Online Real Estate Technology

For those of you who are really interested in social media, I’ve decided to create another blog called Social Media College and my intention for this blog is to include information and updates about my training courses and updated articles tips etc on Social Media.

Very soon you’ll find information on my Bloggers Masterclass series which I’m putting together as we speak, I also intend to use the blog purely for social media updates and leave this blog for real estate tips & technology updates.

So please make sure you have a look at the blog and leave me comments on your thoughts on layout and content etc.

Search Engines

Your blog will have a better SEO result when you utilise good SEO techniques such as link building, and one of the ways to do that is by creating internal links within your posts or content.

A good internal link structure can have a size-able impact on your rankings on the major search engines. Most blog writers either don’t use this strategy or don’t know how to create internal links and it is really quite simple. You want your readers, particularly new readers to discover all your great content, and by including links to your older posts, it gives them a whole new life, as well as maintaining your readers on your blog for a longer stay. For example, in February I wrote a post about Google Analytics and in January I wrote about how important an SEO strategy is to your business, as you see I’ve included internal links to both of these posts I’ve mentioned, knowing that when new readers visit my blog, they will be able to visit those posts and read the stories, effectively giving those older posts a new lease on life.

So here are a few tips for you on creating an internal link strategy and a few things you should avoid:

1. Avoiding Bad Anchor Text: Whilst adding “Click Here Text” may drive a better click through rate, it is not good for anchor text. You need to decide if click here or keywords are more important. In the examples above, I’ve decided that keywords are more important, you can of course mix them up, by including good keywords and then a separate link containing the words “Click Here”. So if you want to rank for “Red Widgets” don’t use the phrase click here. I’ll cover this in my next post.

2. Uneven Distribution of links: Make sure you spread your links around, promote all your old posts in your new content. But one word of advice, don’t over do it. One or two links per post is sufficient.

3. Broken Links – Make sure all your links work,there’s nothing worse for a reader than to click on a link in your post and it not work. If you change or upgrade your blog software it can cause broken links,so make sure they all work and test them regularly. If you are using Google webmaster tools on your blog, it will tell you if a link is broken. But beware, the search engines don’t like broken links.

4. Missed Opportunities: If you are blogging about a subject you’ve written about before, don’t miss the opportunity to link to your older content.

5.Edit Instead of Linking: Sometimes there is the temptation to go back and edit an old post, or you might even want to add some up dated information to it, Well resist the temptation, you are far better to write a new post and then include a link to your old one.

I hope this post on how to create internal links is helpful to you in getting a better result for your blog. You can breath new life into your old articles and posts by creating internal links, and it will help you in the search results.

Good Luck and if you need help please let me know by leaving me a comment on the blog. I’ll always respond to your questions.

You can now download and listen to this post as a podcast, click here to get the latest episode.

During the course of my blog workshops I present a lot of options on how you can promote and syndicate your blog when you are just starting out, and one of the ways you can generate new readers is by putting your blog with, what the experts call, Link Farms.

The question you may have on the tip of your tongue is “What is a link farm? well link farms are web sites that have lots of inbound links that help increase their ranking and page rank on search engines such as Google. Some of these sites actually build or contain links to unrelated web sites, and sometimes these sites also link to themselves. Search engines are very strict on link farms and in some cases ban them all together from being indexed and displayed in search results.

If they are banned by Google for instance, they will lose their page rank, but that’s not the worst part, because if your blog is linked to one of these sites then you too can be banned and lose your page rank. That is why it is extremely important that you know what a link farm is, and you know how to properly identify one so that you avoid linking to that site.

If in the past you haven’t analysed the sites and directories you link to then you really need to start doing so, as they can have a massive impact on your site or blogs ranking. It is most important that you review the site closely before adding a link to it. Hopefully the following advice will help you know what to look for and help identify a link farm.

The Site has lots of links-If you go to a site and it has lots and lots of links then you should immediately realise it is possibly a link farm.

Low Page Rank -Usually link farms get penalised by Google and lose their page rank, therefore you need to be careful if you see a site with a page rank of 0, not all sites with this rank are link farms of course, but at least this will help you start to look more closely at the site.

Little or no content – Those that control link farms don’t care about content, all they want is the inbound links to help drive page rank. Therefore as a rule, don’t Link to a site that has little or no content on it.

Badly maintained sites- Most link farm webmasters don’t maintain their sites very well, links are all that are important to them. I’ve just removed my blog from one site that had heaps of broken links and links to pages that went nowhere. So check them carefully!!

Be careful as well, as to where you link your site, I added a link to a site about 6 months ago that was heavily used by spammers, unknown to me, and this caused my blog to be flagged by Wordpress and removed from public view, the first I new about it was when my traffic decreased considerably, so be careful as Wordpress will not notify you that you have been flagged.

My advice is to check out the directories and sites really well before you link to them. If you are still not sure, check out some really well known blogs, that have been around for awhile, to get a feel of what sites they link to.

I hope this helps and as always, if you need help, please leave me a comment and I’ll respond accordingly.

It’s now official, Facebook added it’s 200 millionth user last Wednesday,and if Facebook were a country it would now be the fifth largest country after China, India, the US and Indonesia. The US still leads the way with the most numbers of users, with western Europe having the highest concentration of users and Australia now claiming approx 4,600,000 users to Facebook per month. I’ve included the US figures in a chart below for you, which gives you the age demographic breakdowns and as you can see, again it’s not a Gen X & Y site, so as a business you need to start to utilise the networking available to you via Facebook.

