What types of Local Information to Provide Users?

There are lots of options for providing valuable real estate and community information to real estate buyers so they can make the best choice possible.  For instance both Truila and Zillow offers information for searchers (I haven't seen anything comparable by Active Rain that ranks well in the real estate markets that I've looked at).  Also City Data and Google Maps offers a wealth of important data for home buyers.

What city data do you provide?  What city data should you provide?  Where should you get the city data?

Real Estate SEO and Ethical Social Marketing Optimization Guide:

After spending quite a bit of time in content marketing, social marketing optimization, and ethical SEO I've come up with 17 awesome tips for the types of content that generates links and is helpful for your customers.  Why should you pay attention or link to this one: well its not just the aggregation of other tips to get a top 101 list, instead I chose to focus on the best of the best.

• interview (linked up)
• house pictures (appropriately optimized)
• directory
• controversial, funny, useful, relevant, surprising, different, unique perspective
• researched (with citation/bibliography and block quoting)

You can check out the rest of the post and the rest of the 17 tips for content optimization about real estate and ethical seo.  You may also appreciate these ethical seo tips for real estate bloggers.

Do you have any other ethical SEO tips for real estate agents?

Great Real Estate Searching

If you're like you you like finding a deal.   Are you a savvy real estate shopper?   To me its like a scavenger hunt--and adventure that ends up with more money in my pocket (at least comparatively).

One way to find a great deal is to have a great location.  This saves time AND money.  Here are the top 10 real estate search tools according to Lifehack.

As a bonus: Better holiday deals.

 Here are some great tools for finding great holiday deals online.  Deal Hack is also supposed to have fantastic tools.

How cool is technology?  Do you have any great websites for finding real estate or online deals?

Ethical Search Engine Optimization: Putting Your Principles into Practice

The type of seo tactics you use says something very important about the type of business or real estate agent you are.  My grandfather was fond of saying, "Don't take any wooden nickels" and I try to take that advice to heart as an ethical SEO.  I want to maintain integrity, add value to clients, and create mutually beneficial relationships throughout my life.  And I imagine you are the same way.

White Hat Search Engine Optimization vs. Less Ethical Forms of Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is divided into white hat, gray hat, and black hat SEO techniques.  While White hat SEO firms use ethical SEO tactics, Black hat SEO firms rely on spam, cloaking, and other unsavory marketing practices.  Each search engine optimization firm has a separate type of SEO they practice.  

Ethical SEO Principle 1: Staying focused on White Hat Techniques

The basic principle of white hat seo is that you are helping users find relevant information for them in ways that don't manipulate the search results.  You are helping the search engines deliver good, quality content.  You also want to increase the web design usability and user experience of a website, so all the information is delivered in an easy to understand fashion:

• Unique Content Creation-Providing great content for users

• Link Building for SEO-Building relationships with influential bloggers in your niche for link building

• Community Content-Helping other related business owners and vendors write content, even if its just a testimonial, a couple tips, or an interview

Ethical SEO Principle 2: Helping Google and Users Increases Your Ethical Search Engine Optimization

• Linking out to great resources (real estate, education, government, sports) related to your area

• Creating content specific to your locality (assuming thats in your keyword section)

• Linking out to key items of interest in your area

• Creating resources for your people in your locality

• Eliminating unnecessary navigation

• Make it easy to contact you

• Follow great blog usability guidelines from a web usability expert. (PS. Why does his site look so very 1997)

Ethical SEO Principle 3: Creating Organization, Hierarchy, and Focus to Your Site for Ethical SEO

• Siloing and theming your website.  This makes it easier for Google's search bots to understand and for you to think about your site structure.

• Emphasizing your most important content and putting it all in one easy to see and use area

• Featuring your most important content (ie feature your most important resources, create a page with the 7 to 10 most important resources for each neighborhood and then link to your "Nashville Real Estate Buyers Buying Guide" on each one)

• The number of links on your site to your most important content.

