Before you go to buy a dongle from your local MLS office, you should download the eKey app from the iTunes store.  It’s free and easy to install.  The problem you will run into is when you go to purchase the dongle from your local MLS.  During the process, they will probably ask you to enter an authorization code that they provide you with and then they will want you to sync your device.  At home, you have your wireless router so this is not a problem in the long term but at the MLS, I doubt they will give you their wifi encryption key to allow you to sync your device on their wireless network.

To solve this problem, I borrowed my wife’s Verizon Mifi.  This is a fantastic little device that acts as a wireless hotspot for up to 5 computers at once in any location that you can get 3g cellular service.  I went through the process, hit “sync now” and everything fired off without a hitch.  There are a few other solutions that I can think of, but most of them are a little clunkier than something like the Mifi.

Certain devices available from Clear might be able to serve the same function or if you have an air card for your laptop, you can take your laptop in and set it up to provide an adhoc wifi network connection to your iPod Touch however the details for that are a bit beyond the scope of this article.

If you are lucky enough to have an iPhone, the eKey setup process should work flawlessly without a hitch.  If you have an iPad, you may have to jump through some of these hoops to make it an eKey depending on which model you have.

The post Supra eKey available on iPhone & iPod Touch appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

The post eKey on iPhone, finally! appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

Pick a strong anchor – There are countless articles on the web regarding anchor text.  Don’t get silly with it.  Make the anchor something that someone would ACTUALLY click on, not just something some keyword-packed garbage that clutter’s the site and makes you look like a spammer.  If you can use it in conversation within your content, even better, it gets counted as more relevant.

Spread out your links – This is not what you think.  Make sure the sites are linking between are on separate classes C IP ranges.  In other words, if your domain mydomain.com points at ip address 10.10.10.2, make sure the site(s) you are trading with are one a different ip range like 192.168.0.1 or even 10.10.11.2.  These are fictitious ip addresses but they are meant to illustrate my point.  Google gives more relevancy to OTHERS talking about you rather than you talking about yourself.  If you are on 10.10.10.1 and 10.10.10.2, those two addresses are in the same range so google decides you are just pointing two of your own sites at each other.  This is good for your user experience meaning that you need to cross link your sites so your customers have the benefit of finding all of your web properties but if you do too much of this, Google’s ranking system could penalize you.

Purchased links –  This is a waste of time and money.  Most of these sorts of services use link farms. Link farms are a kiss of death to your search engine ranks and I highly recommend you follow that link and read about them because you could potentially get blacklisted from a search engine altogether for appearing in link farm.

Reciprocal link trades – sometimes you want to link two or more of your sites together so that your clients can see that you have many web properties to serve their needs in different ways.  For instance, I use my blog www.rostadrealty.com as a portal to all of my web properties.  Conversely, I link from all of my other sites, back to Rostad Realty.  If you do this excessively, you could potentially drive your page rank down.  How much is too much?  Only Google knows.  It’s all locked up in Google’s black box algorithm and they aren’t telling.  Ultimately the SEO should never be at the expense of user experience.  I don’t think you really need to worry about too many cross linking sites unless your sites have no actual content.

ABC link trading concept

ABC link trading – Here is a way, if done correctly, to boost your page rank more dramatically compared to some of the other strategies.  Say that you own www.siteA.com and www.siteC.com.  Now you have a friend who owns www.siteB.com.  Give your friend a  backlink (with his choice of anchor text) from your siteA to his siteB.  Now, your friend will give you a backlink (with your choice of anchor text) from www.siteB.com to www.siteC.com.  Now you EACH have one-way links pointing at each other and google won’t see these as reciprocated links which are ranked lower.  By the way, there is no rule against using this strategy for yourself if you have enough sites at different hosting companies.  Here are the caveats:

• Make sure EACH site is on a different Class C IP range.
• Make sure you and your friend have similar traffic on www.siteA.com and www.siteB.com so that it’s an equal trade.
• www.siteB.com and www.siteC.com get a boost but www.siteA.com does not.
• DON’T get the bright idea to link www.siteC.com back to www.siteA.com.  That could be seen by Google as intent to manipulate your page ranking.
• Don’t get greedy with this concept or it will start looking like purchased links or trades which will be counterproductive.
• The trade should make sense from a user base standpoint.  If you are a Realtor, don’t do an ABC trade with a waterbed factory for instance.  Keep everything relevant to your content.
• Finally, most importantly, make sure you have the content to back up your efforts.  This is all a waste of time if you don’t have something to “close” the client or lead them down the next step of your funnel.
• Don’t do more than one of these without some additional reading and reasearch.  There are risks to this strategy but most of them stem around getting greedy or going overboard with it.

