Update On Real Estate SEO Tools

This is an update to my previous post where I described my experiment where I used the automatic article directory submission system, Unique Article Wizard to make a single article unique and to submit it to over 600 directories.

If you read the previous post, what I had done as part of the experiment is to take the actual post and write two additional versions with similar syntax so that the Unique Article Wizard system would be able to randomize the paragraphs to make each article unique. I then submitted my three articles to the Unique Article Wizard system and measured the backlinks to our site that offers the discount on RedX REALTOR leads page. Because I used a pen name as part of the experiment, I included the unique word xyssion in the post so that it could be easily searched. As in the previous post, xyssion did not have any data associated with it on google when I published the first article.

Okay with that background, here are the results of the experiment. Within four days of publishing the article the term xyssion returned 16 entries on google that backlinked to our Agents Online and Lockbox websites. As of today, a search for the term on google returned 87 entries (60 on bing), all of which are links provided back from syndication of that one article. The actual number of links is much greater, but these are the sites that have been actively indexed and rank at an acceptable level.

From an SEO standpoint, the article and subsequent publication of it took about two hours. Eighty-seven active backlinks from two hours worth of work sure beats the thirty hours I spent submitting MLSNI.com to various directories to get fifty active links, so I think this experiment can be classified as a success. Now I’m looking for a tool to speed up that manual process of directory submission. I’ll let you know if I find a good one.

SEO Backlink Tools

I have been doing a bit of article marketing lately to promote the RedX FSBO and Real Estate Lead service and have found two very effective tools to attract numerous backlinks without a lot of work. The first tool takes your article, walks you through a process to create multiple unique versions of each paragraph, the automatically submits a hundreds of unique versions to over six hundred directories. The service is the Unique Article Wizard, and I found it by reading about various backlink shortcuts on a few different internet marketing forums.

The service came highly rated, and I have been using it for a short time. So far I have published two articles with the identifier “randy xyllion” and one containing the word “xyssion.” In the past two days, I have 106 indexed links from google for the xyllion articles and 16 links from bing back to the xyssion. Overall, not bad for drafting three articles about internet marketing and sending them out to the world.

The other tool that I have recently had success with in building backlinks to increase the search engine position of my agents online website as well as the supra ekey and lockbox sites is a service called the LinkJuicer. Okay, not a great name, but an interesting service. If you recall how a link circle used to work with multiple participants sharing links back to other member’s websites, this service will be very familiar. Essentially, the LinkJuicer is the social network equivalent of a link circle. The beauty of the service however is that backlinks to your site grow slowly and naturally over time as the system places your link into the social accounts of other participants and places links to their site from yours. Because the system limits the addition of only three sites per day and includes fifteen of the popular online social networks, your backlinks grow slowly and reliable which the search engines just love.

Maximize Your Social Real Estate Marketing Online

I received an email this morning from a company that teaches best practices in marketing. The offer was your standard lead generation tool offering a complimentary e-book download in exchange for an email registration. I have been using a similar method to promote our discount offer on the listing lead and FSBO lead service. There was nothing exciting about the offer, but what was interesting was the use of Twitter and social marketing tools to expand the reach of the offer. Just under the call to action and download button were the following phrases with associated graphics and links:

(I have changed the original links to those of the RedX for demonstration purposes. Try them to see how they interact with each social site. I hope to share how to create each of these links in futue posts.)

Have a Twitter Account? Tweet about this download!

Follow Barrett On Twitter @Leads4Realtors

Follow (company name) On Twitter @(company name)

Read Barrett’s Blog

Share on Facebook

The value in including these types of links into any of your real estate agent online marketing campaigns is obvious. It allows the recipients not only to spread your message, but also create a closer relationship to you. The tweet about this download link actually has a script that inputs the text directly into your twitter text box so you just need to click update after logging in. Overall, this is a nice, unobtrusive way to expand the reach of your word of mouth marketing programs and generate a few more leads.

Real Estate Blog SEO

If you are using a Wordpress blog, there are a number of steps that you can take to better optimize it for search engines. In fact, for those of you who host your own real estate blog using the wordpress scripts, these optimization steps can be very easy and yield great results. For those of you who are familiar with these techniques, I apologize for re-presenting the basics, but I have found that many real estate bloggers have not taken these step in their own blogs. With that in mind, here is and introduction wordpress blog SEO 101.

