This week I found lots of lists of more reading to do.  It’s amazing how a few hours with populating a good feed reader with great feeds can quickly pile up to more reading than you can possibly keep up with. 

Build Quality Links
You may have heard that along with great content, good quality incoming links are essential to a successful search engine optimization campaign.  There are dozens of ways to go about this, and Sergey Rusak, an SEO specialist in Boston, has published an excellent list to get you started in his article, 52 Ways to Get Quality Links.  (I think English is Sergey’s second language — nevertheless the resources collected there are awesome).  For that article, we have a hat tip to Lorelle on Wordpress (and by the way, though we may not be attending SOBCon — I’ve found Lorelle’s blog to be always worth a trip).  Remember when embarking on a link building strategy to always keep in mind Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and their page on Link Schemes.

Brushing Up Your SEO
Writing for the Online Marketing Blog, Lee Odden covered the winners in Search Engine Journal’s Search Engine Marketing Blog Awards.

Social Networking Software
Those of you who found my critique of Ning.com to be a bit over the top and who are looking for a serious review of some social networking software solutions may want to check out this review of Ning, Kickapps and other social networking software.  After John Jantsch stopped by last week I saw he was running a social network on Kickapps, so I stopped by there to give it a spin.  So far I’ve found Ning to be a bit more robust.

Real Estate FAQ
As he always does, Phoenix Real Estate guy Jay Thompson has done a good job implementing a real estate marketing idea that you sometimes see surfacing on other sites, the Real Estate FAQ.  Such in depth real estate coverage may help you with "long tail" search results, and help to establish your expertise to your clients and your site’s relevance to the search engines.

When I first got into Real Estate, I came from a background in software development (including, most recently, web site development). Because of this background, as soon as I learned that people were meeting real estate clients on-line, it became my goal to create a profitable web site. Soon afterwards, I set out to create and maintain several profitable web sites.

When I first heard about blogging in 2003, I thought of blogging software as a way to do help me do just that. They say if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see everything as a nail. In my case I saw my task as content development, so every type of software I looked to me like a content management system.

With the rise of social networking, I began noticing a shift away from creating your own content on your own site to hanging around with your friends. In the last year or so, I’ve been repeatedly surprised by the extent to which people — including my colleagues, other Realtors® — are content to rent instead of own their online properties. This was driven home today by an outstanding article by CopyBlogger’s Brian Clark, Are You Someone’s User Generated Content? Clark points to many articles by leading bloggers discussing the regrets people have felt when they neglected their own Internet properties — their blogs — to explore social networking.

Clark sums up my own feelings about frittering one’s time on Facebook, (or mismanaging it on MySpace, if you prefer):

For me, there’s really no appeal in spending a lot of time creating “user-generated” content via a social networking application. That’s like remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent.

This metaphor should be especially apt to Realtors®, who know first hand the benefits our clients can derive from their own sweat equity.

Is your sweat equity being invested in your own online real estate, or are you remodeling someone else’s kitchen for free?

RELATED ARTICLES

Real Estate Social Networks, Their Lure and Limitations

Comparing Real Estate Blogging Platforms

I’m pleased to announce that I’m currently beginning work on a blog installation and training program for for Peter Thompson, a Chicago Loan Officer.  Peter and I met through a comment I made on ActiveRain and we hit it off right away, because I was able to provide him with a low cost and personalized set of services to:

• Improve the Search Engine Optimization of his existing web site.
• Research effective key words to use for his web site and blog.
• Install a Wordpress blog based on a standard template, with some customization to the template.
• Suggest strategies for blogging topics, attracting more visitors (both customers and colleagues that can contribute to the blog’s success), etc.

Based on some of the writing I’ve seen from him both on his newly launched site and his Active Rain blog and his “in it for the long haul” attitude, I expect that it won’t be long before his new blog will ultimately serve as a major resource for Illinois home finance information.

I spend quite a bit of time on a few different social networks. Most recently I’ve been reviewing Cre8Buzz here. Yet I don’t spend a lot of time on social networks because I think they’re productive, so as you can guess I think maybe I should be spending less time there. In general I think you get significantly more benefit from writing a blog post or page on a web site you control, as opposed to writing it on a social network. Still, like the proverbial glass of wine with dinner, most non-alcoholics won’t be too harmed by a moderate use of social networks, and may even derive a certain health benefit.

