Can Web 2.0 Grow a Web 1.0 site?

My business partner, Dean, and I are trying to develop a web 2.0 marketing campaign that’ll help drive relevant traffic to our foreclosures website.   The site ranks well under some key terms, but we need a campaign to drive additional traffic and new links to further improve the rankings.

The site is made up of simple foreclosure listings gathered from a variety of sources.   It’s free and totally searchable by site visitors.   So, the question is how do you develop a web 2.0 marketing campaign around this very web 1.0 site?

Two thoughts dominate our thinking:

Video with user/viewer feedback
and
Creating compelling content that’ll help us generate new links to our site

Since the site is fundamentally about finding great foreclosed homes either to live in or as investments, we think we could create content around choosing the best property.   Here’s how it would work (roughly):

We’d create a weekly video series where we feature two different foreclosed homes listed on FreeForeclosureDatabase.com.   In the video, we’d run down the stats on the two homes then invite people to vote on which home would be the “better investment”.   They would be directed to vote by going to the foreclosure website.

I’m thinking we’d have a contest for those who vote… Maybe a random drawing or something like that to encourage people to vote and create a way (and rationale) for collecting an opt-in list.

Of course, there are a lot of additional details to all of this, but this is the core of the idea.

Have you seen any other successful web 2.0 marketing campaigns?  If so which ones?

Is your title tag really that important?

In a word… YES.  This is not only what searchers see in the search results, but it’s a big factor in your search engine results page (SURP) position.  Things to consider are…

- Keywords in your Title Tag that you are trying to rank for
- The “Prominence” of your most important keyword phrase you are wanting to rank for (how close it is to the start of the Title
- The Keyword Density (how often your most important keyword you are wanting to rank for is used in the Title tag)
- And Proximity (how many words there are between keywords).

Of course, there is no major formula.  The best thing to do is look at your competitors (that are ranking ahead of you) and see what they are doing.  Position your “Title” to be similar to the competitors that are ranking above you and use that as a “starting point” (front which to start testing).  Then simply test different startegies to see what causes your site to move above your next higher competitor (for a specific keyword phrase).  It’s all about trial and error at that point.  Keep in mind that the number of incoming links to your page (back links) and the quality of those back links… will have a huge impact on your ranking as well.

More about that in another post…