Step 1. Under your settings / permalinks tab, be sure to change the URL structure to “custom structure” and include only the string /%postname%/ in the text box. This essentially makes the extended URL of your post the title of the post. If you include keywords in your posts, they end up in the actual URL. For example, in posting on the topic of prenatal vitamin (my wife’s blog) and using the post title Prenatal Vitamins, the blog URL becomes http://www.bloomennutrition.org/prenatal-vitamins which is about as keyword targeted as you can get with sub-directories.

Step 2. Under your settings / general tab, update the Blog address and Wordpress Address URL to include the www as opposed to the straight http://webaddress.com

Step 3. Find the wordpress AutoSocialPoster plugin. This tool allows you to automatically post a link to your new blog entries to many of your online bookmaking accounts. The plugin is not free, but is well worth the money. However, please be sure to check that it is compatible with the version of Wordpress that you are using.

Step 4. For the next step, increase the number of sites that announce / ping your new entries when you add a new post. Go to the settings / writing tab. At the bottom there is a text box with the URL http://rpc.pingomatic.com/. In this area add any other pinging services that you can find. A good list, and a great pinging tool, can be found at pingler.com.

Hopefully for those of you who are actively blogging, this post provides a little help. Separately, to provide an update on our Agents Online lead system for realtors project, the site pops up as number eleven on Google for the Agents Online term and number four for the same term in quotations. The real time SEO demonstration is progressing.

Real Estate SEO, Getting to the Top of Google

Those of you that have been reading this blog know that I am using the search term Agents Online and the associated website AgentsOnline.Org to demonstrate in real time how to get your website to the top page of a search engine for a specific phrase.  For this specific example, I have chosen the phrase “Agents Online” and I am slowly moving the site up to the first page of google for that respective phrase.  

To provide an update on where we are on this experiment, I signed up the URL AgentsOnline.org less than a month ago and created a basic website optimized for the term.  Next I added links from this blog and built a Squidoo page which in turn linked to the site.  I also created a twitter account dedicated to Agents Online.  Currently there are about 16 total sites that are indexed on the search engines and link to this site.  

Now for our progress on Google.  If you search for the term “Agents Online”  in quotes, the page ranks as number seven among the entries on the first page of Google.  Not bad for having a site established for less than a month.  When you search on google for Agents Online  without the quotes, the page pop up as number 21 on Google which is at the top of the third page.  While this is not as significant, it does make the point that by building  a page optimized to a specific term, and using your target term as part of your URL, you can capture a premium place on the ranks of google very quickly.  

Now to move the site rank up from number 21 to within the top ten we just need to add some more high quality, high page rank links.   The can be achieved simply by posting comments on real estate related blogs, associated websites and forums.  

As you read through this post, you will no doubt realize that this is a very easy way to boost your web traffic without extensive Pay per click.  However,  as a word of caution, this process doesn’t always work.  For example our Real Estate Country site has yet to show up at an acceptable level for the term Real Estate Country.

Lead Generation Program With Twitter

When I began working with this new technology I was very skeptical. I have had access to my twitter account which I used to promote our discount to the RedX listing lead generation system, but until recently have not spent much time using it. As a result, I am a little late to the game. However, now that I have a good grasp on the technology, I can see how real estate agents online should be utilizing this tool to attract leads.

Now what are the steps to incorporate Twitter into a campaign? Before we get started you need to understand that Twitter is only a single touch point for your prospective clients and that multiple touches are usually needed to attract a client. Also, understand that Twitter etiquette implies that when you follow someone’s tweets, they may in turn follow you.

With that background, what are the steps? The first step is to link your twitter account to any online page where you can be found. If you have a site, blog or online presence, add a “Follow me on Twitter” badge with a hyperlink to your twitter site.

To start using Twitter as a marketing tool, create an auto-responder on your twitter account so that when someone chooses to follow you, they will automatically receive a thank you with a call to action. I useTweetLater.com for my autoresponders. The message should thank the user for following, and include a call to action. Your may choose to make your call to action an offer for a free report, data, or some other offer that allows you to capture more information about your target lead. For example, my call to action is “Thanks for the Follow! Want a discount on listing leads from RedX? Visit me here for more info.”

The next step is to start tweeting. You should routinely tweet, but also be aware that there is a shortcut that you can use when you can’t post directly. If you have a blog that you update often, you can post the feed directly to your twitter account using TwitterFeed.

