Las Vegas Real Estate Blog

A while back I put up a post titled Can you help? It was about the plight of a young daschund in Las Vegas that needed an eye operation to prevent him from becoming blind.

I talked to the lady at the rescue, they had raised the money and Zippy had the operation done. It was a complete success!  I wanted to thank everyone here who contributed to the fund. The generousity shown was truly wonderful. -Charles

After shutting down all operations and euthanizing more than 1,000 dogs and cats, the Lied animal shelter is finally back open. The shelter was forced to close its doors after an outbreak of Parvo and Distemper, both highly contagious diseases.  Last week at a candle light vigil I was interviewed by Channel 3 news. Needless to say, they got an earful.

The shelter has now adopted stricter disease control standards to prevent something like that happening again. I have two lucky dogs that were picked up by rescue groups prior to the closure that are in need of homes. Both are in excellent health and are ready to be adopted.  If you are thinking about adopting a cat or dog, there are several rescue organizations that can help. -cr

Allure is a high rise condo project located on Sahara Avenue, just a few steps away from the strip. The project at completion will feature two high rise towers with a plethora of amenities. Construction has been underway and tower one has now been topped off.  Completion of construction on the first tower should be completed by the end of this year or early 2007.

If you are thinking about purchasing one of the Las Vegas high rise condos or lofts available, please feel free to contact me at 702-493-8033 for the latest developments and pricing. -cr

If you have a Golden Retriever or are thinking of getting one, the Golden Retriever Rescue of Southern Nevada is having an event on Saturday, March 3, 2007 from 10:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m at Silver Springs Park.  Visit merchant booths, watch demonstrations and take a look at lots of wonderful dogs in need of a permanent, loving home.

Admission is free and leashed pets are welcome. Leash handlers must be at least 10 years old and please pick up after your pet! 

Silver Springs Park is located at 1950 Silver Springs Parkway. Major cross streets are Valle Verde Dr. and Green Valley Parkway. 

Directions: google map.

This public service message brought to you by Jacqulyn Richey, a Henderson realtor. -cr

According to a press release from the US government, in late 2006 congress passed a law giving home buyers who are closing loans in 2007, the ability to deduct the full cost of their mortgage insurance premiums on their federal tax return in 2008.  There is one stipulation to the new law, the tax break is available to only those households who have annual combined incomes of $100,000 or less.

The law is designed to help low to middle income Americans purchase a home. The mortgage insurance deduction will serve as an option when taking an additional loan to cover the 20% down-payment.  Statistically the new law should help nearly a million Americans when filing their taxes in 2008 and will increase their buying power.

The law is still up to IRS interpretation, so you should still consult a tax professional when filing your taxes. For information about Las Vegas real estate, visit me online or contact me directly at 702-493-8033.

While we still have a long way to go, Las Vegas is becoming more and more pet friendly. With over 5,000 people a month moving to Las Vegas, the demand for pet friendly lodging is in high demand. There is one company that is ready to help out the desparate pet owner that needs a place to stay short or long term----Camden.

Camden has several apartment complexes all over the Las Vegas valley. They have communities that accept dogs from under 10 pounds all the way up to 100 pounds.  To get a list of their pet friendly communities, visit www.camdenliving.com.

Several communities in Las Vegas are also courting pet owners with pet friendly communities. Sky Las Vegas and Spanish View Towers are high rise projects that cater to pet owners.  Both projects have onsite areas just for their resident's pets. However, high rise condos aren't the only condos that are courting pet owners. Coral Palms and Brickwater, a low rise condominium community also have a private dog park on site for its residents.

For more information about Las Vegas pet friendly real estate, visit me online or call me at 702-493-8033. -cr

As promised, this is the final installment on my series about understanding web traffic. In my first post about understanding web traffic last August, I started off with the basics and discussed the differences between a hit and a session. In part two, I delved into referring urls and keyword analysis and the different software you can use to obtain that information.

For the last segment, I'm going to concentrate on one of the most important things to track: 1st time unique visitors. As you probably guessed, these are visitors that have never visited your site before. Why are they so important?  For starters it gives you an idea of the number of people actually searching for your products in a very rough sense. More importantly, you can compare the number of contacts you received that day to the number of new visitors to get a rough conversion rate. These visitors represent a golden opportunity as they haven't been to your site before.

On the other side of the coin you have returning visitors.  These are people who found your site before and found it worthy enough to come back. Yet, another opportunity to capture prospective clients. When determining your visitor to contact ratio, these numbers will also need to be factored in. Unfortunately, you'll have to ask those people that contacted you whether they had been to your site before to determine if they were a returning or first time visitor. The number of returning visitors is usually a lot higher than first time visitors----if you have sticky content. If the number of returning visitors is low or very close to the number of first time unique visitors, and the number of daily contacts is very low, you may need to revise your site and/or add new content to encourage more people to contact you.  Keep in mind as your site gains ranking in the serps, you will be getting more non-essential contacts (spammers, lookie loos, other agents looking for information for their clients, etc) so you'll need to factor that out in order to get an accurate percentage of your conversion rate.

Lastly, the one other thing you should be looking at closely is your page data. Your website should be getting visitors hitting directly to your internal pages, if you have done a good job at optimizing it. In other words, not every visitor should be finding your home page to find you.  Now, the amount of traffic to your internal pages will of course, depend on the ranking of those pages in the serps. However, you should still see some traffic to those pages every month like clock work. By tracking the traffic patterns and ranking of those pages, it should give you an idea of what works as far as gaining visitors directly to those pages. Combining that with the layout of those pages and copy, will give you a basis to help boost traffic and the serps for your other pages. Along with this your tracking should be giving you a list of keyword data, giving you the most popular keywords your site is being found at. The data should match up with your own ideas of your most popular keywords, if not, then you may have better options to optimize your site to.  This data should also reinforce the stats for your page crawls, with the keywords for highly trafficked interior pages appearing high in the list.

Probably one of the most overlooked areas of tracking is the crawler report. It means just what it says, the amount of times (and by whom) your site has been crawled by se's.  Low crawler numbers would explain a low amount of visitors, because lower ranked sites are usually crawled far less than sites listed higher in the serps.  Another important tidbit is that if a crawler from one of the big three is missing from your list.  The only reason for that would be your site being banned by that se OR you have some type of No-Crawl tag listed in your site, probably in the htm.access file, robot.txt or Meta information.  If its there its probably an error, since why would you intentional not want  your site crawled.

If you have a template site from a company like Advanced Access, you have access to these statistics. Most major companies that offer real estate websites also give those owners this information. For those that have a custom solution or built their own site, there are several programs available that you can install on your server to track, organize and quantify your web traffic. Webalizer for example, is one.  For more programs, both free and paid, simply google web traffic stats. -Charles

I had put up a post, Just for laughs, with a link to the Weird Al video for the song "White and Nerdy".  If you haven't seen it by now, you're probably one of the 10 people on the planet that hasn't.  I was reading Jim Boykin's blog and stumbled across this post Linking Dirty - Blackhat and Dirty. If you haven't seen the Weird Al video yet, watch it first otherwise none of this will make sense.

He re-worded the song to make it seo relevant. Pretty funny and worth a quick read. Enjoy. :) -Charles