Realespace

First of all I want to thanks all the guys that work on putting this conference together. IMO it was a huge success. We came away with some good relationships with vendor and I learned something from every panel. Good job!

REtechsouth website
The guys that put it all together
Brad Nix, Maxsell.net
Matt Fagioli, DiamondDwellings.com

There were actually a lot of people involved, but those two guys really did a great job and put most of the even together.

I was a speaker on “The Dreaded SEO” panel. There was some good information put out from that panel, although there were some differentiating ideas. When I was preparing for the panel, I focused on 3 concepts to achieve from the discussion. Those being, it’s all about relationships, SEO can be to much to handle, and keywords are the key.

It’s all about relationships
Every business is a lead business, whether you are a dentist, real estate agents, software developer, your business will not succeed with out leads. If you are focusing on getting all your leads from google search results you will not be in business for very long. Even on the internet you have to be pro-active and go get your business. The internet should not change your business plan, but rather enhance your lead generating plans. IMO you should focus on building relationships, just like you do in real life.

If you are just starting a blog, you should optimize it for search, but you really won’t see results for many months. In that same amount of time, if you make a friend a day on the internet from commenting on blog posts, citing other blogs, using Facebook and linkedin, etc… you will be much better off then if you spent that time focusing on SEO.

Do the math, 1 friend a day X 6 months = 180 friends, that you are interacting with, building trust and credibility. Remember your search results will improve with more and more traffic, so it will naturally improve your results.

SEO is too much to handle for most of us
The really cool thing about the internet is that information we put out there will stay for a long time, even if we (the authors) long forget about it. Again, this is for people just starting to blog, but imagine 5 years from now, how much information you will have out there. One thing to remember is that even though the information is out you should still make sure you have control of it. New standards of data portability and pushing that all sites lets you (the author) to take your work with you. So if you are blogging on a site that does not let you export and move your articles, get a new provider, FAST. I love Wordpress and I hope it will be around for a long time. I can take my posts to any other Wordpress site, or most other blogging packages, but we don’t know what will happen in the future…5 years from now who knows how we will be putting out information on the internet… you have to be ready for anything.

So, my point is, don’t fret about SEO, your website/blog will naturally get better and better search results it gets older, gets more traffic, and grows. Write interesting articles, with catchy titles, and engage the public’s interest. I know you are thinking, “But won’t SEO help it grow faster?” Yes, but in the time it is taking you to read this post, Google has probably changed their algorithms…they seem to do that a lot, and what worked yesterday is not working anymore, or worse yet will hinder your search engine status. Don’t let it stress you out, have fun blogging, it is a great outlet… Not your second job. Also, many SEO companies are expensive, and most will not guarantee results, so weigh your options for other marketing material that you can put that money towards.

Keywords are the Key
Sit down for an hour and define 20-30 keywords that you want to get search results for. Focus on your niche. Then take that list to Google Keywords Tool. this tool will show you how much those terms are searched for and how much competition there is. It will also show similar keyword phrases. Define your list even more with the Google tool, now each of yours posts should target your keywords. I’m now talking about keyword density. Pick a keyword and make sure that in your next post you use that keyword enough to dominate all other keywords in the post.

For example, if I have a 400 word post and my keywords are “San Francisco Real Estate”. I should include “San Francisco Real Estate” at least 5 times in that post. The more words, the more often to use it. There are many keyword density tools on the internet that will make it easy to count your keywords

Keyword density is important because search engines use this information to categorize a site’s theme, and to determine which terms the site is relevant to. The perfect keyword density will help achieve higher search engine positions. Keyword density needs to be balanced correctly (too low and you will not get the optimum benefit, too high and your page might get flagged for “keyword spamming”).
Source: SEOchat.com

Paramount movie studios has built a widget (facebook app) called voozoo that allows user to send short movie clips to their friends. It has just been released and the selection is somewhat small. It will also take the studio months to tags and organize all the movies, but there is much hype that this will be huge. This is a great move on the part of paramount and, of course, all the movie studios will follow, and really shows the record industry how to use social media and deployable application to a marketing advantage. Imagine if 3 years ago, you could send short song samples with meaning to your friends , would we have had so much trouble with the RIAA?

This is brilliant. I know at least 5 clips from Anchorman (really anything from Will Ferrell) that I would send to my friends. Really, what better way to get a point across then with a movie clip, and what will make you want to watch the entire movie later. Each movie clip will have a button to purchase the movie, and eventually the studio will use this widget for upcoming movies to build hype and buzz.

As much as I like the strategy behind the widget, one thing that really annoys me is there plan to get people to send content to their friends. They have V-points, which seems a little buggy at the momment. You need v-points to add movies to your collection. You get v-points by sending friends the application.You get 25 for sending the app, and only 1 point if you send them a movie clip…doesn’t make sense. I sent it to a friends and got undefined v-points.

This is a really good idea for a widget, and would like to see it taken out of Facebook and made a free standing widget to be used on any website. Similar to how I can embed a Youtube video in blogs. I’m glad to see the studios are embracing the social media movement.

Google, the core driver behind SEO strategies, looks to become the King of Social Networking Optimization (SNO) as well.

“The web is more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues. But with the trend towards more social applications also comes a growing list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn.

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.”

