It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog, I wanted to let my 12 readers (thanks!) know that I’ve moved to a new job,  I now work for LandCentral as the Internet Marketing Manager. LandCentral specializes in cheap land and rural land with in house financing and no credit check.  I’m excited to be working with some very talented people in an incredibly creative and productive environment.

I’ve also updated my Twitter so you can now find me @LCSimon

I’m really looking forward to what the future holds and this new adventure. I’ve already been to pubcon which was amazing and SES is upcoming in March. Let’s connect!

This video is the 3rd in a series of SEO Training we offer to all our Agents at M. In the video I discuss the importance of “On-page SEO” These techniques can be applied to any website in any genre, so, I hope you enjoy and I’d love to get your feedback!

BTW – this was my first ever solo video, I did it first time, in one take. Yes I’m very proud right now.

SEO Training Week 3 – Optimizing Content and On Page SEO from chris lynch on Vimeo.

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?

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!

• Comment on related Blogs and posts. Do a Google search for your target key phrase and get to know the blogs or forums that are on the first couple of pages.
• Get involved with the community. Don’t just post 1 line comments purely for generating the back link -  get involved in the discussion, on most blogs the authors decide whether to approve comments or not and most 1 liners never make it into the discussion.
• Make your name your target keyphrase, if you are targeting Seattle real estate, make your name “Steve Seattle Real Estate”  with the website link going back to your own site.
• Create an avatar! most blogs use the gravatar service, Its free and simple, just upload your image and associate it with your email address then each time you comment the readers can see your a human and not some auto spam comment bot.

There are thousands of discussion forums online around your websites topic, registering and participating in these forums is another way to generate legitimate back links to your website. Use the same tactics when entering these communities, fill out your forum profile, upload a picture and post relevant contributions. Most forums allow for signatures, this is where you can use your URL and anchor text which will be displayed on every forum post you create.

Well, what are you waiting for? get out there and get involved! once you become a member of these online communities a whole world of back link opportunities will arise, you’ll also meet some great people and make some valuable connections!

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.

When it comes to ranking websites within the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) there’s two main factors they take into account:

• How much relevant, unique content the site has
• How many other websites link to the site (one way “backlinks” not reciprocal)

In this article I’m going to explain the best way a Realtor can begin to completely dominate your niche within the major search engines, focusing on unique, relevant content not only to the search engines but also to your potential clients, searching for you and your service online.

First things first, Whats your niche? lets take a buyers agent, neighborhood specialist for the Irvington neighborhood in Portland as our example.

We’re going to assume this agent has already chosen a suitable domain name reflecting their specialty ie: irvingtonportlandrealestate.com, We’ll go over domain name choices in another article.

Your content (pages, posts, images, videos) should completely reflect your niche. Lots of Realtors struggle to find things to blog or write about,  here’s some suggestions:

• Show off your local knowledge. Schools, neighborhoods, restaurants, facilities etc are all great topics to write about for our neighborhood specialist
• Market stats. Generate reports on how the market in your area is doing, add your own comments and insight to the article, this could become a powerful weekly feature the search engines and visitors will love.
• Be transparent! if your an active agent viewing homes the Irvington neighborhood, write about your viewings, add your own opinions, experiences get creative.
• Promote community events and neighborhood associations. Participate as much as you can in your community your attempting to sell real estate in and write/blog about it.

You need to keep your content up to date and relevant. Try and put aside three-five hours a week for unique content creation. Each post/page you add to your website gives you more authority on the content your writing, this content will show up in the search engines and the more you provide, the easier you will be to find.