Ethical SEO Principle 4: Following Google Guidelines for Ethical Search Engine Optimization:

• Bolding, italizing, and emphasizing with H1, H2, and H3 tags.  One way to conceptualize this part of SEO is to think about it like an outline and the way the main parts of an outline emphasize the central parts of that content.

• Using anchor text that tells the search engine what the link points to. (For instance, whenever I say "white hat search engine optimization" I link over to my blog.

• Appropriately naming photos and pictures "nashville-real-estate.jpg" or "franklin-real-estate.gif" instead of using spaces.

• Adding "no follow" to unimportant info on the site, or pages that aren't getting traffic.  This will help shape your Google link juice toward your most important pages.

• Paying attention to Google Analytics  Pay attention to what search terms are bringing in visitors, pay attention to which pages are getting the most traffic, and pay attention to where visitors are leaving.  If you are very much a technical and numbers person (aka accountant-esque and a little computer saavy)--pay attention to Avinash--he is the web analytics guru.  Following his advice can help focus your web analytics strategy. (see also: Web Analytics on an Hour a Day)

• Following Google SEO Stater Guide (Here my summary of the Google SEO Starter Guide)

• One way to do this is to get links from your local Chamber of Commerce or places you speak. (.edu and .gov are most trusted domains.  .org is highly trusted as well.  Hence, speaking at a local university in )

• Keyword data is all about balance.  Remember SEO keyword data is very important and paying attention an important insight into the mind of your potential customers.  However, don't just allow your content to be shaped by keyword data.  If new things are on the horizon, its hard for current keyword data to consider those future events.

• Make sure your URLs include your keywords that are contained in your posts.  Often this means that your URLs mimic your post titles.

• Decide on a unique feature for your blog.  Some people choose to go with Watercooler Wednesday.  Some people link out to the top 25 bloggers in their niche based on Technorati ranking.  Still others decide to provide a summary of the best posts they have bookmarked on del.icio.us and provide a pithy quote.  This brands their blog and allows them to do deep on a particular issue.  Be unique.  Be useful. Don't afraid to be controversial.

The basic problem is you aren't your customer, so its hard to assume how customers think or act online without asking or looking at data.  Its always nice to have someone to advise you about your website optimization whether that is search engine optimization, user experience, or website conversion.

Ethical SEO Principle 5: Avoid Spammy, Manipulative, and Shady Black Hat Search Engine Optimization

You also want to avoid gray hat and black hat techniques.  You don't want to be excessively spammy, to buy links, or to get links from link farms.  Yahoo has a great explanation of what those are.  In fact, you can report spam to Google here.

If your tactic has a Multilevel marketing splash page connected to it, that might just be a tip that its a black hat technique.

Ethical Search Engine Optimization Principle 6: Target Local and Long tail Terms for Search Engine Optimization

Pay attention to local search engine factors.  Supercharge your local small business website with these tips.

Ethical SEO Principle 7: Create monthly link bait that you promote via PR, blogger relations, or email

This is a way for you to focus your effort on a post or two or the creation of a unique resource and then promoting that resource as valuable to other linkerati online.  Linkerati are just bloggers and other influential webmasters.  (Google, Technorati, and Alltop can help you identify them)  Without links you can't be found on Google, so this is an important component of your strategy.

Ethical SEO Principle 8: Bring An Influential in and Make Yourself a Hub Around Your Content

Feature a neighborhood or industry influential on your blog.  Its even better if you can have a series of these posts, because you become more of a hub for this type of info in your area.

Ethical SEO Principle 9: Reverse Engineer the Best for Search Engine Optimization

Look at Google, find out who is doing well.  See what type of content they talk about.  Look at what content they are getting links from based on Technorati data.  See which websites are linking to them via the SEO tool Linkdiagnosis.

You might also check out a top leader in a tough market like San Francisco real estate or Washington DC real estate or Washington DC real estate blogs.  That search yieled Metro DC Homes at the top.  Visit my blog for more social media for real estate tips

Remember, Google and Technorati can't tell you what offline relationships have been created to drive links and traffic.

