If you have kids, or are under the age of 20, you know what thae OMG acronym stands for.  For those of us who remember learning how to type on Electrolux typewriters, it may be foreign.  For me, I had to look it up.

Regardless, I had the same feeling when my friends over at the RedX (Real Estate Data Exchange) offered an additional 15% off the first three months of their already economical membership, along with continuing to waive the $149.00 start up fee.  Essentially, that offer brings the daily cost of their service to below that of a bottle of water.  Not too bad.

If you are interested, here is the URL that they gave me, or you can use promotion code 14610 if you are signing up over the phone.  http://www.theredx.com/signup/4mysalespromo.html

Anyway, that’s not really the reason that I am posting today.  I really wanted to share what I have learned over the past little while on the topic of search engine optimization and getting the internet to really work for you to warm up leads and get them closed. 

What I have learned is that online, if your goal is to get traffic and convert that traffic to listings, there are two features of the online world that you need to be aware of and balance.  These are breadth and depth and what I mean by these terms is as follows:

The bigger your web presence, the better your chances of target clients finding and landing on your website.  Those real estate agents that have depth to their site, or a lot of optimized pages with good content that can easily be found by searching terms that target clients commonly use; and those agents that have depth; i.e. a lot of different micro-sites dedicated to specific search terms have the greatest chance of attracting web traffic from targeted clients and closing more sales.

If you think of the web as a literal highway, then the more billboards you have up as people cruise by, the better your chances of getting their attention and making them a client.  Unfortunately, web advertising is expensive and in many cases too broad to meet the needs of your average REALTOR.  Search engine optimization however, is not nearly as expensive, and if done right, will give you a much more significant return on investment.

How this is done is simply by choosing the list of terms that your ideal client typically uses when searching for a home online.  Then create three dedicated pages on your website for each specific term.  Because the search engines place a high priority on sites that include the search term in the URL, you may want to consider creating micro-sites that have your targeted phrase in the web address.  (A micro-site is simply a small website designed to drive a specific action from the visitors.)  After you have created your search term-dedicated pages, or micro-sites, simply get links back to those pages from as many sources as possible.   Publishing articles is a great way to do this effectively.

Over time, add more content to improve the depth of your site as well as to expand the body of terms that attract search engine traffic. Monitor your web traffic, and if a specific term seems to attract viewers, post more content targeting that keyword to improve your depth and traffic from that term.

The process may be a fair amount of work when you get started, but after you have established your site or sites, you can just sit back and let the leads roll in.

If you are blogging to attract real estate leads, which many of us are, you know the value of having your content found on the internet.  I have been working for some time to get the word out about the Real Estate Lead Generation Software provided through RedX and have learned a great deal about search engine optimization in the process.   What I have learned is that if you want to successfully drive leads to your blog, the actual post is only the first step.  The steps following your post will truly determine your level of success in attracting traffic and subsequent real estate leads to your blog.

Steps To Attract Real Estate Leads Through Your Blog

Let’s face it.  Any time you spend creating a blog is an investment in marketing.  However, your return on investment is determined primarily through how many people read your blog and visit your site.  Fundamentally, the best way to get your blog read is if it shows up on a search engine.  Therefore, getting a high ranking for a given search term is imperative.  So what are the steps necessary to search engine optimize your blog post?

Before you even begin writing your post, you should determine what keyword phrase you are targeting.  If you have a topic in mind, spend a few minutes on google to see how competitive the phrase you are focusing on will be.  To see the level of competition, look next to the search box for the search results information.  For example, the competitive information for the term “attract real estate leads” is “Results 1 - 10 of about 4,230,000 for attract real estate leads. (0.55 seconds)”   Because this article is competing with over four million other entries, it is unlikely to rank high on the search term “attract real estate leads.”  Therefore, optimizing it for that term may be relatively futile and I should probably optimize this post to a less competitive phrase such as “listing leads for realtors”, or even “GRAR” which only has one million competitors. 

