Real Estate Internet Marketing

Googe is testing Knol. A social networking site.

2007-12-22T01:41:00.000-06:00

Recently I read a post about Knol from Google. Knol stands for a unit of knowledge. Larry, Sergey and Eric was to find a way to help people share their knowledge. In my opinion, Knol will be a social networking site for professionals who know and/or specialize on specific fields or industries.

Knol will be a good source to find accurate and updated information about important topics that can make your life easier.

Here are 2 paragraphs from Google's Blog:

..."Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try anew, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge.

Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.

At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word "knol" as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page.

Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we'll do the rest. "...

It'll be interesting to see what Google ends up doing with this project.

Internet Marketing: A long term investment of time and money, Is it worth the shot?

2007-12-22T00:27:00.000-06:00

For the last 3 ½ years I have dedicated most of my time to learn, test, create, study search engines full time. All my knowledge might be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars that I am not selling or giving it away.

Many clients and people that know me and what I do, usually ask why it takes so much time to be successful on the web and that they could not wait a year for their “website” to generate visits, leads and/or sales.

In other words, they do not care about the future. They’d rather rent a local store, pay a high monthly rent for at least 3 years (because of the contract), and hope for clients to come in and shop; that’s the old way. Nowadays, any business can be successful online, it’s a matter of knowing how to use the internet and be found by future customers who need and are looking for your product and/or service.

People use search engines to find solutions to a problem, to gain knowledge about a service, product, diseases, technology, nutrition, exercises, read reviews, you name it. It’s all about information and you can provide that information about a specific industry that you might sell your services, products, etc, but what you provide has to be unique and very good for them to give you their money.

The web is an easy way to make money but you have to make your web visitors trust you. Give me $3,500 and you can come to my private Internet Marketing seminar. I bet your answer is no because I am not even telling you the benefits you’ll get by signing up, well, most of the online businesses who fail are because they want to sell, excuse me, they want your money, that’s it, simple, they are not willing to give you the information you need or tell you the benefits of their products and/or services because spending or investing time and money on marketing their site is not worth the shot; the results = failure.

Search engines are getting better at finding and ranking high quality information. Still, you can find spammy pages ranked on page #1 but they’re vanishing and fast. Some webmasters and SEOs get frustrated and mad at Google sometimes because they make it harder and harder every day to rank and attract visitors but the truth is that if Google did not exist, they would have no business, I would have no business.

In a way, I think we should all be happy to have a big player in the search engines industry like Google. If you do what their guidelines state, you should do fine, yes, it does take time and money and Google will not trust you and your site if you do not provide high quality information.

Do you see my point? Your visitors won’t give you their credit card numbers for your product and/or services if your site does not contain good info and Google won’t rank your site either.

If you understand this, then I’d say you’re ready to be successful on the web.

Google's New Video Sitemap Tool

2007-12-18T01:26:00.000-06:00

John Fisher-Ogden (Software Engineer) and Amy Wu (Associate Product Manager) from Google posted an article on Google Webmaster Central blog about the newest tool for Webmasters, I’m talking about the Video Sitemaps.

Really, the Google Video team put a lot of effort on this which will help many users to search the world’s public videos. This new feature was created by the Google Video team and the Sitemaps folks. You can now add the video specific Sitemap to the standard Sitemap and specify the video files on your site. Also, you can add relevant metadata…do you want to know how? Take a look at the following example from Google Webmaster Central blog.

Get started today and let Google know about your content. Sign in to your Google Webmaster account.

Google Toolbar 5 (Beta)

2007-12-13T18:04:00.000-06:00

Google has released a new toolbar version which includes new and improved features.

The Toolbar’s features are the following:

- Custom buttons for Google Gadgets.

- You can access all of your toolbar settings, bookmarks and custom buttons from any computer.
- Google notebook is included with Google Toolbar 5. This allows you to clip, collect and share info as you browse the web.

- The Google Toolbar Find Bar. With this feature, you can search words as you type and quickly locate and highlight key terms across different pages.

- Google Toolbar 5 shows you suggestions web addresses that you may mistype, instead of seeing a 404 or DNS error page.

- The AutoFill feature has been improved. You can keep several profiles to serve your business and personal needs and store credit card info with password protection.

- The AutoLink feature lets you turn text about vehicle, book and map info into useful links.

- Web History can be accessed now through the Google Toolbar 5 to see where you have been searching lately and see suggestions for related searches.

- If you do not know the exact URL of a site, you can now simply type the domain name into your browser address bar; this feature is called Browse by Name.

