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.

Save Real Estate from Government Regulation Now!

Please help save our real estate industry. On July 21, 2010, our President signed into law the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. It’s another federal statute responding to the financial meltdown of 2008 that occurred in part because the Federal government unwisely forced banks to take on risky loans.

In reality, this statute was nothing more than government taking over our industry with the most sweeping regulatory changes since the Great Depression. It’s just another regulation that says, “Government knows better than you how to run your business.”

 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.

RSS feeds have turned the country’s most prestigious newspapers into gutter swilling money pits. They have also turned those who know how to use them into their own entrepeneurial news organizations. It use to be in the late 19th century and early 20th century owning and operating a syndicated newspaper had a great deal of clout and profit. Not only could you control information, but how it was presented. The larger the newspaper, the larger the power and clout . . . and profits.

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?