Start by watching David’s “Blogging is so 2008” video:

Here is conversation on David’s Active Rain blog.

Then head over and read Rob Hahn’s response — Blogging is Forever: Branding vs. Lead Generation. 

Anyone that knows me personally knows that I’m a huge advocate for anything that improves the lives of others (see here, here, and here), so I have to highlight Benn’s two most recent posts — Using Real Estate Social Media to Broaden Community Non-Profit Efforts and 10 Steps to Organizing a Real Estate Social Media Non-Profit Community Channel

And finally, Justin Smith has some good learning to share about getting listings indexed — My Personal Experience with Getting Real Estate Listings Indexed By Google

Here is an example search with a few filters selected in Boston (click for larger version):

Clicking on the more info link of an individual listing brings up a screen that looks like this:

Here is the introductory video:

How does this impact you? If you are an agent or broker and not currently syndicating your listings to Google, you’re certainly missing out on some exposure to home buyers. Here is their FAQ if you have questions about how to get up and running. Sure, buyers may not naturally think to use Google Maps to find real estate listings, but Google is the largest game in town in terms of traffic; I’m sure they can and will figure out plenty of ways to drive more traffic to the real estate search experience now that it’s integrated inside Google Maps.

More coverage:

• Search Engine Land
• Property Portal Watch
• Mashable

What's Your SMM Strategy?

I do believe that social media marketing (SMM) has a place in the modern sales repertoire, but not at the cost of other more efficient programs. It seems to me that an agent would want to start with a decent base (likely a blog) and then build outposts that lead back to that base.  I think Seomoz’s Rand Fishkin tackled the priorities well in his recent post.  Why spend so much time and energy on social media if your SEO is in the toilet?

Like many agents, I get quite a bit of business from referrals - a common argument for involvement in the re.net. The majority of my referrals come from three places.

• Past clients who are happy the services I provided them
• Windermere agents from Western Washington where most of my second-home buying clients live
• CRS agents who prefer to refer to an agent with this designation and the level of experience /expertise it represents.

NAR members should download the NAR Relocation Report for their area. Where are people really moving from when they move to your town?

For Chelan County, WA people mostly move here from Washington state . The first out of state county to provide us inbound migration is Los Angeles County CA - 11th in the list of counties. The total number of families that moved here from L.A. is less than 2% of the total.

On the other hand, Western Washington counties in the Puget Sound region - King, Pierce and Snohomish provided 28% of the total movers.

I rarely get any business from agents who I know or have befriended through my involvement in Activerain or Twitter. I’m sure folks would refer to me if they had clients, but the truth is, they don’t. The numbers in the relocation report back that up. I need to focus on getting referrals from Western Washington.

Do we really need additional networks like Zolve or Broker Agent Social?

Does it really make sense to have a Linkedin account that is just you connected to all your online real estate buddies from across the internet? Does it make sense to push your Facebook Fan page in the race to get 1000 fans if all your fans are really just other agents who hope you reciprocate?

Wanna be my friend on Facebook?

Shouldn’t your Linkedin account be filled with recommendations from clients who were happy with your services and would recommend you to others? Shouldn’t your Facebook Fan Page be a place for actual Fans?

Does it matter if you have 2000 followers on Twitter if half are other agents and the other half are spambots? I don’t Tweet for agents in Vermont or Texas. I expect my local news and chit chat would be boring. I hope they aren’t upset when I don’t follow them either. I tweet for my friends who I have met at Seattle Social Media Club. I tweet for Seattle area agents. I tweet for my new-found friends who work for the local newspaper or other local businesses. I tweet for all the people in Seattle who love my little faux-Bavarian vacation town and the recreation that surrounds it. I tweet to make connections that will lead to business or friendships.

Is your involvement in social media about points and followers or is it about running a business?

The new iphone app by MobileApploader is FREE.

I just downloaded the REBarCamp SF app on my iPhone and before I could fully investigate it’s functions and menus, I wanted to get something up on the one place I know other Real Estate Geeks go to find this stuff, The Geek Estate Blog!  Looking forward to seeing you at this years event, you can bet your apps that I’ll be there, and not without my iPhone.

I first met Geordie Romer at RE BarCamp Seattle a few months ago. During our SEO session, he volunteered his Icicle Creek site as a website to critique during the session, but we got a bit off topic and we didn’t really get to looking at the specifics of his domain. I again asked for volunteers (this time on Twitter) while at RE BarCamp LA and he again volunteered to be the guinea pig. To me, this shows he’s serious about improving his site’s SEO, so I spent some time reviewing the site and here are a few suggestions/observations:

1. To start, I should say I think this site is fairly well optimized for the search engines already. Of course it’s not perfect (no website ever is), but the basics are definitely covered; title tags, URL structure, keywords. Geordie’s blog is a Tomato Blog, so it’s no surprise the basics are covered — I’d actually be very disappointed if they didn’t have all these covered since they are a paid solution.
2. Create your own landing pages for your “popular searches” on this page. Right now, the “Leavenworth Condo Search” takes you to a page on your IDX site (seen here) and is iFramed in (click one of the links and notice the URL in your browser window does not change). I’d recommend creating a page like iciclecreekrealestate.com/leavenworthcondosforsale/ and framing that search result inside that page. Here is an example landing page for Emerald Bay on LagunaSeaside.com. Hopefully your IDX solution, IDXPro, can support this functionality. Your main search for homes for sale page should then link to every home search landing page you end up creating — and each of those landing pages should cross link to all the other landing pages.
3. Create a page on your site for your Leavenworth Information links and remove them from the sidebar. For a blog really geared toward attracting SEO traffic, I wouldn’t recommend having those external links in your sidebar because it means every single page on your blog has an additional 14 external links out. Instead, make sure the link to your “Leavenworth Information” page is prominent in your sidebar. Doing this will mean you’ll only have 1 page on your site linking out to those 14 resources rather than every page on your blog (194 pages according to Google).
4. Further optimize your “How much is my home worth?” page for “How much is my Leavenworth home worth?” by tweaking your title tag and H1 on the page. Additionally, add a short paragraph with some keywords that will help Google understand what the page is about. Then create a separate page for every market you cover. The chances of getting any long tail traffic for the term “How much is my home worth?” is fairly slim given the sites in the top 10 right now, but I highly doubt there are many people focused on localized searches for those keywords. Granted, you already rank number 1 for “how much is my leavenworth home worth?” — so this shouldn’t be at the top of your list of changes to make.

Hope this helps - if anyone else has any suggestions or observations, please leave them in the comments below.

• Redfin adds free-text search and better neighborhood statistics
• Marc Davison has a two part series I’d recommend - Part 1: New brokerage model & Part 2: Repositioning for the future
• AgentWorx iPhone App- Your Real Estate Business at Your Fingertips

HTML5 and the upcoming CSS3 standards will allow developers to create extremely powerful web based applications.

Additional changes in 3.5 include
-Support for downloadable fonts
-CSS Media Queries
-HTML5 <canvas>
-ICC Profiles
-Location Aware Browsing
-Available in 70+ Languages and more

If this version proves to be as stable and secure as advertised, it will certainly have Firefox back on track to keep stealing browser market share.

Categories

Categories are pretty straight forward. You create different categories, then include your post into each matching category. As an example, if you have a post on GeekEstateBlog.com about “Mobile SEO”, you might place the article in the categories “seo” and “mobile”. Sweet and simple.

The great thing about categories is that they can be phrases (opposed to tags which are generally one or two words). Phrases are very useful when going after longer tail keywords.

Tags

Tags are a little more complicated, but also provide you will some added functionality. When you create your post, you add tags to it. So for the same post about “Mobile SEO”, you might add the tags “seo” and “mobile”. If the article was more specifically about optimizing for Google Local so it comes up on iPhone map based searches, you could also include the tags “Google” and “iPhone”.  The complication that arises from tagging is that it is very easy to go overboard with your tags. For the same post you could easily add the tags “Google Local”, “Maps”, “Mapping” and “Apple” (not to mention many others). This will dilute your tag cloud and make it hard for users to find content on your site.

The added functionality provided by tags cannot be overlooked, however. Say, after posting our article, you see a huge influx of traffic. After some quick research in Google Trends you notice that the amount of searches for “Mobile SEO” is increasing and you decide to create a few more posts on the subject. After creating these posts, you get even more traffic, and now you want to create a new “Mobile SEO” section of your site.

• If you are using categories, you create a new category, then go back through your old post and edit matching posts to included your new category. If this is just a few articles, no problem, but if it’s hundreds, this can be a daunting task.
• If you are using tags, you simply mash up 2 tags (or more) into a link like /mobile+seo/. So if Geek Estate were using tags the new link would be something like www.geekestateblog.com/tag/mobile+seo/. This will include all posts that have both the tag “mobile” and the tag “seo”.

If you decide to use tags like this, you could then create a set of links from within Wordpress with all your tag mash ups, name it categories, and use them in your sidebar in place of the category or tag widgets (this is a good option for those of you who don’t like the look of tag clouds). This will also provide you with the great benefit of being able to use keyword phrases which were previously reserved for categories only.

The one problem that you come across using tags like this is that you have limited control of your title tags and main page headings for these mashed up pages (which are crucial of on page optimization). This is solved using a great plugin from Netconcpets called SEO Title Tag.

Both categories and tags can be used effectively to organize content and SEO your blog. These days I tend to lean towards tags because of their flexibility. However, when you have multiple authors (like Drew does here on GeekEstateBlog.com) I would favor categories because authors can get a little crazy tagging posts.

• Looking for Hyperlocal Content? — Outside.in has a new product for publishers to add hyperlocal news to your website
• Posting to the Stream in Real Time with the Live Stream Box — Facebook pages can now have live chat and video
• 4 Ways To Add An Event Calendar To Your Wordpress Blog — get a calendar up and running on Wordpress
• Six Twitter Tools to Network Locally — a few apps to help network with potential clients online

I’m off to RE BarCamp OC tomorrow to discuss techy stuff with some fellow geeks — if you can’t attend the event, make sure to follow the #rebcoc hashtag on Twitter.