- Other great features are: Bookmarks, Send to, Google Settings Notification, Translate, Pop-up Blocker, Spellcheck, Pagerank which design has been changed and Highlight Search Terms.

You can read and learn more about Google Toolbar 5 (Beta) here. Make sure you read the Toolbar Privacy Policy.

Download Google Toolbar 5 (Beta)

Do you have a website?

2007-12-10T12:20:00.000-06:00

Nowadays, any business of any type and almost anywhere in the world has a website, but the thing is that most of these sites do not compete in the search engines, do not bring visits, do not generate leads and do not generate sales.

Alike these businesses of any type, real estate agents have websites too, but only a few invest on marketing their sites, design and invest time on creating high quality content.

Most of the real estate agents buy the cheapest websites like Advanced Access or Point 2 which are okay but I can tell they’re not going to increase your business.

You’re probably thinking, “Is this guy trying to tell me that I should spend thousands of dollars on a website?” If you have the money sitting in your bank account and you want to succeed fast….the answer is YES…go out there and get the best of the best, design, programming, software, etc…set up your internet marketing team…it’s worth it!!!

If you don’t have that amount of money to invest on a website…you can get a cheaper solution, invest part of your FREE time on learning html basics, read about SEO, meta-tags, about search engines, etc…get a domain name for $6.00 and start your way to success.

Optimizing a website is not hard or difficult, you just need to give it some time and apply some techniques. Here’s a list of things you need to create a site with a small amount of money:

· Design – Get a predetermined template at http://www.templatemonster.com/

· HTML – Learn html at http://www.davesite.com/webstation/html/

· Get a webhosting…there are hundreds of companies offering this service…I recommend you go to Google and search for web hosting reviews…read them…do your research.

· Get a HTML editor like Dreamweaver or Frontpage so that you can edit your website templates.

· Get software – I’d recommend using a website authoring software…click here to learn more about it.

This is a cheap way to start and a very effective one.

What you need to know about "Cloaking"

2007-12-04T11:37:00.000-06:00

What does cloaking mean?
Cloaking is often used as a spamdexing technique. It’s a black hat search engine optimization to try to trick search engines by giving the relevant website a higher ranking.

It’s also used to trick search engine users when visiting a site based on the search engine description which site turns out to have different content. For this reason, major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Live.com, consider cloaking to be a violation of their guidelines.

I highly do not recommend using this technique; it’ll work for a while but you’ll get your site delisted from the search engines. Sooner or later search engines find out if you’re cloaking their index.

Put effort, time and money on projects by doing things right, yes... it might be a slower process but much worth it.

Recently, Matt Cutts (he’s currently the head of Google's Webspam team), posted on his blog about cloaking. He commented on a Danish company that offered ‘undetectable’ cloaking techniques to its customers.

“For cloaking to be completely “undetectable,” it would have to be like that Steven Wright joke: “Last night somebody broke into my apartment and replaced everything with exact duplicates.” And a cloaking script that gave users and Googlebot exactly duplicate pages would be a bit pointless.” – Source: Matt Cutts blog

Don't risk your search engine rankings
You might get good short term results with shady SEO techniques such as cloaking but it is very likely that your site will be banned from search engines if you use them. You'll put your web business at severe risk if you use black-hat SEO methods.

5 Easy steps to optimizing your website

2007-12-02T12:06:00.000-06:00

i. Define your market: In order to succeed online you have to know and define your market area. Find out the amount of people that are searching for real estate online in your community, city or metro area, it really depends on how aggressive you are and how much time you’re willing to dedicate to optimize and grow your website.

ii. Use your actual domain name or get a new one: When you already know what people are searching on Google, Yahoo and Live.com, you can either keep your domain name (if you have one) but I’d suggest searching for a domain that has the exact keywords that people search for. For instance; suppose they search for ‘your city real estate’ which is the top keyword being typed every day in the search engines…well you then go to godaddy.com or mydomain.com to see if ‘youcityrealestate.com’ is available…if it is…I can assure you a 100% rate of success with that website…of course everything is not about the domain, I'd suggest you get a professional design, high quality information, etc, so that visitors would want to contact you.

iii. Increase your link popularity: Many of you might be wondering why your website needs to have decent link popularity. The major search engines, Google, Yahoo, Live.com, rank websites according to the link popularity that they have; I do not suggest buying links from other websites since Google and other major search engines will penalize your site. You can read more about buying or selling links to pass pagerank here.

