If you’re looking to put yourself in front of these web surfers, you will eventually begin to consider search engine marketing within your lead generation strategy.

In this series of posts, I will share my knowledge of search engine marketing with you over the course of a few weeks; each post will get more and more detailed and precise.

Search Engines To Consider

In January of 2008, comScore tracked that Google has received 58.5% of all search engine traffic.  That number increased to 59.2% in the following month.  This tells me that a majority of my search engine marketing efforts should go to Google.

Coming up second is Yahoo at 22.2% market share.  What a big decrease!  Google has literally become a house-hold name; “Google it..” you’ll here ever so often.  I’ve personally found many agents still using a majority of their lead generation dollars (dedicated to online marketing) to search engines besides Google.

I’m not saying investing in Yahoo or MSN is a bad idea.  Rather, it’s just not the most efficient use of your marketing dollars.  Investing in Google’s marketing options is by far more cost effective.

Types of Search Engine Marketing

Generally there are two types of marketing you’ll consider.  In no significant order, you have pay-per-click (PPC) and organic search engine marketing.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Search Engine Marketing

Pay-per-click is pretty much exactly what the name implies.  When investing in this type of program you will pay a pre-determined fee each time someone clicks on your advertisement.

Google PPC allows you to create an advertisement that is seen on the right side of search results.  Many other search engines follow the same system.

How do search engines know when to show your advertisement?  This is where keywords come into play.  When creating your “campaign” for PPC, you’ll choose which keywords you’d like to target and you’ll also choose a bid price.  This bid price is the amount of money you’re willing to pay when someone clicks on your advertisement.

The more competition your keywords has, the higher bid price it may have.  You’re always welcome to bid lower that the amount the top person is willing to pay, however your advertisement is likely to not be seen as it appears at the very end of a long line of people advertising for your same keyword.

If you want to appear first, you’ll have to pay for it.   When I was bidding for real estate keywords in my market, I’d ended up paying around $0.50 per click.  This can really add up after a while – especially if you’re in a big real estate markets.  This is where Organic search engine marketing begins to get attractive.

Organic Search Engine Marketing

When you search for anything on a search engine, you’ll be presented with the usual “top 10″ sites that seem to pertain to what you’re looking for.  These sites do not pay to advertise here; they are organically discovered and ranked by the search engines throughout the day.  Yes; this means rankings can fluctuate on a daily basis.

Free you say?  What an incredible idea!  I’ll rank top 10 for any term I’d like and essentially advertise for free!  Not so fast.

Organic search engine rankings are far more difficult to rank for.  This is especially true when it comes to marketing a real estate site.  Real estate sites are abundant on the internet; you’ll have plenty of competition in this area.

In search engine marketing and your business, I begin to take baby-steps into this area by discussing some of the key ingredients to creating a great site for search engines.  Optimizing your website for organic search engine rankings is often referred to as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  We’ll get into SEO in a later post in this series.

Wrapping It Up

In this weeks post you’ve learned the type of search engine marketing you can pursue and eventually incorporate into your lead generation strategies.  Next week I’ll talk in more detail about optimizing your site for search engines, and great ways to begin building your search engine rankings.

Have you begun to investigate search engine marketing?  What kind of questions did you have?

Please feel free to share your thoughts by adding a comment below.  Remember – in the coming weeks we’ll get more detailed.  This post was aimed to get the ball rolling.

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Search Engine Marketing is a post from: Technology For Agents

Trulia ranking well doesn’t surprise me. Their site is well optimized to rank well in search engines, and their site is truly innovative in the tools it provides to real estate consumers.

However, what does surprise me is that real estate agents in Houston are actually helping Trulia rank better than them. Why? It could be a for a couple of reasons:

• They don’t really care about rankings, and are perfectly fine with intentionally doing this.
• They are uninformed.

I seem to feel that it’s more a matter of the agents being uninformed than them not really caring.

It Gets Worse

What I find in common with many of these agent sites is that they are all from one provider. Number1Expert is a firm that builds real estate sites for agents, and for a fee, the agents can use them to procure business in the form of real estate leads.

At the bottom of each of these sites/templates is a Trulia Widget, which also contains a backlink with the appropriate anchor text of “Houston Real Estate”. Guess where they point to? The link the Trulia is now ranking top 10 for! Did Number1Expert and Trulia form some kind of deal to get this done?

I found 8 real estate agents with a vast multitude of links per agent doing this, and they all had a Number1Expert template. The agents sites are linked below.

