Happy new year from Real Estate SEO Pros! As I mentioned back in December, we are expanding our offerings into real estate websites. The reason for this is that we came across so many agents who wanted to improve their online presence, but weren’t happy with their current website. Either they went with a company that gave them limited optimization options, or they didn’t like the layout, features and functionality of their current site.

We knew that we could build better real estate websites than the competition because we understood the real estate industry better and we know how to optimize sites to make them rank higher in the search engines. We decided to bundle a SEO and marketing package with our websites for one low monthly price. Currently, we are offering our websites coupled with a marketing package for as low as $65 per month with a 2 year agreement.

Our websites come with the following features and functionality:

1. Quality Lead Capture Options – Our websites are built to capture leads. Many websites miss the most important aspect of your business – capturing leads. By not making this the main focus of the site, they are losing leads as traffic visits their site and gets lost in the confusion. Our view is that websites should be simple and have a very specific focus. We offer websites that give visitors the info they need in exchange for their contact information.

2. Featured Listings – We give you complete control over your website including the ability to upload and manage your listings.

3. MLS/IDX feeds – We can import your local MLS/IDX listings via an API upon request.

4. Admin Area – Your admin area for your website gives you complete control over your website content. You can change page content, update your contact info, receive email alerts, manage your leads and much more.

5. Free Upgrades and Support – We offer free upgrades and support as long as you are with us. We are constantly upgrading our features and functionality to give you the best websites and lead capture systems possible.

This is just a brief overview of what our websites entail. For more information on our real estate websites and lead capture systems, please visit http://www.realestateseopros.com/real_estate_websites.php

We look forward to helping get you more traffic, leads and closings in 2010!

Aaron Evans

Vice President

www.realestateseopros.com

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Happy December Everyone!

As the year comes to an end, I wanted to give everyone an update on what is new here at Real Estate SEO Pros. We have had a great year and want to thank all of our clients for their support. We have had a lot of successes this year for our clients in getting them more sales and closings. We have been improving our services and our admin functionality to give you more options and a better customer experience. I wanted to give you a heads up about what we have coming out early in 2010.

1. Admin Area Upgrades:

• Features – We have been adding a ton of features and functionality to your admin area. Soon you will see a new dashboard that shows you the vital statistics about your account such as your targeted keyword rankings and your monthly traffic levels.
• Topic Suggestions – You can now make topic suggestions for blogs and articles that our in house team of copywriters will use.
• Access to your content – You can now view all of your articles, blogs, videos and more in your admin area.

2. Package Upgrades:

• Package Improvements – We have been improving our packages for even better traffic and rankings improvement
• PPC Management – We are offering PPC optimization and management services now!

3. Websites and Landing Pages:

• Real Estate Websites – We are adding custom real estate websites to our list of offerings early in 2010
• Lead Capturing System – We offer optimized landing pages customized for your area. We can add this to your existing site or have it as a standalone site to send traffic to. These landing pages will help you to capture and convert more leads.

We like to hear recommendations from all potential and current clients on what we can do to improve our services. Feel free to contact us with any suggestions that you have on how we can improve our services.

I am very proud of the progress we have made in the last year and look forward to continuing to improve our services in the new year. Thanks to everyone at Real Estate SEO Pros for their hard work, and thanks to all of our clients for making 2009 such a success. Lets make 2010 a great year. Merry christmas and happy holidays!!

Aaron Evans

Vice President

Real Estate SEO Pros, Inc

Personalized Search For Real Estate

So you rank #3 for “Real Estate in Denver” and your pretty proud of that fact. Well done except that you may not be #3 for everyone searching that keyword. Welcome to the world of personalized search, where no two searchers will likely get the same results anymore.  Personalized search is here for everyone there is no going back to static search results. How is search personalized? There can be alot of factors that go into search including:

Types of Search Personalization:

Location Based Personalization:
Geo-graphic personalization
IP address personalization

Time based:
Time of day
Time of year
Historical data

Behavior Personalization:
Query history
SERP interaction
Selection and bounce rates
Interactions with advertising
Surfing habits (frequent surfer – fresher results)

Other personalizations:
Social Search
Bookmarks (and sharing)
Social Networks like Twitter and Facebook
Demographic (including geo-graphic)

How will search personalization affect real estate searches?

The first thing to keep in mind is that you some of the control is taken away from you and put in the hands of the searcher. Their previous behavior will have more to do with how you rank than it used to. But that doesn’t mean that SEO is done for or that you can’t optimize your site for personalized search. It becomes even more important to take on a comprehensive online strategy. By blogging, writing articles, social networking and link building, you can show up in the increasingly segmented search results.

