Real Estate Marketing SEO Blog

Vista towards Google

Vista-
Definition:  view or prospect, especially. one seen through a long, narrow avenue or passage. 

Microsoft made its move for world domination yesterday. All kidding aside Vista has gotten great reviews for its interface, and bad reviews from geeks.

CNET is calling Vista just an expensive upgrade to XP.

So what does that have to do with online marketing?

Guerilla Real Estate or Just Gay Real Estate?

I just read some of the coolest insider information on how a New York Real Estate Pro finds the hottest up and coming neighborhoods at the best prices.

She asks a Gay waiter!

Yep, read more here as Barbara Corcoran describes her methods.This is in the trenches type of selling prep work that makes this lady dominate year in and year out.

More sage advice on investing:

I’ve found that once the trash cans in the neighborhood get liners and Starbucks moves in, you know your investment has topped out. .... And as an investor, it’s time for you to move, too.

Wow, I am not sure if the Seattle Company that wakes me up in the morning would agree or appreciate this. But interesting.

Free is Free

Reading The Real Estate Tomato turned me to a post over at Active Rain whereby Teresa Boardman ranted about the inane behavior/posts going on at Active Rain.

She is big on a new net term called Local Blogging. This is where you as a Realtor post blogs about your market. Put another way it is using your media to focus on your demographic. This seems to be quite a revolutionary concept.

This is counter to what many realty bloggers are doing, especially on Active Rain.. Many are posting about national news and really anything other than their marketplace and its homes.

I agree. Now, maybe national news is interesting, but the fact that the Fed funds rate just jumped has got to be translated to how that affects your local prospects. Real Estate is local for goodness sake.

Size Used to Matter

This is a photo of the starting point of the net. The gentleman there is actually Sergey Brin's father. All he has to do is pull those wires and the net goes black! Actually this is from a 1954 Popular Mechnanics Magazine.

This is a rendition of a 2004 household computer as envisioned by the Rand Corporation. They believed this would be way beyond many people's affordability.

Could they ever have imagined that our handhelds do more computing than this monstrosity?

Click the picture to get a better look.

Final Take On SEO Myths

This covers the First two sections of the Ten Myths of SEO. Optimization is about Page Rank and isn't about Page Rank. It is about Meta Tags and it is not. It is about density and...you get the picture.

The is and isn't is what Search Engine Optimization is.

It is scientific in that on a month to month basis we pull testing to derive trends. The science is about identifying the measurables and looking for trends. Then the art is finding the strategies that will help scale the activities necessary to make positions happen.

So Page Rank is important. But it is not everything it was 2 years ago. Meta tags are useless from an engine perspective except the title tag.

Being in the top ten or even number one for one phrase is not going to change your world. You need many phrases to rank and give you traffic. And, if your call to action sucks, then the SEO is wasted.

Business Strategy

Over the holidays I spent my head buried in business planning sessions.

One of the problems that most newbies online do is to spend their days chasing opportunity after opportunity. Pay Per Click, SEO, "Stealth Websites", Aggregated Traffic, Buyer and Seller Leads. Social Media, Tagging, Blogging, Link Exchanging.

The challenge with chasing these activities is that unless they fit into an overall strategy, they won't work. There are many reasons, one of which is that it is impossible to do any of these activities with any sort of scale unless you have an overall system.

Pain and Pleasure

If you have read my stuff at all you know that I love football.

I also love USC Football. Understand that I have some bias as I have had many friends that are tied to the program over the years and currently.

However, the reason I am most impressed is that their Head Coach, Pete Caroll is a very unique person. And as far as I can tell, so is much of his staff.

Something that I have witnessed over the years that always kind of seemed antithetical to the "positive thinking" mantras, is that great players will tell you that they are afraid of losing. I first read this years ago when Terry Bradshaw was winning Superbowls with the Steelers.

That is why I took note during the College Bowl season as Carrol was quoted in response to his only recent losses over the years to Texas, Washington State, Oregon State, & Cal.

"They don't go away and I don't want them to go away. I want to feel the sting."

I know that humans will do more to avoid pain and pleasure. In fact, Tony Robbins has a strategy he uses when changing people called the "Dickens Pattern" where he induces the pain of not having to propel one forward towards the pleasure of their objective.

I mention this only as fodder for thought as I know that you as a Realtor are bombarded with the positivity thinking mantra that comes with the tough position of running a real estate business.

I will note in future blogs some attributes that I have noticed from the way SC's program  is run that can help you run your business with even more success.