If an agent on this list would like their link removed, it will be done so immediately. Simply contact me to let me know.

• http://www.teamjudy.com/myhomes.asp
• http://www.kaytownend.com/myhomes.asp
• http://www.barbarastraty.com/myhomes.asp
• http://www.donburns.com/myhomes.asp
• http://www.shereechang.com/myhomes.asp
• http://www.curtiswarren.com/myhomes.asp
• http://www.countonchris.com/MyHomeDtl.asp?HomeID=504611&P=20
• http://www.dianesanders.com/MyHomeDtl.asp?HomeID=708956&P=20

This is a part of the reason why Trulia is ranking in the top 10 for the term “Houston Real Estate”; I promise you that. Do the agents doing this know what they are actually doing? Do they care about their own search engine rankings?

When it comes to the SERPS, it is my opinion that Trulia is a competitor. Agents in the top 10 rankings for pertinent search results get real estate leads from that ranking position.

So in theory, I suppose you could say that Trulia is also a competitor to that agent’s business, since they’re ranking position (if higher) could possibly take leads away from that agent and disperse it elsewhere. That’s a whole other debate of it’s own, but why help your competition?

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Houston Agents Help Trulia Rank Top 10 is a post from: Technology For Agents

Do you like helping your competition when it comes to search engine optimization? I personally don’t like to.

However, it seems that many uninformed agents looking to increase the nifty features of their website are inherently harming their chances of doing well in search engine rankings.

How is this so? Eric Bramlett, Austin Real Estate Broker has brought it to my attention that the widgets that Trulia offers also include a keyword targeted link back to their site, which intentionally helps improve their search engine rankings.

Why do many agents still use the widgets? I believe that it’s simply them being uninformed about the real intentions of the widget feature. That is why I’ve decided to increase awareness by posting about this here at TechForAgents.com.

Trulia is truly kicking butt in the SERPs (for big time terms, and for long tails) because they’ve cooked up some solid linkbait in the form of widgets.

If you are currently using their widgets on your site, I would either:

• Discontinue the use of the widgets all-together.
• Take Eric’s advice, and modify the script to use the widgets without hurting your search engine rankings. You can see an example of this modification by following the source link below.

Source

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Trulia Widgets Help Their SEO, Not Yours is a post from: Technology For Agents

How I Use This Tool

The search query I use the most is “site:www.sitename.com”. What this will allow you to see is when pages of your site get indexed by Google. You are then given the opportunity to re-visit the page, remind yourself what keywords you were targeting for, and check their ranking in Google. You can automate this process by using this handy keyword analysis tool at McDar.net.

You can also use the Google Alerts tool to notify you of when new topics are indexed regarding specific keywords that you are looking to gain rankings in. The most common use would be “area real estate”, where you would replace “area” with your market location. This will allow you to see when new blogs, news articles and even competitors get their sites indexed by Google for the various keywords that you’ve chosen to go after.

If you are currently using Google Alerts, what nifty ways are you using them to better your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts?

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Using Google Alerts is a post from: Technology For Agents

This piece of software made by Axandra offers a vast array of tools to use by the beginner or avid web developer. It also enables it’s users to bypass tedious tasks, such as directory submissions. By far my favorite is a tool is the “Top 10 Web Page Optimizer”.

The optimizer will initially ask you for a target keyword or phrase. In this example, let’s use “Houston Real Estate”. What this software from Axandra will do is analyze the top ten pages that appear when browsing that keyword phrase via any major search engine such as Google, then compare their pages to yours!

You must first enter your URL, or web page address. Let’s go ahead an use my site as an example: MyHomeHouston.com. After inputting your URL, it will then ask you which search engine would you like to optimize for. I suggest you start with Google, since they currently have the largest market share among Internet users.

Moving forward, it will then ask for your keywords phrase where I have entered “Houston Real Estate”, and it then shows you the top 10 pages that come up when typing in “Houston Real Estate” into Google.com. This is more along the lines of a verification, just to make sure you want your site compared to all 10, or maybe just a few. You also have various other options to choose from which we can get into at later date.

After it’s searching process you are left with a nifty report, analyzing the keyword usage, title descriptions, keyword density on all the top 10 pages for “Houston Real Estate”! You can obviously see how this tool can come in very handy, as all you must do is simply mimic the top 10 sites as a foundation, then begin to input quality content to rise in the rankings.