I will come right out and say that some of this is heresay.  Google locks their secrets away to protect them from exploitation.  Their ultimate goal is for people to find what they are looking for.  They are always re-evaluating what they are doing to make sure this goal is met.  This goes back to my advice that you need to prioritize quality of content over the any sort of SEO effort.  The BEST chance you have at truely getting instead Google’s head is by reading Matt Cutts’ blog starting with this post he wrote on page rank sculpting.  Matt Cutts is the head of the webspam team at Google.

The post The ABC's of link trading appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

This is my open letter to Zillow respectfully requesting that you add a way for me to use google analytics in my Zillow profile.  While I have countless reasons for wanting this feature, let me give you a few bullet points:

• Track effectiveness of activity in discussion forums.  This is the BIG one.  I want to know WHICH discussion forum conversations I am participating in are sending me the leads.  I have gotten over a dozen leads (to date) from Zillow since I started answering questions in the forum but I don’t know where they were from since I’ve posted over 600 times in the forum (to date).
• See which geographical areas you are appealing to the most.  All the anayltics data can be drilled down to the town level and this would be handy for me to see who is looking for me.
• See which other external links are bringing traffic back to my Zillow profile.
• Check which outgoing links on your profile are effective when the site it points to doesn’t support analytics.
• Find out which keywords in your profile are getting picked up in Google searches.

I know this is technically feasible.  You wouldn’t even need to allow javascript code in Zillow profiles.  Simply add a box to insert your own Google Analytics profile number such as UA-XXXXXXX-XX. Please post some comments people.  They need to hear that I am not the ONLY person who wants this. 

The post Google Analytics on Zillow Profiles appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

connect with local businesses – What better way to build up your repertoire in town than to follow local businesses on Twitter?  Obviously this would be more prevalent in a high tech area like Silicon Valley or Bellevue but search out a few businesses you know of, you may be surprised.  Several local businesses have even found me and followed me on Twitter.  Places that are moving into town and I didn’t know existed before.  It’s always good to have fresh tidbits of new information to talk about with your client base.

be first to know about community events – If you follow the right local bloggers and citizens, you can grasp a very easy to digest view of what is going on in the community and neighborhoods that you work and live in.  You can even try to find these people by searching for names of neighborhoods and places in those areas that people may be talking about.  In my area for instance, I follow Kirkland Views on twitter because they track every bit of local news that occurs in the area and condense it down to 140 characters including a link to the original story.  I can digest much more news this way than ever before and much of it is relevant and in real time. 

boost SEO rankings for listing addresses – Every time I take a new listing, I use postlets to syndicate my listings.  While I’m at it, I take time to tweet from postlets.  This makes a post that looks something like: “Just listed: 123 Main Street, Anytown USA  http://www.postlets.com/res/2283244”.  This does one very imnportant task other than looking good to your client.  It ties your listing property address to your listing.  When someone googles the address of your listing, your twitter page will often show up in the first page or two of search results.  This has the side effect of cross-promoting your other listings and your twitter page.

twitter is NOT just for followers, google indexes it – When you first start tweeting, you may get discouraged because your follower count doesn’t just skyrocket overnight.  You may even want to give up thinking, “No one follows me so why bother?  I must not be very interesting.”.  Don’t give up!  Anything you post gets indexed by google.  I got in trouble recently because I mentioned something about the new coffee shop opening up in Downtown Kirkland soon.  An owner of another coffee shop I frequent asked me, “SOOOOOOOO, you like XYZ coffee do you?!?”.  I asked him, “why, do you use Twitter?”.  He said, “Nope, I just found you by searching for their name.”  He googled to find out about his competition and my name came up in the first page of the search results!  You can’t tell me that is not a powerful tool if used correctly.

keep an eye on news from industry pros –  Zillow, Trulia & Redfin ALL tweet.  Zillow has many employees who tweet.  Spencer Rascoff, the COO of Zillow is one of the more vocal of the bunch.  He often posts his opinion on the latest industry data, latest Zillow widgets and much more.  Diane Tuman of Zillow follows all of the high profile celebrity home sales for fun and she posts about them on Twitter.  I know of no better person to follow if you are interested in celebrity real estate.  Check out some of the folks I follow if you need more ideas.

keep an eye on what other pros are doing – I borrow some of the best ideas I’ve had from my peers and co-workers.  Do you have some local agents that you admire?  Do you wonder how they go about their day and what they are doing differently than you?  Here is your chance to find out.  Surely they are already on Twitter.  If not, perhaps they will soon be admiring the your impact via social media.

effect of gravity – Followers beget more followers.  Keep yourself interesting.  The more followers you gain, the more will find you through your tweets with other people and by seeing your name on following lists of people who are following you.

