Luxury Real Estate

Courtesy of Diana Tuman, Content Manager, Zillow.com

Two Luxury Real Estate members have been included in Yahoo Real Estate’s Guides and Advice column for the 10 Most Spectacular Ski Homes for Sale.

Listed at $15.9 million by Slifer Smith and Frampton Real Estate, the 8,308 square foot, 6 bedroom and 6.5 bathroom Norwegian Lodge-style home sits at the base of Vail, the largest ski resort in the U.S. The property features imported Hawaiian Koa wood paneling and French lithograph wallpaper, an indoor swimming pool, cobblestone driveway, heated decks and patios surrounding home, caretaker's quarters, separate guest house and dining gazebo.

Listed by Chase International, Lake Tahoe's most prestigious property holds few rivals in the world. Owned by Joel Horowitz, the co-founder of Tommy Hilfiger, Tranquility provides unparalleled magical seclusion with a private lake and eight buildings. At $100 million, the buyer will enjoy world class amenities at the touch of their fingertips. Spread across 210 acres, the 20,000 square foot masterpiece includes a main residence, art studio, conservatory, and gymnasium with basketball court, two par-three golf holes, a 16-car garage, and gate house.

By Robert Lockard

Thanks in large part to all of the wonderful contributors within the global Who’s Who in Luxury Real Estate network, the Luxury Real Estate Blog is making a tremendous ascent in its ranking on major search engines, including Google, Yahoo and MSN.

www.LuxuryRealEstate.com is the most-viewed luxury real estate Web site in the world and it comes up first on most searches for luxury properties, luxury homes and luxury real estate. But the Luxury Real Estate Blog is fairly new and we’re building it up to the heights of our main Web site. We owe much of our success to Jim Walberg, John Brian Losh and many other bloggers who consistently contribute their fun work

Like my personal written works, I take pride in the writing found on the Luxury Real Estate Blog. As this blog’s editor, I feel particularly responsible for its quality and success. So it pleases me to no end to add so much great content almost daily and to find more comments from our fantastic readers. I also like seeing our blog climb in popularity with a number of search terms.

I’ve thought a lot about how best to organize the information on the Luxury Real Estate Blog’s ranking in the big three search engines. I’ve finally decided to simply put the same search terms in each row for easy comparison purposes and to roughly put them in order, from highest to lowest, in terms of their placement on search engines.

The following search terms and rankings were recorded on the morning of Thursday, July 31, 2008, and they’ll surely change in the coming days and weeks. At least this will give us a good reference for future searches so we can see how they improve, hopefully.

By Robert Lockard

For the past several months I’ve had the pleasure of posting content to the LuxuryRealEstate.com Blog from Jim Walberg, an experienced blogger and the co-Broker/Owner of The Bay Area Team, the most-successful team at Keller Williams Realty-Danville, Calif. Jim’s Caribbean Islands Realty Blog is very well-established and fun to read so I’m always glad to include his work on our blog, with his permission, of course.

Jim took the time to point out something awesome to me in an email on June 11, 2008. I have read about blogs helping with search-engine optimization, but Jim’s message really drove this idea home to me (The links weren’t in his message originally. I added them):

”You may notice when you use my blog postings that LuxuryRealEstate.com jumps up on the Google search engine. I have “owned” Aruba Fractionals on Google for months! LuxuryRealEstate.com just jumped to the top of page one with the posting of my article on your blog site. It is so fun to see how this blogging game works. It is my pleasure to support LuxuryRealEstate.com in any way I can.”

One other comment Jim made also impressed me: “The power of blogging is based on one’s understanding the ‘rules’ that Google and Yahoo have set up for search-engine optimization. The next is to understand the ‘strategies’. Don’t forget, strategies always beat out rules. What I have found among the blogging world is that all of us are constantly sharing strategies. We all want each other to ‘win’. That is one of the fun cultural experiences you will find in the blogosphere. I am always available to share.”

Thanks for the great message and for all of your help, Jim.

I still feel like I'm learning the ropes when it comes to blogs, trackbacks and all of these inventive ways to provide great content and be rewarded by search engines. I think it’s very important to write about important topics first and worry about good placement and all that other stuff second. It’s nice to know that Jim Walberg, who has found a great balance between the two, is on our side!


Editor’s Note:
Robert Lockard is the Public Relations & Media Specialist with LuxuryRealEstate.com. I am Robert. I create all of Luxury Real Estate’s newsletters, write the editorials in LuxuryRealEstate.com Magazine and much more. You can contact Jim Walberg at jim at jimwalberg.com. I sure put a lot of links in this blog entry. I guess I just had a lot of information to cram into a couple of paragraphs, plus I’m learning how to provide more links for the search engines to find us.

By Joey Pauley

Have you ever heard the expression a picture is worth a thousand words? Google hasn’t, and neither has Yahoo. That’s right — search engines cannot view images. What does that mean?

When you see a picture of Brian Losh at our fabulous European Conference in Salzburg, Austria you see this:









Brian laughs as he prepares to go skiing because he knows that Joey is back at the office.

But what a search engine will see looks much less handsome:

<img width="154" height="115" alt="John Brian Losh in Salzburg"  src="johnBrianLosh.jpg"/>
a> Brian laughs as he prepares to go skiing because he knows that Joey is back at the office.

What search engines find attractive may not be so great for people viewing your site. What can you do to please them both? Make sure you use alt tags that describe the image (i.e. John Brian Losh in Salzburg, Austria). Also, make sure the image name and text around the image is relevant.

Marketing your site for consumers and Search Engines is a balancing act. By adding the proper text around an image you can make them both happy. How happy? ...As happy as Brian is skiing while I am in the office.


Editor’s Note:
As a Technical Account Manager with LuxuryRealEstate.com, Joey Pauley helps members with their Web and technology needs. At last our weeklong wait has come to an end and we have been greatly rewarded with this excellent bit of information from Joey. Amazing! So search engines are like Mr. Magoo: blind, stumbling around and mumbling goofily until they run into exactly what they’re looking for. What a funny image.