rails to geocode our existing addresses. I wrote a script to cycle through our database and geocode each record, then save the new coordinates for future use. After the coordinates were obtained, we could easily map the points using Google’s API,

Here’s is a sample of the code I used with geokit:
@location = YahooGeocoder.geocode("#{@condo.address}, #{@condo.zipcode}")
Posted by Jonathan Filed in Projects, SEO
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SEO for Press Releases

February 29th, 2008

There was a great deal of buzz around getting your site listed on relevant news sites via press releases. Is there any merit to this? Hells yeah. Once you send your press release out o the wire there is a good chance that Yahoo news, Google news, Reuters and other aggregators will pick it up if it is press worthy material. If this happens then the blogosphere usually repurposes the release and takes out excerpts or references. Hopefully some of those references will be your website URL. The most common mistake that I see is companies forgetting to use an anchored link to their own website in their releases. Duh?? Many writers, especially bloggers are too lazy to strip this out of the releases and if they copy and paste the news then you get another inbound link hopefully from a blogger that has relevant content to your business or vertical. If you happen to have something press worthy enough to get to the home page of Digg or other social news media sites then it becomes a home run for your link strategy. Here are a few good press release distribution services and some of these guys even have SEO upgrades for releases. Money!

PRWeb
PR News Wire
PR Log

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Posted by admin Filed in SEO
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Live Search Webmaster Center

February 28th, 2008

MSN has recently launched its own Webmaster Tools (Beta) center which is similar to the Google Webmaster and Yahoo Site Explorer webmaster areas. You can register you website and sitemaps with them now at:

MSN Webmaster Tools

Use the Webmaster Tools to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your website, submit sitemaps and view statistics about your websites. Once you have your site authenticated with a HTML tag then you can view a site summary, your rank on MSN, top keywords, top outbound links and top backlinks.

You can submit your XML sitemap for better results. Sitemaps help the Live Search robot find all of the files to be indexed. You’ll get the best indexing results by using robots.txt autodiscovery.

On the website status page you’ll see the date from the last crawl or your site along with the total number of pages that were indexed.

If you haven’t submitted your site and it doesn’t already appear in the MSN Live index then you can submit to MSN below:

MSN Search Submit

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Posted by admin Filed in SEO
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