Real Estate SEO and Technology Blog

“Personal Search” is Dramatically Altering SEO for Google

As it did over 300 times last year, Google is planning to unveil an updated algorithm. Except this one is going to change things dramatically. It will place much more emphasis on the user’s experience within their website. How are they going to do this? In a word, analytics.

Build contacts with business executives you don’t know by linking with people you do using the tool LinkedIn. How? Let me provide some background first. LinkedIn is a Web 2.0 social marketing tool that fits into the neat nomenclature of “social network”. It is primarily created for business professionals. For our purposes, we will focus on discovering sales leads.

Make more sales with your website at one quarter the cost.

That’s the definition of an “investment”. How many times do I run into people that say they have a website, but when pressed say they don’t have it optimized under either SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or PPC (Pay-Per-Click). Who would even think of buying business cards and then keep them in their drawer? Who would make yard signs and keep them in their garage? Who would take a listing and then keep the marketing of it a secret?

What is Mark to Market, and why are so many “experts” saying that this is either our biggest financial problem or the way out of our current financial debaucle?

First a quick overview from Wikipedia:
In accounting and finance, mark to market is the act of assigning a value to a position held in a financial instrument based on the current market price for the instrument or similar instruments. For example, the final value of a futures contract that expires in 9 months will not be known until it expires. If it is marked to market, for accounting purposes it is assigned the value that it would fetch in the open market currently.

Okay, so far so good, but what has this got to do with real estate?

How far has real estate SEO come? Here’s a test. Raise your hand if you have your name or company name as your domain name . . . Ouch. Should this be? This blog is all about why and how to fix it. Why is having your name in your domain name (such as JohnJones.com) not good? Because your domain name is one of the first things that the major search engines look at (even before your Title) to see how relevant you are to the prospect’s search. In other words, if a prospect types in “Boston luxury homes” into the search engine, and my website domain name is BostonLuxuryHomes.com, it is a directly relevant website and is given high value in the search engine rankings.

I just got back last week from a mind-blowing SEO Conference in San Jose, and what I learned you will want to know. There are 3 major things that I learned:

What is an RSS Feed?

RSS is an acronym for Real Simple Syndication. RSS feeds are free content feeds from Web sites that contain article headlines, summaries and links back to full-text articles on the Web or to other Blog Sites. The article that you are reading is actually a post in a blog that you can subscribe to . . . anonymously. That’s only one of the beauties of RSS Feeds.

See video below of John Riggins interview with Randy Eagar about his SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

As a real estate website positioner (SEO strategist), I’ve got a big pet peeve to unload. After I’ve put my search engine strategies in place and successfully driven prospects to my client’s websites, too often the prospect is disappointed with what they see on the website. So they click away and go to another agent’s site that has more of the features and content they’re looking for.

Even I am shocked! Webstarget has achieved #1 ranking status in only 60 days because of our new Gold Masters SEO Plan. And think of this: We beat out 29 MILLION other websites to get there. And the irony is the SEO company that we beat out . . . OURSELVES! That’s right. ComputerCamp.net held the #1 and #2 positions in Yahoo! Now we hold positions #1, #2 AND #3 for “real estate website positioning” (try it yourself).

OKLAHOMA CITY, Oklahoma, February 13, 2008 — Home values in Oklahoma increased in 2007 for the seventh consecutive year, according to a report released today by the Oklahoma Association of REALTORS.

The average sale price for an existing home in Oklahoma rose by 4.24 percent last year, from $143,669 in 2006 to $149,758 in 2007.

It’s been said that “whatever you give to people represents who you are”. And nowhere is this more apparent that with your website. Real estate SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the ability to drive prospects to your website by getting your website ranked high in the major search engines.