Ethical SEO Principle 10: Link to and Comment on Do-follow Blogs

Links aren't the basis of relationships, but it can help build relationships.  Here is a list of do follow real estate blogs you might check out.

I plan on adding more tips and links, so come back....  Have a great day.

Free Valuable Tips for Real Estate Marketing So You Can Relax, Vacation, and Spend More Time With Friends and Family

What's the hardest thing for blogging for you?  Finding content?  Knowing what to write about?  Staying focused?  Perhaps you are looking for some Google love and search engine optimization or wrapping your mind around social media and community engagement as a real estate marketing strategy? Or maybe you want to know about specifically ethical seo?

I've tried to include some outside of the box and non-traditional ways to increase search engine rankings for real estate agents and bloggers.

First, write when you are most inspired and block off a set amount of time.  Block off 45 minutes to an hour and a half to write some quality content about your city.  Yahoo Local or your local newspaper could be be a great jumping off point for ideas.  If you don't have something good to say about the neighborhoods, why are you living there?  And why are you selling houses there?  

Soon blogging and content creation will become a natural part of your work flow as a real estate agent.  

Second, set priorities and boundaries.  Its very easy to let blogging trade off with family life.  Its very important that you establish boundaries and of course follow through on your promises to yourself.  This bloggers guide to seo will help make that transition easy.

Third, you have to develop patience with your SEO campaign.  Realize getting ranked on the first page of Google may take a while, especially for very competitive search phrases.  And it will take even longer if you don't take your SEO seriously and you just blog about gas prices, what you ate for lunch, and your cat.

Its important that whenever you start a blog that you take time to update it.  Generally this means updating it two to fives times a week with new listings, which only takes a total of about 45 minutes once you get in the swing of things.  Staying dedicated to updating content can be hard if you're not passionate and you don't see it as a long term strategy.

Fourth, consider outsourcing content for search engine optimization.  Consider hiring a freelancer to blog or write some of your content for you.  As long as you credit them on the blog as a guest poster, you maintain the authenticity of your blog.  In sharp contrast, you want to avoid the tactic that Walmart used called astro turfing where they pulled a bait and switch on readers.  The backlash was the shot heard round the bloggosphere. You can outsource content from an affordable freelancer who are passionate about your topic and have more time to devote to writing, editing, and content creation.  As you create content, you will also want to consider this tips for writing for the web.

Fifth, consider outsourcing the creation of resources and link bait for seo.  You can outsource the creation of several real estate tip sheets that serve as resources for your customers.   You want to create real real estate resources for potential home sellars and home buyers.  One tactic that drives link building, one of the cornerstones of white hat seo , is the creation of resources.  As a real estate agent and having a family you may not want to spend your time writing.  You can opt for someone else do create the fundamental aspects of the writing and add your tips and suggestions in the editing process.

Six, consider going audio for search engine optimization.  Consider speaking your content onto your laptop or voice recorder and getting it both transcribed and edited.  This would allow you to save a ton of time and do your blogging from almost anywhere.  You can even turn you ipod into a recorder for about $40 and voice recorders run about $40-80 bucks.  I just got a Sony voice recorder for this very purpose.  You should be able to get it transcribed for relatively inexpensive from a site like elance.  However, you may want to look into transcription prices before jumping head first into the audio space.  Or if you are already doing real estate podcasting, you can pay to have those too.

Seventh, kick the extra point and go the extra mile for SEO Marketing Results.  Once you have your content in place, you want the content to have a multiplier effect on your efforts.  So its important to invest a little time and money into promoting the content.  Consider an affordable online public relations firm or you can pick a great white hat search engine optimization firm to integrate your strategy.  If you don't you may just end up being the proverbial tree that falls in the forest and no one is there to hear them.

Eighth, community engagement builds an audience (Its perfect real estate marketing).  Ask your audience questions.  Answer their problems.  Tell your story.  Build a crowd and community.  Check out the free service Ning for creating your own social network.  Or build a community around a podcast.  Before getting started however, you will want to see what communities are already out there both offline and online.

