Archive for June, 2007

Perhaps I’m out of the loop, but when I found this company that takes aerial photos to help promote real estate listings, I was pretty impressed. I have seen this kind of thing before with very high priced listings… like the 10 Million+ range with small planes and helicopters, but I have never seen anything like this:

IMO, this is a brilliant idea, and I’ll bet this guy is having a ball turning his hobby into a business. He charges $185 per listings with bulk order discounts, and same day delivery. This trumps every other service I’ve seen that usually starts in the $1,000 range because of the use of real airplanes.

Now what this guy needs to do is duplicate this business on a national level. I know alot of agents that would jump on something like this… as far as I know he only shoots in Colorado.

Here is an example of his work:

It’s great to see innovations like this… even in a niche market like real estate aerial photography.

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Sorry for the short hiatus… my wife and I were busy having a baby last Thursday!

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Many of you have probably heard the terms: SEO & SEM (Search Engine Optimization, and Search Engine Marketing). There is such a vast amount of information on both topics out there, and it may be confusing. It’s hard to know who to trust, and who the experts are with all of the controversial topics surrounding the subject. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the cofusion about page rank, Google Sandboxing, duplicate content, link exchanging, keyword density, the list goes on and on…

But don’t get overwhelmed. I’m going to give you the basic information you need know about SEO to make your blog successful.

By Design, Blogs are Built FOR Search Engines:

• Blogs have all the things that search engines love. Keyword rich titles, URL’s, and subpages. Since each post acts like it’s own web page, it can be titled for a specific topic and the title is usually used as the anchor text to link to that page.
• Blogs have lots of content. Search engines love it when they crawl a page and find more keyword rich content. The more often your blog is updated, the quicker the spider will return to your page to re-index. Compare that to a static website homepage that just sits around growing stale.
• Blog structures are naturally very search engine friendly. Lots of text, text links, categories, tags, titles, etc. It is naturally very easy for a search engine spider to navigate a blog because it is comprised mostly of text, and text links.
• Because of all these great built in SEO features, you can concentrate more on writing great content, and not whether your internal link structure is built properly.  Don’t worry about it!

When writing content for any blog, keep these SEO tips in mind:

• Keyword Rich Titles. This is probably the most important one of all. When writing a blog post, pick your topic, then write a keyword rich title that matches the keywords in the post. I’m not talking about stuffing keywords in unnaturally. I’m simply suggesting that you pay attention to your title, and include your keywords whenever you can.
• When you are writing a post, you will probably be linking to other outside sources. When you do, try not to use text links like this: “Click Here”. Instead, incorporate your link into a sentence depending on what you are linking to. For example, if you are writing about Rancho Santa Margarita Real Estate, include those keywords as your link text.
• When I write a post, I try to identify what keywords I want to target before I start writing. For example, in this post about the Douglas County School District, I wanted to target those very keywords: “Douglas County School District”. So I made sure to include those keywords in the post title, and sprinkle them throughout the post itself. Last time I checked, my post was coming up #11 in Google for that term.
• Depending on the platform you are using, make sure to include your posts in the appropriate categories, and tag them if applicable. This is yet another way to tell the search engines through keywords what your post is about.

How to Find Highly Searched Keywords with Little Competition:

• Start doing some serious keyword research. Sign up on WordTracker.com. If you don’t want to pay for their annual fee, just pay for one day or one week access, and use that time wisely to research all the keywords you need. Make a list of all the keywords you’d like to rank well in on the search engines. Be as broad as possible. You may even want to list the name of your city as a keyword. Wordtracker will break down all of your words, and tell you which are the most popular.
• After you have a list of your keywords, go to worktracker and start entering in those words. Your keyword list will get long fast, but don’t worry, you’ll want to have as big a list as possible. Once you have 100-200 words in your basket, do a competition search. This will tell you how many people have webpages optimized for those keywords, and will give you a rough idea of your competition.
• Here are the keywords I was able to discover from just 20 minutes of work: “model home castle rock colorado”, “castle rock real estate listings”, “castle rock horse property”, “castle rock realty”. All of these keyword phrases get a decent amount of searches per month, and have virtually no competition. They are perfect for my purposes.

