This exclusive real estate video features Eric Blackwell, Director of Technology at RE/MAX who presented a special session at the August 2009 HomeGain Nation Live Real Estate Forum in San Francisco titled “SEO Is A Team Sport”.

Did you put SEO or getting better ranking as a priority for your business this year? What is SEO? Why do search engines put some REALTORS® at the top of search results over others?

SEO is the role that relationships play in helping you get to the top — being “search engine friendly”. Blackwell explains all this and more for what SEO means to REALTORS®, and provides the basic rules of effective SEO strategies.

Watch the SEO TRENDS session video: “SEO Is A Team Sport”

Check back next week to see one more video from this 2009 real estate event, which is the “Trends In Real Estate Marketing” with power presenters Robert Hahn, Patrick Kitano, Jay Thompson, Joseph Ferrara and Louis Cammarosano!

Watch more HomeGain Nation session videos

Also see more HomeGain Nation real estate videos on the HomeGain YouTube channel, on the HomeGain Nation Blog. and in the HomeGain Media Center.

One of the questions that I get from REALTORS all of the time while consulting is something like this…

“Do I need to worry about ranking in Yahoo and MSN as well as Google?”

“How much attention should I pay to Yahoo and  MSN?”

While the questions vary slightly, the meaning is exactly the same. Each search engine is different. It is one thing to rank really well on one search engine. It is another thing entirely to rank on two (or more). In the past (before Bing and Yahoo announced that Bing would be powering Yahoo), the answer was splendidly easy. Just worry about Google. The rest do not matter. They simply do not have enough market share to matter.

But what about after Microsoft has spent over $100 million advertising Bing as the “decision engine”? What about once Yahoo is powered by Bing? Will they have enough market share to matter then?

A couple of insights are helpful. The first of them is to know how to get a monthly snapshot of the search engine market share. Continue reading this post

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is becoming more important to Realtors® each year. These lesson snippets, provided by Eric Blackwell, Director of Technology with RE/MAX Properties East, will help you understand the importance and how to leverage SEO to your advantage.

Let’s start with the TOPICAL INFORMATION. In the SEO business, this is what is known as On Page Optimization. Search Engines index your pages and the only thing that they can see is text so it is important to write/build web pages so that the text is visible to the search engines.

1. Provide QUALITY content.

2. Write search friendly titles for your posts, pages and articles that will attract readers and be something that they will search for. The title will show up on the search engine as a headline and that is what you need to keep in mind.

3. Avoid duplicate content. Why should Google, as the librarians of the internet, keep hundreds of copies of the same book or post or article on the front page? (Hint: They don’t.) When you write on your blogs, be original and unique. It will not only rank better, it will attract more readers.

To get the full lesson and receive the monthly SEO newsletter, sign up for AgentView.

Mr. Blackwell will be hosting a session titled “SEO Is A Team Sport” at HomeGain Live Nation in San Francisco on August 3rd at 2pm. Twitter @homegainnation

Eric Blackwell who is the Director of Technology for RE/MAX Properties East in Louisville, Kentucky, spoke with me yesterday from British Columbia where he is speaking at the Real Estate Web Masters Conference to other real estate professionals about SEO.

Listen to our interview about SEO:

Highlights:

J: Eric, what’s the main message that you want to get across to other real estate professionals about SEO (search engine optimization)?

E: I think there is some mystery attached to the term SEO but what it really is creating a website that Google and other search engines would want it to be. It’s a lot of hard work to build a site that has both the reputation and authority that search engines are looking for. A lot of times people think you need to trick the search engines but that’s not necessarily true.

J: Have you found that there common threads between leads and traffic that come from HomeGain, and Pay per Click, and natural search engine traffic?

E: The common thread is that there are best practices that work to effectively “convert” them to clients and then to lifetime customers. Whether you get the lead from HomeGain or other source, the lead has to come into your site and you need to be able to get them to contact you or to be able to contact them – and be able to convert those clients. The more effective you are at that, the better off you’ll be and the more profitable things will be for you.

J: What are some common traps that Realtors might fall into when trying to do SEO marketing?
Continue reading this post

I have 120 agents in my office. Which means that there are at LEAST that many business plans going on all around me every day. When you throw in the Search Engine Optimization clients that I do work for at EricOnSearch (many outside of the real estate industry), that is a tremendous number of folks I meet whose livelihood depends on marketing and leads. Many of these good businesspeople have had it tough in the past year. Many have had less business than they would have liked. This past weekend, I went through my rolodex of clients, friends and agents in our office. I found something interesting and want to share it with you.

Of the people who were doing TRULY poorly this year, ALL of them had relied on a single source of leads and/or a single marketing channel to drive leads to their business. Seriously.
Many of these good folks had become complacent in getting a lot of leads from a single source, month after month and then it went away and their livelihood was jeopardized. For the record, this included folks who had not continued to invest in their SEO efforts, which is a high risk, high reward sort of thing. I often hear so many people on the web say “Don’t do that, it is a waste of time.” …”Don’t use these guys, they don’t work.” I have heard that…even about HomeGain quite a bit. (Confession time: Used to say it myself…grin). No matter where your business is or how you market, if you are not diverse, you are one market shift away from having a bad year (or even a bad couple of months). Continue reading this post

We’ve been fortunate to have such a great group of Guest Bloggers that we have not added any recently.

That is about to change.

I am delighted to announce that Eric Blackwell shall be contributing to the HomeGain Blog.

Eric Blackwell is Director of Technology for RE/MAX Properties East a real estate brokerage of 120 agents in Louisville, Kentucky. He helps REALTORS reach and assist their clients using Technology and he is the Webmaster of www.HomesinLouisville.com. He is passionate about helping REALTORS succeed in their online marketing efforts and leading by example.

Eric also consults on Search Engine Marketing issues and does Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for select clients from his primary blog, www.EricOnSearch.com. He currently writes for several real estate blogs including the Bloodhound Blog, RealEstateIndustryWatch.com, as well as a columnist for RE/MAX Times Online (an internal blog for RE/MAX Intl.).

Eric lives in Southern Indiana with his wife, Jen, and their four children.

Stay tuned for Eric’s first post on the topic of referral fees! Continue reading this post