Here are some examples of why this is important:

1. Searcher “A” likes to click on videos. So when he searches on “homes for sale in denver” videos tend to rank a little higher for him. If you don’t have any videos out there optimized for that keyword, then you are at a disadvantage from an agent who does.

2. Searcher “B” likes the real time web and clicks on the Twitter and Facebook feeds in the google search results. Don’t have a tweet out about “homes for sale in denver” recently, or a post on your Facebook? Again, you are not ranked as high as the agent who is doing that.

3. Searcher “C” likes news results. By submitting articles and PR pieces, you have a better chance of showing up in designated news results than if your not doing that.

4. Searcher “D” tends to click on images more. If you aren’t applying alt image tags to your house images, then you are less likely to rank for this searcher.

There are many more examples of optimizing for segmented searchers. The takeaway is this, everything is changing but some things never do. Providing quality information to your customers in a clear and concise manner will never go out of style. What does change is that you need to adapt and be in the more segmented markets of search to be in from of the different searcher “archetypes.”

Another thing that will be increasingly important in the future of real estate personalized search is how your previous traffic has interacted with your site in the past. Metrics such as bounce rate, click through rates, time on site, and conversion rates will be used by Google to establish what sites are providing relevant information and which ones are wasting their time.

Spend time optimizing your site for the segmented searchers mentioned above, provide quality content and great information on your site in a clear and concise layout, and split test and measure via analytics, and you will be doing more than most to adapt to personalized search. But start now before the rest of the real estate industry sees the importance of personalized search optimization and they react. You will be one step ahead of the competition, and that is all you need in the world of internet marketing and SEO.

Aaron Evans

Vice President

Real Estate SEO Pros, Inc

There has been been alot written about Google Goggles in the last few days. This is the new visual search feature for android powered mobile phones. It allows you to take a picture of something and get search results based on that image. For instance, you can take a picture of a landmark such as the statue of liberty and get back relevant info about it. Or you could take a picture of a bottle of wine and find out how good that wine was for that particular year. The applications for this new search are endless, and it is still in its infancy.

While there has been no mention of real estate in these early stages, we at Real Estate SEO Pros like to stay ahead of the curve and speculate on where this new technology is likely headed. Flash forward to early 2012. Home buyers are driving around a neighborhood in your local market and stop by a house with a for sale sign out front. Normally, to get relevant info on this house, they would have to find a number on the sign and pick up the phone. Or they could get out their smartphone and punch the address into google maps or zillow. But it’s 2012, and (assuming the world hasn’t ended yet) they know that they can just take a snapshot of the house and search Google with this image. The agent who is listing this house was savvy enough to load all relevant information about this house into Google Maps Real Estate Search. They were also smart enough to load images of the house into Google images with the proper Alt tag information. The result is that they house hunters were able to find all relevant info about that house and found it was exactly what they were looking for. At that time they are prompted to contact you.

It likely will be as normal in a year or two to search visually by your phone as it is to search with a text query now. Real estate is an obvious application for this new search technology. Think of it this way, is it easier to type in a long complicated address into your mobile phone and click through a few screens to find info about a home, or to take a picture of the home and have all that info come up right away? What about the convenience of taking a picture of a picture real estate. Real estate catalogues are still prevalent and many people like to search through homes in this manner even now. By taking a picture of a ral estate listing you could possible find more info about the property than the listing gives you. What happens when google uses it’s street view technology to sell homes with virtual for sale signs? How will that change how people search for real estate? What we may see emerge is a complete virtual real estate platform that allows user to trace the route from their house to the elementary school. In the same search that can god seamlessly from street view into a virtual tour of the house, provided by you, the realtor.

While this technology is likely a ways out for practical real estate use, there are a few things you can do now that can help you gain visibility in the search through images of homes you sell.

1. Take pictures of your properties and submit them to google images. Make sure you take advantage of the alt image tags and input the address, IDX/MLS numbers, and local real estate keywords.
2. Submit your listings to Google Maps through the Google Base product upload.
3. Put the images of your homes up on your site with all relevant alt tags and info from #1. If possible, optimize your title and meta information with addresses, IDX/MLS numbers and local real estate keywords such as neighborhoods.
4. Get listed in the local business results. Google has a local business center here where you can register your business.

Mark my words, Google Goggles technology is a game changer for real estate search. In a few years time, we may be wondering how we lived without visual search. A little further out, expect this same technology to work for video and this will change how we do virtual tours and video tours. Change is the only constant in search and real estate is historically an early adopter of new search technologies, so pay attention to this one.

Aaron Evans
Vice President
Real Estate SEO Pros, Inc