After you have chosen your search phrase, write your post to include that phrase one to three percent of the time.  Be sure to include the phrase as part of your header tags <h1> as well as your subhead <h2>.  Back to our example, the phrase Attract Real Estate Leads is in the <h2> tag of this article.

Now Start Your Real Estate Search Engine Optimization

Here is what I do to promote these posts as well as the RedX discount page.

*  Ping your entry using a pinging tool to multiple sites.  I use pingler.com

*  Use an article rewriting tool to create multiple unique versions of your article.  Unique versions are needed so that each syndicated site that posts your article is counted as a unique back link to your real estate blog.  I now use Magic Article Rewriter as my tool of choice. 

* Submit your unique article to as many article directories as possible.  I use two tools concurrently for this.  The first is UniqueArticleWizard, the second is Magic Article Submitter.  Both tools allow you to syndicate your article across the web over time which gradually increases your links and your search engine rank.  Their actual sales pages are pretty cheezy, but the tools work great.

*  Bookmark the post to StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicous, and the rest of the bookmarking sites.  If you are using a Wordpress, Orlywire has an interesting tool that allows you to automatically bookmark your post to your accounts.

* If you haven’t submitted your RSS feed to the multiple feed readers, then now is the time to do so.

* Update the post on your facebook, MySpace, ActiveRain and Broker Agent Social pages.

All of the above sounds like a lot of work, and it does take about an hour to complete all of the steps.  However, where you may attract one or two real estate leads from the post alone, you can now expects a few hundred more people to find you from your search engine optimization activities.

This is an update to my previous post where I described my experiment where I used the automatic article directory submission system, Unique Article Wizard to make a single article unique and to submit it to over 600 directories. 

If you read the previous post, what I had done as part of the experiment is to take the actual post and write two additional versions with similar syntax so that the Unique Article Wizard system would be able to randomize the paragraphs to make each article unique.  I then submitted my three articles to the Unique Article Wizard system and measured the backlinks to our site that offers the discount on RedX REALTOR leads page.  Because I used a pen name as part of the experiment, I included the unique word xyssion in the post so that it could be easily searched.  As in the previous post, xyssion did not have any data associated with it on google when I published the first article.

Okay with that background, here are the results of the experiment.  Within four days of publishing the article the term xyssion returned 16 entries on google that backlinked to our Agents Online and Lockbox websites.  As of today, a search for the term on google returned 87 entries (60 on bing), all of which are links provided back from syndication of that one article.  The actual number of links is much greater, but these are the sites that have been actively indexed and rank at an acceptable level.

 From an SEO standpoint, the article and subsequent publication of it took about two hours.  Eighty-seven active backlinks from two hours worth of work sure beats the thirty hours I spent submitting MLSNI.com to various directories to get fifty active links, so I think this experiment can be classified as a success. Now I’m looking for a tool to speed up that manual process of directory submission.  I’ll let you know if I find a good one.

I have been doing a bit of article marketing lately to promote the RedX FSBO and Real Estate Lead service and have found two very effective tools to attract numerous backlinks without a lot of work.  The first tool takes your article, walks you through a process to create multiple unique versions of each paragraph, the automatically submits a hundreds of unique versions to over six hundred directories.  The service is the Unique Article Wizard, and I found it by reading about various backlink shortcuts on a few different internet marketing forums. 

The service came highly rated, and I have been using it for a short time.  So far I have published two articles with the identifier “randy xyllion” and one containing the word “xyssion.”  In the past two days, I have 106 indexed links from google for the xyllion articles and 16 links from bing back to the xyssion.  Overall, not bad for drafting three articles about internet marketing and sending them out to the world.   

The other tool that I have recently had success with in building backlinks to increase the search engine position of my agents online website is a service called the LinkJuicer.  Okay, not a great name, but an interesting service.  If you recall how a link circle used to work with multiple participants sharing links back to other member’s websites, this service will be very familiar.  Essentially, the LinkJuicer  is the social network equivalent of a link circle.  The beauty of the service however is that backlinks to your site grow slowly and naturally over time as the system places your link into the social accounts of other participants and places links to their site from yours.  Because the system limits the addition of only three sites per day and includes fifteen of the popular online social networks, your backlinks grow slowly and reliable which the search engines just love.

