Online Real Estate Technology

It’s amazing how quickly you can get out of the discipline of writing blog posts, and having just returned from the US and not having written any articles for awhile, it’s really taken me a little time to get back in the mode again.

But here we go, I’ve written a lot about the impact social media usage is having around the world and having spent the first part of August attending the Inman technology conference in San Francisco, where social media was a dominant theme, I thought I’d take a look at what is happening in the Australian market. 

In June, over 70% of Internet users visited a social network site, that transposes into an increase of 29%. So which sites were the most popular? Facebook had the most increase out of all the sites, with Twitter benefiting from it’s mainstream popularity.

Nearly nine million Australians visited a social network in June, making it among the more popular content categories on-line. Facebook led the sector with over 6 million visitors, growing 95% from last year.

Other interesting facts are as follows: Windows Live Profile chalked up close to two million visitors, but Twitter grew the most, rising to 800,000 visitors in June — up from 13,000 in June of last year. What’s more, social networking use is quite high across the web, composing almost 90% of users that populated Australia’s top Internet properties for the month.

Social media is now an essential part of peoples’ daily on-line routine, providing a level of engagement and reach that far exceeds most other content categories, so understanding how to leverage this audience successfully is both a challenge and significant opportunity for most small business owners.

If you are still  mystified by social media, let me know and I’ll help shed some light on how you can successfully tap into this medium for your business. Another idea is to attend one of my forth coming workshops on social media.

As always, let me know if I can assist you or answer any questions you may have with regard to Internet marketing and web site SEO. 

Hi All,

Just to let you know that I’m now back after my US trip and will adding some new posts over the next few days. That will get the ball started again on this blog, so bear with me while i get my routine back in order. I’ll also be setting up some new blogs that will concentrate on particular themes.

So watch out for those over the next few days and weeks.

Just thought I’d let you know that this weekend I’m heading off to the US to attend the Inman technology conference in San Francisco, the event starts on Wednesday and runs until Friday, so hopefully I’ll have some great new ideas to post on technology for you once the conference is over. So if I’m a little quiet in posting this week, you’ll know why.

How do you choose the right keywords for your piece of copy or blog post to really make sure that you’ll get readers to your blog or that you’ll get a good ranking on Google. It’s hard sometimes when writing, to find the right keywords to use, and even harder to put them into sentences that are optimised for the Internet. So I’ve decided to write a little piece on it for you, and give you a few ideas on how you can choose those keywords and then check to make sure they have enough search volume to rank. Remember my post on Red Widgets and how to include keywords in your article to get a good rank on the search engines, well lets now look choosing the right keywords for your target market.

The first thing to do in your real estate office, and this works really well with any business, is to sit down with all your staff and find out the most commonly used words or phrases your customers use when they contact your office, either by phone or face to face, create a list of these words and then identify the words or phrases most often used.

Develop these into profiles, you could for example have a first home buyer profile, or an investor profile, a green profile, a retiree profile etc.

Determine which one of these groups your article is targeted too and then weave the words that are keywords from each group into your body copy when writing your article.

Technology can be of real benefit to you here, as you can use Google Adwords keyword tool for checking keyword popularity and the tool will give you suggested variations on your chosen keyword.

Another great tool to use to find variations on your keywords is to use Google’s “Wonder Wheel“, now what is this you ask? when you type in a search term on Google you get the results on a web page, on the top left hand corner is a link called “Options”, click on the link and now you have a side bar on the left hand side with a number of options for you to use including one second from the bottom called “Wonder Wheel”.

Click on that and you see the wonder wheel appear in your screen, I’ve included a screen grab below for you which shows a search for Real Estate.

Real Estate Wonder Wheel

By clicking on the Wonder Wheel link, I now have a list of real estate companies, if I click on any of the links surrounding the wheel it gives me variations on my search term

Googles Wonder Wheel

This little tool is really handy for finding matches to your search term or for finding other keyword variations, the best way to understand it is to play around with it for awhile, so go and have some fun.