From a search perspective, content on a social network site has an important limitation that content on your own web site does not. This limitation is that your content may appear several links away from the main page. Because of this, even your profile page not be indexed by the search engine for some time after you’ve been active — let alone any brilliantly conceived blog posts you’re letting loose on the world. I’ve yet to see my Cre8Buzz Profile get indexed by either Yahoo or Google, for example.

In addition to being indexed slowly (if at all), although the the community may have collected considerable page rank, being several links away from the home page means that this value is likely to be watered down fairly thoroughly by the time it gets to you.

Let’s take the example of a blog. Let’s see how far away from the home page your blog appears in three different scenarios:

Scenario: Stand alone blog.
Links: 0. (By definition, in this case your home page is your blog).

Scenario: Integrated web site and blog.
Links: 1. (User comes to your home page, clicks on “Blog Link”, and there they are.

Scenario: ActiveRain. Assume you’ve been posting enough there that you’re on page one for your county. Otherwise add links.
Links: 4 Home –> State –> County –> Your Profile –> Your Blog

On the positive side, if you choose a real estate community (as opposed to a general community like Cre8Buzz), you get an advantage from being part of a huge site that has a great deal of “thematic content” about your subject. This would not be the case if you participate in a general community like Facebook or Cre8Buzz. I have also noticed that the search engines don’t seem to index content on the more general social networks as readily as they do the content on more theme-based sites.

The other positive benefit you derive from posting on social networks is the opportunity to provide some link love for your main web site or blog. However, it’s easy to overstate the benefit from this, since traditional wisdom is that the search engines like to see incoming links from a variety of sources. Thus, 10 blog posts on your main site with 10 incoming links from your ActiveRain blog are likely to receive less of a benefit than would 10 blog posts with 10 different sites linking to them. And remember, incoming links only count for reputation — in terms of page rank, a link is a link is a link, and a page on your web site or blog will naturally have a lot more internal links to different pages on your site, and fewer links pointing to the rest of someone else’s site.

I have several screencasts and blogs planned around some topics in mastering Internet marketing for real estate agents, and lately have been considering offering some of this material initially on the blog, but with the eventual goal of organizing and expanding it into a course of study in real estate Internet marketing.

The course would be for those who want hands-on experience building a very low cost web site. It would be for people who want to not only save lots of money by free (or low cost), tools and vendors, and who want to understand Internet marketing in enough depth to know what to do and what to avoid. The goal will be to equip you with enough information to make Internet marketing a major or a primary source of your real estate income.

Here’s a preliminary course outline.

1. Understanding where we’re going. A roadmap for success.
2. Internet Business Planning, including two or more complete business plans for successful Internet marketing.
3. Researching key words. Find the right major and minor key words. Striking the right balance between search volume and competitiveness.
4. Search Engine Optimization basics. White hat all the way. What to do and what to avoid.
5. Registering your domain name and setting up hosting. (Should also include material on how to use the course with an existing domain name.)
6. Building your webmaster toolbox. Find and install free tools to help you make money without spending much.
7. Installing your Wordpress blog, Part I. Up and Running.
8. Installing your Wordpress blog, Part II. Using Wordpress to manage your entire web site.
9. Customizing Wordpress. Plug-ins and themes.
10. Promoting your blog I: First steps.
11. Blogging made easy I: Free blogging tools. Working with text.
12. Blogging made easy II: Photos and advanced topics.
13. Blogging made easy III: What to write, when to write, and what to expect.
14. Promoting your blog II: Using social networks effectively.
15. Your real estate “killer offer”: understanding IDX.
16. Let your users search, Integrating IDX.
17. Time or money? Using pay-per-click advertising effectively.
18. Measuring results: use free tools to analyze your visitor behavior.
19. New visitors are good. Repeat visitors are great. Get them to keep coming back.
20. Improving conversion rates. Turning visitors into customers. Working with Internet buyers.
21. Dominating your market. From knowledge to mastery.

Now all I need is a few hundred hours with no interruptions and getting it done will be easy.

For a short time I had a bit of a widget installed here that would let me chat with people.  One gentleman who struck up a conversation was in the beginning phases of writing a blog for San Jose Real Estate.  I felt a fair bit of sympathy for him, since it seemed to me he definitely had his work cut out for him.  I had researched San Jose as a possible topic of a real estate web site some time ago, and ended up rejecting it as being too ambitious.