Feel free to follow me on twitter.  Watch how I use it and add your own twist.  There are so many more ways to use this tool than I could possibly name here.  Do you have an innovative way that you use Twitter?  Please leave a comment below and share it; Twitter is quickly becoming a force to reckon with in every other aspect of life, check out Time Magazine’s article: How Twitter will change the way we live

The post Twitter, Who Cares? appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

Content is king – If you have a blog, why not write a blog about some local condo buildings or neighborhoods you have intimate familiarity with?  Spice it up with some keyword phrases that you think people would use to find that building.  Add in some fun extras like Walkscore if applicable even.  Perhaps you want to get REALLY serious about this one neighborhood or building.  Start a new, separate blog that is focused only on this area.  Get a URL that is peppered with keywords as well but don’t get too silly because more isn’t always better.

Buy your way to the top – If you don’t have the time, skills, content, etc to pump up your SEO to the top of your tier, why not buy your spot via google adwords.  This is how the big boys play it but you don’t need the big budgets they have.  Use the keyword sandbox to find your long tail keywords.  Say that you want to sell in Beverly Hills.  You may first think about buying the keyword, “Beverly Hills real estate”.  That’s fine but you’ll pay an arm and a leg for it.  There were almost 15,000 hits on that phrase in April.  How about something like “Beverly Hills condos” though?  That has under 3,000 hits.  Better yet, snag a couple others like “Sunset blvd condos” etc.  The more obscure the phrase, the easier it will be to dominate it with less money.

Don’t bait and switch – The best-picked adword campaign in the world cannot save you if you don’t have a way to close ’em.  Send them somewhere they would want to go.  Otherwise, you’ll just get a bounce and that will do nothing but make you poor quicker.   Don’t forget to track your results with google analytics.

Peyman Aleagha has even more ideas on how to use this strategy but I suggest starting small and tracking your efforts before you go nuts on this.

The post Long Tail Keywords to Snag Focused Buyers appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

That being said, there are many more ways to advertise an open house these days.  Some cost money like the newspaper, sending flyers to other agents, etc.  There are plenty of free ways though too.  In many cases, I think the free methods may be more effective at marketing to your target audience but I have one paid method in here that I am experimenting with as well.  When I advertise an open house these days I:

Post it on my local MLS and my brokerage’s website (if applicable) – This is a no brainer.  If your MLS has a place to enter broker’s opens, you should certainly use it since many agents do check there to see when occupied properties will be available for viewing.  I’m with Windermere and they also have a place to post public opens.  Anywhere I can advertise an open house for free is on top of my list.

Use Postlets to create a Craigslist ad – I like Postlets because it creates very attractive ads in the first place.  It saves me a lot of time being able to copy and paste for Craigslist instead of trying to type up a text ad from scratch or busting out html on the fly.  Neither of those methods rival Postlets.  Check out my Postlets page for examples of what the ads look like.  This is pretty similar to what you’ll see when you use them to post your ad on Craigslist as well.

Use www.openhomez.com to syndicate the open house ad and track it – The jury is still out on this website as far as I’m concerned, but I’ve been giving it a chance lately and it has gained a few more sets of eyeballs.  It’s easy to use and the price is right so why not?  They spew out a feed on Twitter of all the open houses people input.  This can’t be a bad thing.

Zillow! – Zillow is yet another place to post open houses.  Once again, free exposure is a good thing so take all of it that you can get.

Advertise my open on twitter and facebook – Postlets makes this ridiculously easy but don’t forget to punch in the time and date that you will be there.  See my twitter for a sample of what my open house ads look like.  I use facebook to keep in touch directly with other real estate agents, past clients, friends and family.  It doesn’t hurt to share your open houses with them.  First off, it gives you something to write about.  Second, it lets them know you are still actively in the real estate business.  Third, you never know, they may just want to see it.

Change my blog entry about the listing to highlight there is an open house – I have started to write conversational blog entries on my blog about my various listings.  When I say conversational, I mean that it’s not just my MLS listing rehashed.  It’s neighborhood information along with other property or building information that you would not have room for on a normal flyer.  I make sure to pepper the entry with keywords that are used by people who might want to see my listing.  Here is the link to the listings I have posted on my blog so you can see what I’m talking about.

Direct market to agents – Other real estate agents are still your number one source of buyers.  I try to send out emails to follow up with agents who have shown the property already.  Also send out to agents who have other listings nearby.  They are not your competition, they can be your biggest allies and many of them would love to join up with you and hold their properties open as well.  Another idea is to check any data you may have harvested on Google Analytics.  Look to see which city most traffic to your listing has come from and focus your marketing effort on those agents.