If you have spent time learning about improving your search ranking for your real estate website you know that there are three main drivers that will get your site to the top of Google.  The first is a website with a URL that contains your target keyword.  The second is a site that is optimized for your target search phrase.  Third, and this is the most challenging, is high authority backlines to your website from multiple sources.  Regardless of whether you are selling lockboxes, or single family real estate from mlsni, your website needs one way backlinks in order to rank well on the granddad of all search engines. 

For this article, I would like to focus on how you accomplish obtaining numerous backlinks to your site, and share some tools that may make the effort a bit faster.  For those of us that like to write, drafting articles and submitting them to various directories is a good way to get links back to your website that have a decent level of authority.  The challenge however is that submitting your article to more than a handful of websites is time prohibitive, and if your article is the same across the board, duplication penalties may actually count against you in the search ranking.  With these limitations in mind, you are stuck either completely re-writing your article multiple times and spending countless hours submitting your site, or you may choose to hire a staffer to continually re-write and submit your site.  Unfortunately, neither option is very good.

Up until recently, this was actually the approach I would take.  I would draft and article and post is on numerous blogs, and even spend time rewriting the paragraphs.  Although cumbersome, it did succeed in attracting backlinks. 

More recently however, I have been using a service entitled Unique Article Wizard and I have found that it is a much more effective method of using articles that you write to attract multiple backlinks across the internet.    Essentially, the service allows you to take your article, selectively change the text in each paragraph into three versions, while still maintaining the same context and syntax, through a step by step process, then submit the article.  The unique article wizard service then mixes and matches the versions of each paragraph to create multiple unique articles.  Finally, the service submits your article to six hundred different article directories and blog feeds which results in hundreds of backlinks to your site from an article that you created.

As I mentioned previously, I have just recently started using this tool, but have found it very effective.  For example, I plan to use the service with this very article.  To track the extent of distribution, I have chosen a unique and searchable word as an identifier.  The word xyssion will be used to track where my different versions of this article pop up.  The word is unique, so in a few days, search the term xyssion and see how many entries track back to real estate and article marketing.

As I mentioned previously, I have had a lot of success using article marketing to build backlinks to my discounted offer for the RedX expired listing and FSBO lead system, and this new tool has put the visibility of that website into overdrive.  Try out Unique Article Wizard and let me know how it works out.

If you have read my previous posts you know that I have been conducting a few real time experiments in SEO to see if I could target a few specific real estate related keywords that promote the REDX listing lead program and get them to the first page of google.  My previous experiments with for the terms Agents Online and Real Estate Country.  By using a linking strategy the sites were able to reach number two ranking on google for the corresponding search term.  Unfortunately, both sites ended up getting hacked, and as a result their listing on the first page fell down a bit.

I did however learn a lot in conducting this SEO experiment, and I think it is time to start another real time experiment to see how quickly I can get two additional keywords to the top of google.   I have purchased three URL's that have to do with specific aspects of the real estate industy.  Specifically, I am focusing on our favorite tehcnology, and one of my favorite market intelligence tools, the lockbox.  Lockbox.me and Supraekey.org are the sites and I am trying to see how quickly I can get those two sites onto the first page of google for the terms lockbox and supra ekey.

I can tell you right now that the supra ekey site will get to the top much faster than the lockbox site; at least that is what I expect.

So what is next for Lockbox and Ekey?

I have loaded a pretty basic web page for the lockbox site.  Because this is an experiment, and does not directly impact the other traning programs that I am doing for various brokers and real estate agents the site is currently just garbage.  When I have time to load the supra ekey site, I expect it will be very similar.  However because they have a keyword specific URL they may start moving up in the ranking regardless of the content.

Stay tuned...