Perhaps you do not know what keywords phrases to use. Internet Business Promoter also has that covered. They are also providing a nice keyword generator that uses the content from your site to suggest keywords that appear often in your articles or pages. This tool can stumble upon frequent used words that you may not catch off hand.

The Internet Business Promoter software is available as a demo for free. Many of the useful features are still able to be used in the demo. I suggest that in time, however, you take the investment in your business and purchase the full version which gives you the best web page optimization tools.

The only negative side is that their software is quite expensive. You are looking at a hefty $250 investment. I suggest that you first make sure that you are ready to invest in this part of your business before purchasing the full version, as the demo is pretty sufficient if you are new to SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

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Internet Business Promoter Initial Review is a post from: Technology For Agents

I’ll admit; at one point I was one of those guys.I learned a few things a while back that really stuck with me from various informational sites that had experienced users who had success with SEO or “Search Engine Optimization”. In this article I will share a few of those key points with you.

There are a couple major factors when working on your site to develop it for the web, or optimize it as some will call it. There are also shortcomings that can indirectly effect the income of your business.

It Takes Time and Money

Time and money isn’t something that we all can say we have in the real estate business early in our career. I want to stress to you that good search engine rankings take time; sometimes lots of it. I’ve read and experienced that a search engine such as google.com will take the age and domain registration length into consideration when determining it’s rankings.

Therefore, we can conclude that even if you had a nice domain name, such as [Insert City]MLS.com, that doesn’t mean you’ll get to the top right away.

The early stages of web design and development aren’t always dollar productive since spending time on your real estate website doesn’t produce direct results right away. Usually that time could be more effectively used on vital activities, such as training and development and lead generation. You’ll find that the domain registration, hosting, and time actually spent developing content all equate to lost money in some form, whether it be through lost time or the actual tender of cash for product and services.

Therefore I have come to the conclusion that unless you have cash reserves (at least 3-6 months worth), your time could probably be better spent elsewhere for now. Work on some dollar productive activities such as lead generation that can directly effect the commission you plan to receive.

The reason I make this statement is simple. I invested the first eight months of my real estate career building my site and earning practically minimum wage. A year and a half later, I can now see that it is now getting a great traffic (or visitors) and I receive a steady flow of leads.

Would I have approached it a different way? Absolutely. I would have focused on prospecting, THEN when I had enough to last a while, spend time on my site. Those first eight months were torture on my personal finances. Building sites can be consuming, especially if you’re a perfectionist such as myself.

Moving forward, let’s say you have the reserves or perhaps you don’t agree with the previous suggestion. I’m alright with that; it’s your business! That’s the beauty of our industry. You can decide what deserves your attention and what doesn’t at any given time.

Our next step should be considered during the planning phases of your real estate website.

What Makes For Good SEO

There are three key factors I consider when optimizing my site for the web. I consider keyword density, content, and most importantly, quality inbound links.

The key word density is also considered and usually goes hand in hand with your content. The content of your site must be filled with key words that are relevant to the theme of your site, such as “real estate” or “listings”.

Why else would someone searching for your site pull up yours? You must have some form of indication that what you have on your web page is relevant to the user’s search query. I suggest a value from 6-10% of how many times your target keywords should appear in the article amongst other words. I will research this in more detail so that perhaps I share more insights with you.

The content on your site has to be of good quality, and continually updated. When I say quality I am referring to articles that really mean something to your readers and visitors. Talk about foreclosures, the market, anything real estate related. I suggest you just keep it current and informative so that your readers have a reason for coming back to you. If someone bookmarks your site, you’ve hit the nail on the head.

The last item of importance is quality inbound links. Other sites need to feel that yours is important as well. I do not mean to past your URL (or link to your site) everywhere you go online; the site referring traffic to you must have some form of relevance.

A site about the maintenance of dogs referring to you will probably do little to affect your rankings in Google. However, your link on a site that already is held in high regard in the real estate industry such as inman.com would certainly help boost your rankings.

The key is figuring out how to get your link there. Inman.com is a real estate news portal so perhaps you could write a fantastic article for buyers about buying homes and they would pick it up and link to you. Who knows?

Conclusion

As you can see, there’s quite a bit of information to be absorbed when thinking of building a site, and optimizing for the web.

Be sure you are ready to take on this major project before embarking on the endeavor. Doing so without thinking of how time should be spent in advance could lead to you making irrational decisions on the use of your time, and your business could temporarily suffer. Learn from my mistakes and make sure you do have the cash reserves before you decide to take on this animal yourself.

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Search Engine Optimization and Your Business is a post from: Technology For Agents