Ninth, optimize for the Real World.  Bring your online search engine optimization strategy into the real world  Integrate your online and offline strategies.  Moving pixels around won't sell property.  You have to build trust, and relationships.  Using your SEOed site to then help develop a community of people who genuinely care about an issue whether thats with Meetup, Yahoo Incoming, or an already scheduled real world event.  You might want to check out this hybrid strategy for real estate social media marketing from Innate 2008

Bottom line for all Successful SEO Strategies:  Invest in quality unique content that will help and delight your customers.  Invest in developing and maintaining relationships.  Invest in marketing.

If you plan on putting 100 to 200 hours in one year into blogging and online content creation you want it to really count.  Otherwise the true return on investment for your efforts may be rather skimpy.

Nathan Ketsdever is an ethical search engine optimization specialist who provides search engine optimization training and social media marketing services to startups, entrepreneurs, and real estate agents.  

Using Google Search Engine Optimization for Real Estate Marketing

As a Christian SEO I try to help my readers and clients as much possible, because I want them to be extremely satisfied.  I just wrote an extensive post about how to use real estate search engine optimization techniques in a recession to help optimize one's website.  Search engine optimization is critical, because increasingly people are looking for real estate online.

SEO for Real Estate Techniques: Tackling Local Search Terms Based on Actual Customer Date

Its important that you optimize your site with regard to keywords.  The Google keyword suggest tool should be sufficient for these purposes.  Those keywords fit into four primary categories:  buy, sell, find, move, and some other related search queries your customers might make to investigate a particular community.  Of course real estate agent, home, and house should also be added to this list.  Its important that you find out how many of these queries are being made in Google to find out how much of your business you are leaving on the table.  This is especially critical for a real estate agent who is marketing during this cost cutting downturn.

The second set of keywords you want to be looking for are related to each of your communities you serve.  

For instance if you serve the area of Ohio that includes the cities below, you want to create posts and eventually series of posts about these cities:

• Elyria

• Grafton

• Avon Lake

• Amherst

• Sheffield Lake

• North Omsted

• Westlake

• Bay Village

• Strongsville

• North Ridgeville

• And of course Ohio real estate

Once you have all of the relevant search data in one document you can know what keywords to target and ultimately what will get you the most bang for your buck.  On the flip side, not knowing your SEO keyword rate is like flying blind.

I would write a quality resource post about each, with a friendly conversational tone (these are also called pillar posts or pillar content, because they form the basis of your blog's content), but I would focus only on those communities that show up for real estate related queries.  Writing a series of posts about a given area can be helpful to Google, because it allows you to become a bigger hub of info about that particular community or issue.  The more valuable and relevant the information, the more likely other bloggers are to link to it.  Keep in mind these amazing SEO tips for small business.

Key SEO real estate marketing tip to remember: Its very important to focus on depth on a locality over breadth.  If you rank on the first page of Google for three of these queries because you went deep, thats better than being on page two for six or seven of them.  In the mean time, you can spend some money on Pay Per Click advertising with a Google Adwords Certified specialist.

The third set of keywords is using latent semantic indexing for Google.  

You want to perform LSI searches for the "buy", "find", and "sell" words above and pepper your posts with those words in addition to the actual key words you are targeting.  This gives even more clues to Google that you are talking about a particular issue.  Quintura can help you with that data.  For instance for real estate Quintura suggests: home, brokers, company, agents, offers, service, market, guide, and resources.  With other search terms Quintura suggests:  mls listing, inspection, credit, brokers, and buyers

Notice you don't want to overload your posts with these keywords, its just a matter of naturally peppering them into posts that you want to increase the ranking of with Google.

If you follow these strategies, the next time your local customers perform a real estate search, hopefully you will be higher in the search engine rankings.  The alternative in tight economic times isn't pretty.