I have been using two SEO strategies to promote our REDX lead program and both seem to be paying off.  My AgentsOnline site, which if you remember was part of the real time experiment to get to the first page of google is now the third listing on the first page of google for that term.  The same situation applies for Real Estate Country which was our original SEO experiment.   So what have I been doing and how did those sites end up on page one of google for the given terms?  

Well, aside from including the keyword in the URL which gets you a lot of attention, I have been working with a few wordpress blogs and using linking silos to create little hubs of keyword pages that are linked around a specific keyword.  I recently attended an SEO webinar, and they emphasized the point that google, likes directories and sub directories that are linked together using a common key phrase.  To provide an example, take my wife’s prenatal vitamin site.  There is a sub-page of the site that optimized to the phrase While Pregnant.  On that page in the text you will find a link to the while prengnant blog entry.  From that entry, you will find links to other entries optimized to variations of the target keyword such as drinking while pregnant, flying while pregnant, exercising while pregnant, etc.  From a directory view, you end up with spiders following directory links named after the key phrase to multiple files in a sub-directory also optimized to that key phrase.  Essentially, you have a little SEO hub optimized to a single search word.  In this instance, it is While Pregnant. 

Anyway, that is the hierarchy that I am currently experimenting with in my SEO endeavors.  I am also adding headline tags in my blog entries, these are the <h2> html tags that denote a headline, with target keywords in those headlines.  So far these activities seem to be paying off as our traffic on the site has jumped about 34% and we are three days into this experiment.  Of course the while pregnant landing page is already on page one of google, but that just shows how important a good URL can be.

I have spent a bit of time working on search engine optimization for our Agents Online REALTOR Lead Generation site and have done a fair bit of reading on the subject.  As it turns out, I was doing a bit of it right, but most of it wrong.  So, after an investment in knowledge, I have the following to share with you on the basics of SEO.  

1.  Your target keywords need to be in the title and metatags

2.  If you can get your primary keyword in the URL before the .com or .net, your rank will improve precipitously.

3.  Include your pimary keyword in your main heading <h1> tag

3.  Inculde your modifiers of your primary keyword in sugsequent heading tags <h2>.  As an example, in your primary heading, include the term Listing Leads as your primary search term.  In the secondary heading, modify the term to by Listing Leads for Real Estate Agents.

4.  Include your primary keyword in the body of the text, but not so much that it appears spammy. 

5.  For those keywords in the body, link those to subsequent pages that relate to the <h2> tags.  For example, link to a page with the term “listing-leads-for-realtors” and have that page discuss in detail the phrase.

6.  Use a dash or an underscore to depict a space between keywords.

Well, that is what I learned today about optimization.  I’ll put my new understanding to work in the optimization of Agents Online as well as our discount offer the REDX REALTOR success system and will see what happens.

Forrester research came up with a great pneumonic to use when creating an online marketing strategy using social media, and it is proving effective as we expand our offering of the redx listing lead generation service.  The approach is known as POST (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology) but what it really boils down to is be everywhere your target customers spend time and be able to provide them with an offer that matches their needs the second that they realize that a need exists.  

Now that sounds great, but a little esoteric, so what exactly does it mean? 

From the prospective of a small business marketer, the first thing you need to ask yourself is what online media are your target clients going to be using?  Older professionals use LinkedIn and email, the younger ones may be on Facebook and Twitter.  What user groups would they be part of?  How about the online social networks?  Is there an ActiveRain or Broker Agent Social for your target client?  Essentially, before you can market to your clients, you really need to understand where they spend their time. 

In addition to where, you need to know what.  More specifically, you need to know what are the needs of your target clients as they participate in these groups?  Not everybody needs a REALTOR 24 hours per day. However, statistics show that they will need a good REALTOR at least once in the next seven years. What needs are being met in your target client when they engage in the online activities of their preference?  