Implement the new keywords into your blog:

• Implementation of these keywords will make more sense if you understand the concept of the Long Tail. You may be wondering… why shouldn’t I just optimize my entire blog for the keyword “Castle Rock Real Estate”. After all, that is the search term that gets the most traffic out of any real estate related search term about Castle Rock. That may be true, but as you understand the long tail, you will see that the combined traffic generated from the total amount of less popular keywords out numbers the total combined traffic from the most popular keyword. When you understand this, you will see that just optimizing for one keyword phrase really limits your blog’s potential.
• So, here is the solution: start writing posts about all of those less popular keywords that I talked about above. Your competition will be less, and if you write enough of those posts, your traffic from them will greatly out number any traffic from just one popular keyword phrase.
• Don’t completely neglect the popular keyword phrases. They can still be good for traffic. But make sure that you pay attention to all of the keywords relating to your market.
• If you broaden your scope, I guarantee you will drive more traffic. And here’s the bonus: more specific searches like: “Castle Rock Colorado horse property”, have proven to convert better than more generic terms like: “Castle Rock real estate”.

I hope this was helpful for you.  SEO is a funny thing.  You have to really get into the head of the search engine, and spend some time tweaking if you really want to get traffic to your site generated from searches.  But, fortunately blogs are already built to rank well in search engines, you just have to start writing that relevant content…

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Resources:

• RSS Feed to subscribe to this series

• Subscribe by email to this series

• Get Full Coverage on our Blog

• View the Blog we use as an example in this series

**If you are following along, and and have started your own blog, I’d love to hear about it! I will even add it to my blogroll so that I can follow along with your progress.

Thanks for joining me in this series on how to start a local real estate blog. I will take you through step by step instructions on how to set everything up from start to finish.

Follow along with me as I give you hands on examples as I start my own local real estate blog from scratch: THE ROCK - Castle Rock Real Estate Blog

If you need help at any time with your new real estate blog, please let me know and I would be happy to assist you.

Sincerely,

Justin Smith

justin(at)hismove.com

It’s an honor to be able to judge this, the 45th week of the Carnival of Project Blogger, and choose who I feel to be the best super hero bloggers with the most super powers.

I was able to get my feet wet a couple of weeks ago when I judged the carnival of project blogger. In that carnival, I took most of the submissions and offered my comments and advice on how to make the posts/blogs better. But since this carnival isn’t about apprentices learning how to blog, I won’t bother my readers with my regular “how to” format.

My style of judging is typically to pick the posts that I think will be the most successful as a real estate related blog post. Whether that means trying to attract buyers/sellers/borrowers, or build a real estate related B2B blog, the goal should be success.

So, in no particular order, here are my 4 favorite carnival submissions:

John Barker’s Mortgage Blog: What is a Short Sale? - This was a great article. I admit that I had never heard of John, or visited his blog before, but this is what it’s all about. It’s well written, informative, and answers a question that I’m sure many borrowers and home owners want to know the answer to.

Ann Brenhoff, LA Times: Shoot — It’s for the Web - Ok, so this article clearly doesn’t fit your “classic” blog post. I mean, come on. It’s an article from the L.A. Times. But it was unique, and I appreciate higher level media standing up and taking notice of events like the carnival of real estate, so I decided to include it. Ann’s post was basically all about how to take quality pictures of listings for posting online. There were some great tips, and it was just plain valuable information for listing agent’s and sellers.

Blood Hound Blog: Dancing on bridges: Apprehending great real estate webloggers - Ok… I don’t even know how to begin commenting on this post. For starters, I’m scared to death to say anything stupid for the fear that Greg will squash me like an ant. Those of you that read Greg regularly know that he is a fantastic writer, in fact he rarely doesn’t include a word in each post that I have never heard before. This is silly, but I often get intimidated when/if I comment on his posts because his writing is so far superior to mine.

If you know Greg, you also know that he doesn’t shy away from speaking his mind. He has stirred up some pretty heated controversies and arguments in the past, and I still haven’t decided if it’s all part of a publicity act, or simply who he his (although I lean towards the latter). I’m sure he is aware of the links that being controversial brings. It’s linkbaiting 101. Anyway, this post was another one that some people may be offended by, but one that gets his point across: blogs good blogs are all about context.

Jonathan Dalton Phoenix Real Estate Blog: First Redfin, Now an Arizona FSBO Site - I’ve always been a fan of Jonathan’s writing. It’s often funny, creative, and always fun to read. This post pointed out a ridiculous article in a local paper that made me laugh about a FSBO site. It turned out that many of the “facts” of the article were just inflated and misleading, and it just made for a fun read.

Honorable mentions include:

Larry Walker - Comp Killers

Stewart Hsu - How to Build a Strong Real Estate Team

Alex Mather - Discount Brokerages and Homophobic Men

Thank you to everyone that submitted this week! And thank you Drew for continuing to run a great carnival, and taking the time to manage everything!