Next step is developing content that actually targets the keywords that people in your target market are based on the real world data you've procured from Google.  You may also like my 55 Techniques for SEO for Wordpress, which is specifically targeted to SEO for bloggers.

Nathan Ketsdever is an ethical search engine optimization specialist who provide search engine optimization training and social media marketing services to startups, entrepreneurs, and real estate agents.  

Tips for Inexpensive Real Estate Marketing in a Downturn

Greetings,

I'm Nathan and I do search engine optimization and real estate marketing.  And I enjoy helping successful entrepreneurs grow their businesses.

During an economic downturn its important to pursue cost effective marketing strategies to secure more buyers and sellers.  Given that you can directly measure the ROI from search engine optimization it serves as a great strategy in economically trying times. 

What would you like to know about search engine optimization?

Real Estate SEO Tip 1: Create new content. 

Google spiders love new content.  This also gives your reason to return.

Real Estate SEO Tip 2: Decide on a niche for your blog.

Pick a blogging platform.  I think Wordpress and Active Rain are great.  Typepad and Blogger are decent too, but I like the flexibility of Wordpress.  This is a great way to practice ethical SEO.

Real Estate SEO Tip 3: Start with your audience in mind. 

All the content in the world is pointless if its not targeted toward your potential audience.

Real Estate SEO Tip 4: Engage in conversation. 

Conversation drives blog traffic and community.  Asking questions is a great way to do this.   Linking out to other bloggers in your local community or your niche is also great.

Real Estate SEO Tip 5: Make your posts multi-media when possible. 

This can add a unique twist and increase engagement.

Real Estate SEO Tip 6: Create relationships with those in your niche. 

Go to Technorati, Google, and Alltop to discover blogs in your niche. 

Real Estate SEO Tip 7: Decide how much time and resources you can devote to social media marketing.

Focus and productivity in your social media marketing efforts is critical to leverage maximum ROI

Real Estate SEO Tip 8:  Learn the basics of search engine optimization for blogs. 

You can write as much as you want and with as much accumen as you can muster, but if you don't show up in search engines you are wasting your time if you're trying to generate new customers. 

• One key tip is to link to other related posts on your blog. 

• Focus on linking more to the most important posts, this points Google to your most important works

• Use anchor text which reflects the keywords you are trying to target.  Remember to target things like your local town and communities, buying, selling, loans, and other real estate related

• Investigate how social media marketing can help organically build your customer base.

• Consider investing in quality SEO Training if you plan to pursue your online market

• One way to learn more is to apply my tips from my 55 SEO Tips for Wordpress Bloggers Tutorial many of which apply to all bloggers.

Real Estate SEO Tip 9:  Consider using a hybrid stategy which leverages pay per click advertising

White hat search engine optimization is a long term strategy that can take 3 months or more, so using pay per click to provide more instant results can help drive traffic.

Real Estate SEO Tip 10:  Remember to keep it personal and helpful

Add a personal post or two about your family, about your passion for food, abour your dogs, or about your kids.  This personal touch can add a real flair.

Real Estate SEO Tip 11: Make your content creation look special.

One way is to use photos, video, or audio.  One particularly great tip for SEO is to use Slideshare to post powerpoint presentations.

Real Estate SEO Tip 12: Use a platform in addition to Your Main Blog

Whether thats Wordpress, Squidoo, Work, or Hubpages its a great way to build links.  For instance in the real estate marketing, many people use Real Estate Brain as their other platform.  Share your pillar content at Real Estate Brain or make a fantastic Work guide to really add value for your readers.  (For instance, here is my Word guide for social media marketing)

Questions?  Have any other tips?  Did this help?

Thanks for reading.

If you need help with your real estate SEO don't hesitate to give me a call at (615) 594-2095

[this is posted under a creative commons, so you are free to post and share some of these on your blog as long as you link to the original post]

Nathan Ketsdever is an ethical search engine optimization specialist who provide search engine optimization training and social media marketing services to startups, entrepreneurs, and real estate agents.