Now that you know where, and have a good handle on what, you need to work on tailoring your presence in each of these communities to closely match the needs of your targets.  If you are an active participant in fulfilling the needs of your prospect, the relationship and their eventual business will follow.  Fortunately, with automation, and carefully crafted profiles, periodic engagement should be sufficient to maintain an active presence in a community and reap the results.  Engage with those who need engaging and be available to those who don’t want to be engaged.  If a client in a community raises their hand, be there to call upon them and address their needs, provide service and get their business.

Still too esoteric?

- Jump on your facebook account and register for all of the goups that service young professionals in your community.

- Update your twitter profile to specifically describe your niche.  Connect on twitter with members of your facebook goups.

- Connect on LinkedIn with the HR departments of local large employers as well as relocation firms.  Use their connections to apply for membership into the groups that they participate in.

- If your city has a group social site, connect with it.  The same applies for any local sport groups, leagues and social groups.

- Set up notify.me so that when a prospect makes a comment about local real estate, you get notified so that you can reply.

- In each network and each communication use it to drive more connections back to you, your website, or a specific call to action.  

If done correctly your prospects will see you everywhere they turn and you will be top of mind when they need the services of a REALTOR.

I have learned that to be successful in marketing your real estate business online there are two basic rules.

1)  Claim as much real estate as possible. 

2)  Continually drive links to those online properties.

When the web started, it was enough to have one site and do a little search optimization or pay per view advertising and even through this is still how many REALTORs operate, this approach is no longer very useful.  Because of the sheer volume of sites, and the competitive nature of the medium, having just one website with no other presence is no longer enough.   In addition, the rules of market now require that you engage your prospects in an online conversation, let them own your personal brand, and lead your value proposition.  These new requirements from your online customers require a completely different approach, and more importantly, a much more pervasive online presence. For example, if you google my our group, 4MySales, about 3600 listings will come back.  Now 4MySales.com has been around a while so it has a number of backlinks, but if you look at the list on the first page of google, you will see that 4MySales has its own website, an independent blog, an active rain blog, a facebook page, a few squidoo and tumblr lenses, a number of social bookmarks, and many more related links. The point is simply that if you are marketing your real estate business online, not only do you need a primary site and a blog hosted on that site, but you need the multitude of associated social and free accounts as well.  Essentially, you need to put your brand everywhere your prospective clients hang out.  A more recent example of how this is applied can be seen on the Agents Online or Real Estate Country sites this I used to demonstrate the basic approach to SEO.

So without spending hundreds of hours online, how do you maximize your lead generation activities online?  The steps are not complicated, but simply require registering and linking to numerous sites.  If you are just a beginner to online marketing, I would recommend that you get started as follows:

1) Choose a set of target keywords and register your website and blog with these keywords in the URL

2) Create a blog in the home directory of your main site to support internal links and SEO.

3)  Create a related, but unique, blog on blogger and wordpress.

4) Install mybloglog on each of those blogs

5)  If you haven’t already, create your corporate facebook page, or tweak your Facebook page to relate to your brand.  Link your facebook page to your home page and blogs.  Do the same for MySpace.

6) Register for an account on ActiveRain, Broker Agent Social, LinkedIn, and WannaNetwork  Put links to your sites and blogs from each account.

7)  Register for a Twitter account and customize the look and feel of your twitter page.  Link your account to your home page.

8)  Go to squidoo.com and tumblr.com and make a few websites dedicated to your personal brand.  Link those sites to your blog and home page.

9)  Register for del.ici.ous,  stumbleupon, mrwong, newsvine, and many of the other online social networks and bookmark sites.

10)  Routinely update your blog and twitter account.  Use the available plugins to automatically post your updates to your bookmarking sites.

11)  Now that you have your basic web presence established, register for google adwords and Yahoo search advertising. 

Depending on your site and your target keywords, you should be expect aggregate web traffic of between 500 and 10,000 hits per day simply by setting up this system.  From there, track how customers find you and how they move through your sales funnel to become active leads.  This approach has been very successful in getting Real Estate Country to the to of Google, Agents Online to the top of the second page, and around 15,000 hits per day looking at our discount offer for online listing leads from RedX.