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

The problem with online marketing for real estate professionals is the reality that learning online marketing has little to do with real estate practice. Remarkablogger confirms one of real estate’s online marketing principal missions – lead generation and conversion.

If visitors don’t take actions that result in profits, you are wasting your time.
You can do all the SEO work you like, but if nothing happens when visitors show up, you did it for nothing. You can pay tons of money in advertising, and you have thrown away every penny if nobody buys anything or signs up for your newsletter. You can write comments on other blogs and work through social media to attract visitors, but if those visitors just bounce right back out of your site without doing what you want, you’re leaving money on the table.

Mastering the tricks and vagaries of effective online lead generation are beyond the scope of 99% of real estate professionals. The industry knows this, and online real estate applications have historically aimed to simplify or automate online marketing presence for agents: Continue reading this post

I’m a research person. I love having lots and lots of research to back up my statements and decisions.

So, let’s first take a look at the blogosphere as a whole, how it began, how it grew and where it is going.

According to Dave Sirfry’s April 2007 report on the blogosphere, Technorati currently tracks 70 million weblogs. The report shows that 120,000 blogs are created each day with 1.4 blogs created every second.

Since October 2006, there a slight slowing in the growth of the blogosphere which was expected as its previous growth rates were staggering having grown 60 times what it was in 2004.

In 2006, the blogosphere saw 1.3 million postings per day or 15 posts per second, whereas in 2007 it grew to 17 posts per second. Interestingly, the percentage of blogs in the top 100 reached approximately 25% (22 blogs). Also, interesting is the consumer perception that blogs are just as good a news outlet as main stream media sites like the New York Times.

The breakdown: Continue reading this post