New Projects, Research Main Keywords

I believe that the first ideal time when you absolutely must do keyword research is when launching a new web site or blog.  Some keywords are simply far too competitive.  For example, querying “intitle:San Jose Real Estate” gives over 7 million results!  By just looking at some of the nearby areas we may be able to come up with something much more manageable.  The query “intitle:Santa Clara real estate”, for example, yields a far less daunting 241,000 results.  Sure, you’d still have your work cut out for you to compete for that keyword, but by comparison, going after San Jose is rather like getting into a prize fight with a heavyweight champ.

Sure, you can change your title later on, but the reason it’s so important to do keyword research at the outset of a project is that if you’re writing good content and networking with your peers like you should, chances are good you’re going to start attracting a few incoming links to your blog, and chances are a few of these folks will use the title in their link text — which is a good thing (unless you overdo it).  So you want to try to get it right up front.

Ongoing Projects — Strive For Depth of Focus

The other best time to do real estate keyword research besides whenever you’re starting a new project is really three ideal times in one:  morning, noon and night!  Well, OK, maybe not night — you do have to save some time for watching Stephen Colbert.  My point is, you have an opportunity with every article you write to capture a topic that a reader may be interested in.  One of my agents, Purva Brown, recently discovered the power of this when she got a client from an article she wrote about Crosswoods Condos.  Such “obscure” keywords are often called “long tail” search keywords (after the shape of the curve drawn by the many thousands of non-core keywords buyers may reach your site for).  These long-tail keywords have several important characteristics:

• There is less competition for them.  This means an article about such a topic has a good chance of getting a high placement on the search engines.
• There are fewer people searching for them (individually).  Because of this, they’re inappropriate as the focus of a whole web site, but perfect for a single article.
• Collectively, they can account for a huge portion of your site’s traffic.

Because there are fewer people searching for long tail keywords, they’re difficult or impossible to turn up with traditional key word suggestion tools like Wordtracker (see also their free keyword tool) or Overture. 

However, brainstorming long tail keywords works quite well.  Think about how people search for homes, and where they might want to live.  Try combinations of:

• Subdivision names.
• Neighborhood names. 
• Parks or other recreation facilities.  Sports arenas?  Theaters?
• Schools or school districts.
• Names of Builders.
• Other local place names.

Often just adding “real estate” to your main place name will do the trick, but for things like school districts you might even try suggesting a radius.  “Homes near Mount Vernon High School”  or the like.

RELATED READING

Selecting Real Estate Keywords

This is our third and final installment in our series comparing real estate blogging platforms, having a blog that’s part of your main real estate web site. Earlier articles in the series include:

Part 1 — Real estate social network blogs

Part 2 — Stand alone real estate blogs

An Integrated Web Site and Blog Solution

I believe that the best place to have a blog is as an integral part of your web site. By integral, I mean at the very least having it on a subdomain of your web site’s main domain name, though it’s far preferable to have it as a folder off your main domain name.

For me this is not a theoretical idea. For the better part of the last four years, I’ve made my living leading teams (and now, as a broker, a company), whose main source of leads was a successful web site and blog combination. If I point to the web addresses themselves you can better see the structure:

The web site home page is: http://www.sacramento-home.com

The home page of the blog is: http://www.sacramento-home.com/real-estate-events

There are a number of reasons why I think this configuration is ideal, but it boils down to this: eyeballs and fingertips. You need to have the eyeballs of potential home buyers and sellers finding you first when they start looking for a solution — hence the eyeballs. As for fingertips, their fingertips need to be clicking on listing information that you provide, so that when they’re ready, their fingertips can be keying in your phone number.

Background: Pay per click is expensive
Pay per click gets a bit of a bad rap, but really there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with it. We like the “click” part. It’s the “pay” we’d rather dispense with if we can. The online “sweat equity” that we use to dispense with pay-per-click is search engine optimization.

1) Good Search Engine Optimization Requires Lots of Fresh Content
The search engine boost that having a blog will give you is often overstated, but one thing is certain: becoming an authority in a competitive market requires lots of original content. So even though a blog is a web site is an HTML page, the tools that have evolved to blog will help you enormously. Even though I am a web site developer, it is still much, much easier for me to post to a blog than create a “traditional” web page, simply because the tools I have to do the task make it so much easier.