When exchanging links with other sites, first make sure that they will place your link on a relevant page, what do I mean by this?...make sure that your link is on a page which has real estate related content. And my second point is to make sure you get the right Anchor Text in your link. Anchor Text are the words used within the link. Don't use images for inbound links.

iv. Identify your web pages: How to identify your web pages? This step is a bit technical, every web page has meta-tags, and they consist of 3 parts which are: the Title Tag, description tag and the keywords tag. Nowadays it’s considered not to be an important part of optimization but I’m here to say that actually IT IS.

Every web page has to be optimized using the right keywords in the right place with the right page title and content. Basically each web page in your website should target a completely different keyword.

v. Fifth and final step: Please repeat the steps above over and over and over…and over and you’ll do fine. If you’d like to know more about internet marketing, how to attract thousands of visitors, generate leads, information resources and more, just Sign Up for our seminar.

Online Presence is Vital for a Real Estate Agent

2007-12-02T10:33:00.000-06:00

Nowadays, online presence is vital for a real estate professional’s marketing plan. Consumers now want accurate information that’s quick and convenient so real estate professionals need to harness the features, capabilities and opportunities of internet marketing to meet the increasing customer demands.

Boost your online presence, plan a marketing strategy for your real estate business, today’s clients are going to be at least as techno savvy, probably more, than you.

Your website needs to keep visitors, give them options, what do I mean by “give them options”?…write reports about the market in your area, give buyers and sellers tips plus a guide, post your listings, if you do not have listings you can ask a real estate agent who does have, if you can post them on your site (remember to update the info as they get sold or prices change); again…you need to keep visitors on your website, impress them with high quality information that your competition does not provide.

Realtor.org is a great source of information including hundreds of reports, surveys and guides. I can assure that less than 5% of realtors take advantage of this information.

The anatomy of Search Results in Google

2007-12-01T09:39:00.000-06:00

Matt Cutts (He is currently the head of Google's Webspam team) went to Google’s Kirkland offices where he was recorded when talking about the anatomy of a search result giving useful tips to help you improve how your sites show up in Google’s results pages.

In my opinion, Matt gives high quality information, he covers everything you see in a search result, page title, page description, sitelinks plus other explanation about those elements that sometimes appear, such as stock quotes, cached pages links, etc.

I have embbeded the video below for you. Have fun!!!

Compete.com, Site Analytics and Neat Tools

2007-11-30T14:18:00.000-06:00

Compete.com offers neat tools which help you benefit from click sharing. It can provide information to protect you from dangerous sites; it creates profile from each website you visit. Also, it shows promo codes to save you money when checking out, Compete.com’s mission is to create a more trusted and valuable Internet.

The company’s idea came from Bill Gross who built a revolutionary search engine called GoTo which later became Overture and it was acquired by Yahoo.

In the year 2000, Bill came up with the great idea, he created Compete.com to organize clicks that we make on the web so that would provide the sufficient information to know what’s going on across the web.

Compete.com offers the following tools:

Compete Site AnalyticsTM
Provides free information for every site on the Internet including site traffic history and competitive analytics; a list of available promotional codes across thousands of online retailers; and site-specific trust scores based on up-to-the-minute data from Compete and third party security services.

Compete Search AnalyticsTM
It's your starting point to build and optimize search marketing campaigns that create brand awareness, drive site traffic and increase sales. Use Compete Search Analytics to discover keywords driving traffic to any domain, identify gaps in your search strategy, invest in terms that drive the most engaged visitors, and track your performance against competitors and peers.

Compete BlogTM
Highlights how people are using the Internet and where interesting, useful sites can be found. The Compete blog is one of the premier blogs on the web and has been recognized for its timely, entertaining and fun commentary across a wide range of topics.

Compete ToolsTM
A collection of tools that make it easier for users to bring the power of Compete Site Analytics to their desktops. Designed for both Internet Explorer and Firefox, the tools provide users real-time access to the same information found on Compete Site Analytics.

MyCompeteTM
Provides a personalized homepage for Compete community members to receive premium content and participate in forums, surveys and other programs.

Hello and Welcome to our Blog

2007-11-30T00:58:00.001-06:00

My name is Matt Bulox and I have been involved with the web, learning SEO, Internet marketing, creating sites, studying search engines, gathering resources and much more (that I can't remember right now) for the past 3 years.

Before going online and learning about the web, I used to be a Marketing Director for a very successful mortgage company in the city of Houston, Tx which led me to always be in the mortgage and real estate internet marketing field.

I'll be posting a wide variety of topics from Real Estate news to facts about Google. My mission is to educate the 1,500,000 Real Estate agents in the United States so that they learn how to profit, generate leads and convert them to clients using the fastest growing media called 'Internet'.

Okay...I have explained a little about myself and I look forward to seeing your comments in my posts too.