Real Estate SEO and Technology Blog

We’ll be talking a great deal about what to include in your website but above all is being found by the major search engines. After all, what’s the point of having the best website on the planet if nobody knows you’re there? SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is to website marketing as real estate agents are to home and condo marketing. Create your own website without the use of a professional to market it for you makes you a FSBO with your website marketing. And you wonder why you’re not getting leads.

Here is an article that I just ran across that I think sums it all up. While it was written for the fundraising world, it applies to the real estate prospecting world. The bottom line is that you need your websites and blog sites optimized to capture today’s prospects. Especially real estate SEO marketing:

Last weeks post highlighting a few statistics from the business world seems to have resonated with readers here. That got me thinking more about how we, in the non-profit space, should look to learn from examples, trends and best practices found outside of our sector. So here’s another great bit of learning for us.

We’ve all seen our honest share of terrible MLS photos. It’s sadly not uncommon to see terrible real estate pictures include blurry images, dark rooms, people, animal, pets, the agent’s car in the driveway, reflections of the person taking the picture in the mirror, or my personal favorite of pictures showing a snow covered house in July. (And the agent is probably wondering why it still hasn’t sold!)
To help you take pictures that sell houses and have fantastic real estate photos you can use for your Internet listings, property flyers, the MLS and newspaper ads, here are some simple tips of ways to take fantastic real estate pictures.

 It’s very important that you bookmark all of the websites that we mention in this chapter. To go to NAR’s website, you may do what I originally did, which was to guess that the site should be NAR.org. If you type this in, you’ll see that this is the National Association of Rocketry, which of course has nothing to do with real estate. You probably know that the best resource for real estate information is www.REALTOR.org. NAR also has many other websites. One of the most use in the country is www.REALTOR.com, which has a rich amount of information also, but is mainly a repository of listings from around the country. 

Most people would say that the biggest technological leap mankind has made in the last century (or ever for that matter) has been that of flight. From that first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903 to the moon landing in 1969. This is our real flight history. In fact this technological leap was so huge that it is always held up as the defining line for any other achievement. “If we can put a man on the moon, then . . .” and you fill in the blank.

Remember in the ’60′s when you’d hear the slogan “Power to the People”? Well . . . it’s BAAAAACK! Only this time it’s not a revolution of chaos, it’s a revolution of information. Look in any newspaper and you’ll see the majority of major stories are from news sources such as the AP, UPI and other wire feeds.

The online version of this is the online press release, which is the very same as the printed news release except it is electronic and much more viral.

Remember when the “virtual tour” was a big deal? The technology grew from individual photographs, typically of various rooms in a home. Then these were put together in a slide show format. With the advent of the “panorama stitching” technology, we could take photos and overlay them about 20% and create a nice panorama of the room. But something was missing.

When I came across this post by my good friend Pat Zaby, I couldn’t believe how dumb I was not to have thought about this myself and tell others. So in lieu of me telling you, I recommend going to his post yourself to see how to do this. Simply CLICK HERE to see Pat’s article.

Is Real Estate SEO still a good marketing plan? Overwhelmingly, the answer seems to be YES! Apparently 71% of all those using Search Engine Optimization think so. In a recent study by MarketingCharts.com, 71% of all those surveyed who use social media said that they not only plan on continuing to use Search Engine Optimization, but that they plan on increasing it in the near future. Incredibly, only 1% plan on decreasing their use of SEO. Additionally, 8% have made no plans to use SEO in the near future. Only 20% of those surveyed plan on keeping their SEO marketing the same.

Google’s new “Panda,” has sent shock waves through the Internet. Many sites lost their positions in the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions), while others were apparently unaffected. How is it possible for you to maintain or regain your standing?

Before you can figure out what you need to change, it’s probably worth looking at what got devalued. There seems to be an emerging consensus. If a site’s pages are thin on content, or contain content that has been copied from elsewhere, chances are they lost some Google love. So what is Google looking to reward?

Blog video marketing can open your marketing to a whole new realm of people that might not have seen you before nor would have seen your message. Plus, “video blogging” makes your message more “sticky”. In other words, it makes people want to linger longer to watch the message.

But there’s another reason why you want to put your videos into your blogs. This reason is to gain more “authority”. By copying the embed code from YouTube into your blog, when your visitor plays the video, it plays from your blog and not from YouTube’s site. This is important not only because it focuses attention on only your video, but YouTube gives your video higher rankings.

In this day and age of multimedia, portable videos, YouTube, video on demand and other such multimedia features, you might ask yourself where has the concept of blog podcasting gone? Good question. Here’s another. Where has the concept of radio gone?

You might think that radio (like the podcast) is old architecture and is now a thing of the past, but nothing could be further from the truth. Think about driving around town, picking up the kids from school, going on trips in the car. All of these errands for many people involve the radio. In fact many are going the next step to purchasing book CDs. Why? Because they are a good filler, and whether for entertainment or education, this mobile society has gotten very use to multitasking.