-Google on OpenSocial

‘Learn Once, Write Everywhere’ is the core message of this ‘new’ architecture proposed and fostered by Google. Using the most general of statements, Googles latest release will have broad reaching effects regarding how the web ‘works’.

According to Google, OpenSocial is a set of three types of API’s that allow programmers to access core functions and information that are common to ’social networks’:

1. Profile Information. Info about you.
2. Friends Information. Info about your friends.
3. Activities. Whats everyone doing, reading, buying, looking at, playing with..?

Although the three API’s above look pretty ‘So What-ish…’, thats really the beauty of it all, they’re blatantly vanilla yet almost infinitely scaleable considering the amount, quality, and how information can be shared. There are little to no restrictions from a programmers standpoint, it’s a wide open and flat playing field to develop under. In the real estate and mortgage verticals, today the question is:

‘Whats the big deal?’ since there are no succinct applications or service providers amongst the initial group of partners that clearly look to benefit ‘Real Estate’ or ‘Mortgage’. I’ll reserve specific examples for the next posting, but I do have some general broad canvas thoughts…

In a recent post on The XBroker, I spoke of the evolution of Widgetry (or Gadgetry) or, shareable applications designed to increase the functionality and share-ability of a web-site via SNO. I touched on the importance of SNO in my last post here.

Google has kept things ‘Really Simple Stupid’, allowing the collective brain power of programmers with almost any skill level to develop an application or widget using OpenSocials API’s. With just a few tweaks as to how applications/widgets are developed, programmers who choose to integrate OpenSocials API’s won’t need to learn or develop new (mark-up) languages to make their shareable wares work on…pick your web-platform…

As stated above, OpenSocial isn’t ‘just another social network’, it creates a common platform that allows independently produced applications/widgets to work on and connect with multiple platforms.

This should allow for very rapid development cycles as well as much faster adoption rates for popular (and useful) applications. If you’ve used FaceBook you have seen the dynamic of rapid application development in action, which is also why Facebook is the rage in IT (and VC) land. OpenSocial one ups Facebook by not restricting such application development to only their platform. Just think, you could soon be able to throw sheep at your peers outside of FaceBook! (OK, bad joke.)

What becomes possible using OpenSocial relevant to Real Estate service providers? Ponder for a second the richness of information that could be called upon, seamed together, and shared between ‘network hubs’, or like groups of professional peers, running relevant applications (widgets et.al.) using OpenSocial’s framework. Listings, potential consumers, existing clients, vendors, mortgage rates, broad demographic data, hyper-local opinions and information…

Today, real estate agents, mortgage professionals, brokerages et. al. are powerful and robust information network hubs, however, they still remain fractured and relatively disparate from each other….Applications designed to seam these hubs together for the benefit of the professional end-user as well as the ever discerning long tail driven consumer are already in the works, OpenSocial looks to have shortened the learning and adoption curve of such applications substantially.

Also See:

Social Networking Maintenance Made Easier

What Does OpenSocial Mean to Real Estate?

Why Google Turned into a Social Butterfly

The web begins and ends with Search. Sure, there are an almost infinite number of other applications, but they all draw back to increasing a sites (and its content) innate ability to be found. I’m not just talking about Google, Yahoo etc only type search, I’m also talking about the social utilities that are ‘reconnecting’ the World Wide Web in different and smarter ways. Blogs, blogrolls, plug-ins like map mash-ups, widgets like Sphere and MyBlogLog, social networking platforms like Active Rain, Domus Consulting Groups Uber-Blog concept, Digg and Technorati, RSS Information Aggregation (like Google Reader)… all social utilities, add to what I call Really Smart Search or: SEO + SNO (Social Networking Optimization).

Search Engine Friendly tactics implemented within ones website is almost as refined a process as the algorithms that look for them; follow some fundamental rules, sprinkle in a few insider tips and SEO is bestowed upon your site. Today, like right now, SNO is starting to look to as important, possibly even more so within the real estate and mortgage verticals. They’re both cottage industries who are built and have depended on social networking principles and processes as a core of their business models; SNO is part of their DNA.

The MLS has long served as the social networking component for Realtors, which is why they’ve been able to maintain their existence.
IMHO thats the only reason MLS’s (proper) aren’t just disappearing, their main purpose (is) was to communicate inter-broker compensation offers. This task could easily be maintained by independent agents using the host of social utilities currently available in the marketplace today, and most are free.

The landscape is full of alternative listing services, I believe simply starting another database then recruiting agents (and consumers) to participate is pretty short-sighted…besides Trulia and Zillow pretty much have this nailed down, not to mention they’ve got some nice SNO strategies working (See Trulia Voices and Zillow Discussions). These two companies remind me of the current Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD horse race…The only difference seems to come down to brand loyalty. I’ve even seen the first mash-up, a player that reads both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD formats.

An interesting discussion thread would center around exactly how to ‘Optimize’ and refine ones Social Networking strategies for best case results. It’s still a pretty raw concept with alot of moving parts, though not nearly as difficult to understand or implement as SEO, at least not yet.

SEO is about getting people to find your content, SNO is about giving people the ability to distribute your content for you.

Both are vital for success in the online real estate and mortgage verticals.

Also See:

FoREM for a snapshot on where and how SNO is being implemented to varying degrees of effectiveness.