The next step in your twitter marketing should be to add followers. You can find followers who live in your area simply by doing a keyword search on the twitter user directory Twellow. Just search the twellow list for active tweeters that live in your area and follow those that fit the bill.

There are numerous other ways that you can include twitter as part of your marketing, including mobile messaging and even video. We won’t get into those details for this post, but may address them lager.

Finally, I did want to mention that we are still SEO-ing the term, AgentsOnline but it has not yet been indexed on Google. It should be soon.

Agents Online- Real Time Update and Google SEO

As previously stated, I am committed to demonstrating how you can use a long tail keyword and some very basic online tools to get your website, or at least its online landing page, to the top of google. To recap, I have chosen the search term Agents Online which receives about 11,000 searches per month according to google’s keyword tool. I have registered for the URL http://www.agentsonline.org and last evening I spent about two hours on Dreamweaver creating a multi-page website. I copied much of the data from the failed Real Estate Country site, but optimized it for the search term Agents Online.

Because the web page is basically an experiment and essentially promotes the RedX expired listing lead system, I didn’t spend a lot of time on the format so it is pretty basic. However, I did employ some very basic SEO techniques including having different descriptions and tags for each page, parsing the data on multiple pages within the site, and including a privacy policy. Anyway, here is the site for agents online.

As we all know, having a website does not mean that traffic will just show up; even if you do have an appropriate URL. Therefore, the next step is getting backlinks and doing some online promotion. In that vein, early this morning I created a squidoo lens focused on the term Agents Online and bookmarked the page on StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us, and registered for the Blogger Blog Real Estate Agents Online The reason for the lens and the blog on blogger is that both have a relatively high page rank out of the gate and both allow for “dofollow” links. Also, every time I post something to a blog, I run the URL through pingler.com so that the search engines know that new content is available.

So this was the preliminary work for this project. Over the next few days, I will be posting links to the Agents Online site wherever I can. It may take two or three weeks for the site to actually get indexed by google, but these links give it a head start. In about ten days, you should be able to google the term “agents online” and at least one, probably more, of the links described above will appear on the first page. Shortly after that, the actual agents online website should appear.

Real Time Update on Getting to the Fist Page of Google

As I mentioned before, this blog thread is attempting to show you how you can get your site to the top of the search for a given long-tail keyword on google. I am little less confident in this post due to the challenges in getting realtestatecountry.net to show up on the first page of google for the term real estate country. However, I think I will have more success with the term “agents online.”

Anyway, to provide an update, I registered the URL agentsonline.org on Friday with godaddy.com. The URL cost $14.00 which is an insignificant cost in comparison to the traffic that should be seen if this process works out. I have spent two hours today drafting the text that will appear on the agents online website and will be posting it over the next few days. If I have the time and things actually go according to plan this time, the site should show up under the term agents online within the next two weeks.

Keep in mind that the process that I am describing, if it works, should be easily duplicated for whatever long tail keyword you are trying to optimize. For example, if you are trying to optimize for REALTORS in Naples, this methodology should be relatively successful.

It's Reat Estate SEO Time Again with Agents Online

Okay, the fact of the matter is that sometimes your SEO plans work out and sometimes they don’t. For example, I published the real estate country website with intentions to get it on the first page of google for the search phrase “real estate country.” To date the page has not shown up in the top searches for Google, and is in fact very poorly ranked. I blame lack of planning on my part as United Country seems to have numerous high ranking pages that show up under the Real Estate Country Term.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. This afternoon I registered for another term that I feel will be better suited to demonstrate the SEO strategy that I have been sharing for the past while. This new term, Agents Online, gets between 11,000 and 18,000 searches on Google per month. Obviously the term targets real estate agents, I have been a member of the site for eight years, but there are very few competitive sites optimized for that term.

With this new term, here is the strategy: Use XSite Pro to create a website optimized to the term Agents Online. After that, establish backlinks to the site by posting comments on the many social networks and blogs that cater to the real estate segment. I also plan to the site on the few blogs that I manage myself. In fact, wherever there is the ability to place a dofollow link on a website, do so.

After that, it is a matter of reporting on the success. Hopefully I will have better luck demonstrating how to use this technique to search engine optimize your real estate lead generation pages than I did with Real Estate Country.