2) Good Search Engine Optimization Requires Natural Incoming Links
Once upon a time, Realtors® were some of the Internet’s biggest fans of reciprocal linking. I link to you. You link to me. Everyone rises in the search engine. Several Google updates later, reciprocal links are no longer valued as they once were. However, bloggers are still notorious for quoting (and linking to) other bloggers.

3) Having the Blog Integrated Means Good Internal Links - Naturally
If your blog is integrated into your web site, naturally each blog post you write will have a link to your home page, your search page, your contact form, and lots of other places where a visitor can begin the path toward becoming a client. There’s nothing problematic there — it’s just good internal site navigation. This means that the benefits you received from #1 and #2 above are going to be passed on as much as possible to your main site without even a whiff of SPAM.

4) Your Best Offer is on your Web Site
In Part One of this series, one of the criticisms we had for social networks was not the question of who owns the content, but what is the content being used to promote and sell. Unlike 90% of the authors who write about blogging, I don’t think that the main goal of blogging is to establish you as an expert. Certainly I don’t have a lot of buyers who call me up and say “I heard you were an expert.” What I DO have is a lot of buyers who call me up and say “I saw a house on your web site”. I think we can dispense with a lot of the silliness that’s written about real estate blogging with a simple quiz. It’s fill in the blank:

“My ideal customer is someone who is pre-approved and has a strong need to buy or sell a ____________ this weekend.”

Did you say “house” or maybe “million dollar home”? If so, great! Now you know why your blog should be on your web site, with a clear path to your real estate search. If you look at my blog, you’ll see you can get to the search page at least two ways from any page, and three from the home page. In fact I think it should have three from every page. I think I’ll go change it.

If you filled in “Realtor®”, then you need to go get your picture printed on BOTH sides of your business card, so you can stay busy flipping it over and smiling.

7) Your Web Site Can Support Other Search-Friendly Work
Are vacation homes popular in your town? Then how about a directory (literally a “directory”, or computer folder) with different pages about vacation homes? Now your blog can support the directory by being your vehicle to announce new features to what in effect has become a “mini-web-site” on a less competitive niche keyword.

6) Competition is Fierce
Back in the reciprocal linking dark ages, many of us would put up five or ten sites or more, optimized for different keywords, since the effort required to boost any single site to the top of the search engine results was fairly mechanical and well known. Nowadays you need a sustained and focused effort to master the search results for even a moderately competitive keyword. That’s why we recommend a clear click path to your best offer, and focusing most of your efforts on a single site (except perhaps for link building and other promotional work, which may of necessity get you out into the world).

Toprank blog had a short but intriguing essay recently discussing predictions about the Death of SEO within the next five years or so. To me, this is one of those articles that is important not because of the answers it provides but because of the questions it raises.

On the one hand, I do agree with the author that Search Engine Optimization is getting harder and harder to do. I say this with some confidence because, over time, I’ve found that the effort that I need to expend to promote a site to top place has grown over time from something I would consider child’s play to a sort of full time Herculean task that may or may not produce results.

So, indeed, to the extent it becomes more difficult, I’m sure that over time SEO failure stories will become more prevalent than the success stories, and that won’t be good for SEO as an enterprise.

I must admit, however, that the author loses me later on in the article when he talks about building traffic through social media becoming more effective. Although in a later article the author does go on to give specifics as to how this might work, I do feel like there’s a little bit of the ubiquitous “If you blog it they will come” hocus pocus going on. To me, there’s nothing more effective than the following scenario:

• User is looking for a solution to a problem, and types a search in a search engine.
• User finds results that match what she’s looking for, and clicks through to a web site.
• The web site looks like a fit for what she’s trying to do, and offers more information.
• Phone rings. Start selling.

There are probably cases where one can sell effectively through the social network of fellow bloggers, but it all depends on what you’re selling, I think. In the case of real estate blogging services, the people reading your blog are also your likely buyers. My friend Jim Cronin is doing a brisk business capitalizing on this. But in the case of real estate blogs, on the other hand, I’ve found that most of my readers are either fellow Realtors® or folks who want to take pot shots at us. So there’s no direct correlation between blogging and business — the “social network” I’m targetting here starts with a “G” and rhymes with frugal.

What I’ve found, however, is that this is only working for me on sites with a long history already, so for me, “search engines versus social networks” not is not a case of either/or, it’s a case of one of those hands washing the other.