US Facebook Traffic Increases Again amongst Older Users

News also today that the other 3 year old flavour of the month Twitter, is growing in popularity with older consumers. In fact, according to Comscore, the majority of Twitter users are over 35, so in effect, younger users are not driving the success that Twitter is having world wide. The number of Twitter users worldwide in February had grown to 10 million, up 700%, from a year ago,while in the US the number hit 4 million, a growth of 1000% over last year. Those aged 35 – 44 spend 20 minutes on Twitter on each visit, but one surprising statistic that stands out, is that the 55 – 64 year olds spend an average of 9 minutes on Twitter, the longest of any demographic using the site. Over the past 12 months both Myspace and Facebook have experienced growth in the older age groups, but it’s Twitters popularity that is being driven totally by the older users.

Twitter Trend Use

To me this is a clear example of the increasing comfort level that older users have with social media sites and the fact that they are embracing these technologies means that business should embrace these sites today, and no longer have a “ban this site“ policy. What it means to you as a business, is that your customers are embracing this type of communication faster than you are,so if you want to stay relevant to them as a business, you need to move with them. 

The more traditional forms of marketing are being left behind, so as a business, you need to use social media from a non traditional approach. One side effect of a social media strategy, is the impact is has on a companies culture, after all, social media is built on sharing.

I’ve seen so many businesses try to attract consumers via social media sites using product as a incentive, and I’ve seen that approach fail time and time again. You need to use the medium where it’s strength is and that is in networking, providing information and interacting and sharing with your customers. 

You need to enter the conversation and create the handshake.

If you don’t know where to start with this strategy, then contact me via this blog and I’ll be very happy to help you on your way.

So what is more important, Blog readers or Twitter followers? Well the answer to that question appears to be very simple, Blog readers.  Problogger has been running a poll about this subject and the results which were released last week found that 84% of respondents preferred blog readers to Twitter followers and only 16% thought Twitter followers were more important.

To me, generating a good readership for my blog by providing good quality content and building relationships via that content, has always been my goal for this blog. My use of Twitter is to solely to promote and push new readers to my blog.  Twitter which allows short message updates of 140 characters is a great push tool and I find my readership and podcast downloads goes up when I tweet on new content.

I’ll continue to work on my content and my blog readership and my suggestion to new blog writers is to concentrate on good quality content and build your blog readership. Use Twitter and Facebook, which is also a microblogging site to help build on the foundations you set on your blog.

As always, let me know if I can assist you in anyway. I hope Darren Rowse at Problogger won’t mind but I’ve included the results of the survey for you below.

Bloggers are preferred to Twitters

The next Mike Andrew real estate internet marketing seminar will be held on Wednesday 25th March at the Boulevard,121 Studley Park Road Kew Victoria.

Topics covered will include, On Line Reputation Management, Integrating Social Media &  Blogging into your Corporate Communication Strategy.  

Registration will be from 9:15am for a 9:30am start. To attend contact Tino on ttabacchiera@domain.com.au or mobile 0409 417 001

Don’t forget, this Wednesday 29th October the location for the 3rd in the series of Power Breakfasts will take place in Bundaberg at the Spinnaker Restaurant starting at 7am. I’ll be presenting a futuristic view of Internet marketing and how real estate agents can leverage the power of blogs and podcasts and why real estate offices should have a 2 year strategy in place to take advantage of these new mediums. Plus I’ll take you through the impact of video and social media sites such as Facebook and Youtube and how you can use these sites to raise your profile on the net.

I’ll also take you through search engine marketing and why this is should be an important part of your office strategy. If you would like to attend and you are in the Bundaberg area please contact David Foki Domain.com.au State Manager on 0458 220 091

I spent Thursday and Friday last week chatting to some real estate agents in Sydney about blogging, and on a number of occasions they mentioned to me the potential for readers to leave nasty messages or disparaging comments on their blogs, and this was the reason why some of them did not want to start blogging.

Well lets clear up the confusion on this, a blog is not a forum. Forums are where people are encouraged to leave comments on a business or service, and we know that in most cases these comments can be negative. I’ve even been driven to add my comments to these sites on occasions. As an example, I’ve been searching tripadvisor.com, planning my holiday, and because of user comments on service or standards of hotels, I’ve changed my choice of hotel. Blogging is not a forum, blogs allow you to publish information on any issue you feel relevant or to add advice about real estate etc, it is your personal communication tool. Your readers can add comments on your posts and request information on any issue that they feel is relevant to their area, their life or business. If you get comments from readers, which you should encourage, these are captured in the backend system of your blogging program and you get to vet or moderate these comments first, so no comment hits your blog without you approving it. If you don’t like the comment delete it, simple!!!   

Set up your blog as a tool to communicate with prospective buyers or vendors and make sure you provide good quality information on your blog. The other roadblocks put forward are, “I don’t have time” or ”I don’t have time to commit to this, I’m already very busy”. Well one word of advice, ”MAKE THE TIME”. You commit as much or as little time to blogging as your schedule allows, but remember, blogging will allow you to publish information that can be accessed from anywhere in the world, by your clients or readers. Publish your blog address on all your listings on realestate.com.au and domain.com.au, promote it on your own web site and emails and publish on all printed material that leaves your office.

That means you will have as part of your on line strategy a digital communication tool, that allows you to instantly update your clients or prospects with information that might just lead to you being the chosen professional against your competition, now wouldn’t that be nice.

I’ll cover in the next post, On Line Reputation Management, this will cover how you protect yourself from unwanted or negative comments from consumers, this is a slient business killer, and you need to know how to protect yourself and your business.