Use google adwords to stir up some more traffic – This is one of my newest tricks.  I’ve started purchasing keywords on Google Adwords for certain properties I have listed.  I won’t post the ones I’m using here because I don’t want any of you skewing my data.   I’ll give you some hints here though.  Say you have a Brownstone in New Jersey for sale and you are going to hold it open soon.  You would want to go on google and use their Keyword Tool.  This tool allows you to see how much traffic various keywords are getting.  A couple of phrases I would try would be “New Jersey brownstone”, “Brownstone for sale”, “New Jersey townhouse”.  You can purchase ALL of these phrases and set a monthly ad budget.  This will keep your costs in line.  Aim the ad you create back at your conversational blog entry or somewhere else you’ve advertised your open house.  I plan to elaborate on this later in another blog when I’ve had more experience with it but my first impression has been very positive.

These are just a few of the things that *I* have been doing lately to stir up traffic to my open houses.  What have you been doing? I would like to hear; please post in the comments if you have any other ideas.

The post Checklist for Advertising an Open House appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

The question for most real estate agents is probably “Where do I start?”  The options are overwhelming and there are an incredible number of websites that are glad to take your money.  Rest assured, everything I’m going to tell you about is free.  None of it works without a bit of effort though so here are my suggestions:

www.postlets.com – This is one of the first things you should be doing with every listing you get.  Go to postlets and enter your listing.  You can moan and groan all you want about having to enter your listing in yet another place but don’t be lazy, this is free and doesn’t take all that much effort.  Postlets does MANY valuable things.  First off, it syndicates your listing to Google Base, Oodle, HotPads, Trulia, DotHomes, Backpage, Vast, Enormo, Front Door and my personal favorite, Zillow.  Next cool thing, it allows you to post your listing to all of your social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, LinkedIn, etc.  Another nifty thing it does is makes you a pretty ad for craigslist.  All you have to do is copy and paste the code it generates into the description box on craiglist and presto, you’re practically done.  Postlets also creates a one page website for your listing.  That gives you a link that you can pass around and use in other online marketing efforts.  Lastly, another one of my favorite things that postlets does is creates a custom webpage for you, the agent.  Check out my postlets site here to see what this looks like.  Something I really like about that page it creates is that it generates a map of where all of my listings are.  This is good for illustrating your service area.  One more small touch of information I’ll mention is that postlets allows you to insert the code for Google Analytics.  This is invaluable for tracking where your hits are coming from and how many you are getting.  This is a topic for a whole other article though.

www.zillow.com – The entire real estate profession came unglued when Zillow first started publishing their infamous Zestimates.  How horrible that this data is easily put into our client’s hands!  I’m sure you now realize, Zillow is here to stay.  Like it or not, they are currently the #2 real estate web site.  Instead of fighting this, embrace it.  These guys ROCK for your SEO.  Their links are followed and indexed by google.  I encourage you to create a user profile on Zillow with links back to your own home page.  I won’t give away all of my Zillow secrets here but let’s just say I’ve had 4 leads per month directly from my activity on Zillow and that number seems to be climbing.  Get your profile on there at the very least people.

www.twitter.com – When I first looked at Twitter I thought, “what a useless waste of time”.  Oh how wrong I was.  Twitter gets indexed by Google FABULOUSLY.  If you can think of NOTHING ELSE to tweet, at least use your postlets account Twitter feature and post your listings.  This helps your SEO something fierce.  Start doing this stuff and then try googling one of your listing’s addresses.  Your twitter should be in the top 10 results.  Since I’m using analytics I can see that probably 10% of my traffic is currently coming from twitter and I’m gaining followers just by posting.  Check out my twitter page to see how I am using it.

Google Profiles – When you google your name, what do you get?  Is it some post you made on the Usenet 10 years ago where you were flaming someone because they disagreed with you?  Is it relevant?  Ultimately your name is your calling card.  You should take charge of it on google and make sure you like what you see.  If not, here is one chance to change it and another chance for back links to your website or blog.  If you have a google profile, this is the first thing someone will see when they google your name.  I suggest you put it to good use.  Hopefully one of your doppelgangers hasn’t already grabbed your name.

My goal is not to overwhelm you here.  I’m simply trying to give you the list I wish I had 4 years ago.  I’d say I wish I had it from the beginning, but some of this stuff didn’t exist in 2002 when I started real estate and if it did, it probably wasn’t that relevant to selling homes.  Whatever the case, these are different times we live in.  The industry is now driven by information empowered clients instead of by stuffy old brokerages bent on domination.  The clients are getting this information one way or the other; what is best for you, the real estate agent, is to make it easy for them to get and to make sure your name is attached to it.

The post SEO Tips for Listing Agents appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.