Google prioritizes aged domains and websites - This is incredibly frustrating when searching for upto date information, this is in my opinion, the single biggest flaw in Google’s technology. More often than not you will find the top 3 results will be Googles “authoritative” websites, sites that have been around and indexed forever. Most times these sites will be archaic, badly designed and seriously lack substantial updates of any kind. Google tackled this issue with the introduction of “Universal search” which placed relevant news, blogs and videos peppered in with the usual top 10 results. The problem with this is it doesn’t seem to work very well. There are hundreds of thousands of reputable real estate blogs out there with solid content, fresh opinions and great conversations going on. I never seem to see these blogs on any real estate search term as a universal result.

As a webmaster and SEO guy, I understand Google’s reasoning behind prioritizing trusted websites but I really feel its time to introduce more relevant, upto date information into the front page of Google’s results. How cool would it be do do a local real estate based Google search and see results from everywhere of relevance, like trending tweets, facebook groups, recent blog posts (not just the generic link to the blogs domain) and so much more.

While the Internet keeps evolving at a lightning fast pace, We need a search tool that’s not manipulated by SEO’s, that returns upto date and relevant results and that doesn’t reserve its top 5 placements to 10 year old sites that were made in front page 98. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for bing, if they can work on the suggestion system and polish the result preview pane the could easily become a major player in the search market.

What do you think?

Just have to brag about the environment we have created at M Realty. I received this email today for a training program that was put together by Simon, our SEO/site director. He is passionate about all thing web and SEO and decided to build the ultimate education program for our agents. What struck me was how “normal” this feels here. We have an environment where these discussions happen every day.

I couldn’t agree more. We are on the cutting edge of technology and our agents are thriving. This high tech environment just feels so normal for none technical agents who are reaping the rewards of our previous SEO training.

As I look forward to the new, indepth training course I invite you all to check out some of the amazing things we are working at over at HomeQuest (polygon shading, new map labels, huge IDX upgrades and so much more) and M Realty, I promise you wont find another real estate brokerage in the world quiet like ours and I’m proud to be a part of this real estate revolution!!

A perfect example of this is Aaron Majors, a dynamic M Realty agent who came to us with grand visions of portland real estate auctions. After spending the last 5 months immersed in the M vision, Aaron now completely dominates his niche online, through taking advice and employing strategies learned during our inhouse training and just being around our tech conversations.

One of the best pieces of advice I can give to any Realtor looking to be successful with online marketing, or any new media is to completely immerse yourself in it. Join online communities, attend local work groups and utilize social networking to get a greater understanding of whats involved, whats needed to become successful and most important of all: what works for your industry! There are experts out there brimming with knowlede and experience, if your not utilizing it, your missing out!

VisiStat offers real time website analytics, in other words, you can actually see when a visitor lands on your website, where they came from, what page they are looking at and a wealth of other useful information as it happens.

VisiStat is a premium analytic service (and by far the best I have used in 11 years of SEO / Internet marketing) and costs around $100/year per domain.

Here’s the reason I suggest VisiStat for realtors. Not only do they offer real time tracking, they are also introducing a whole host of SEO tools without raising the price.  So far VisiStat have replaced four of my every day SEO tools, two of which I pay a yearly subscription to use.

Some of the key SEO features included in the subscription are:

• Multiple Keyword Rank Tracking (see the position of a keyword in the 3 major search engines, this information is saved so you can visually see your movement within the search engines over any given period of time)
• Keyword Trending
• Keyword Tracking
• Meta Tag Analyzer
• Keyword Saturation
• … and even a meta tag generator for all you none CMS (wordpress/joomla) folks!

We love VisiStat so much, we set it up for all of our websites, even sites with little to no traffic so we can keep a close eye on their progress as they are developed. As far as I know, no other web analytic service offers this many tools, with blistering fast customer service and support at this price, Realtors – I urge you to investigate VisiStat, then keep an eye on this blog as I explain the usage of some of the tools they offer.

1. Don’t worry if it’s too long, you can always buy a smaller, more attractive domain that you can point to the longer, SEO friendly domain name.
2. Use a keyword / keyphrase people could be searching for that’s relevant to you, your service and the content you will be writing about
3. Always use a top level domain name: .com will always be the name of choice and though some people might disagree with me – I only ever use .com domain names that I want to rank in the search engines.
4. Use an Ajax tool like Domainsbot to search quickly and efficiently for your new domain name, don’t be discouraged when your first 10 choices are already taken.

Your domain name is one of the most important factors when a search engine determines the relevance of your website.  Avoid using your name as the primary domain name for your real estate business, this will not help you rank your site for real estate search terms.