• Always keep personal and real estate profiles separate. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have coworkers on your facebook or friends on Linkedin, but always think carefully about whether you want a potential business relation to see pictures of you with your sister’s baby or celebrating at a Griz game

• Think about each social network you are going to get involved with. Just because everyone has a myspace page, think about is it really relevant to what you want to do and who you are. For a real estate agent, Realtown would be good social network to get on, but Myspace would not be. But don’t just jump on the bandwagon of a social network, think about what having your ‘brand’ on there would mean by association

• Always check your privacy settings for any social profile, regardless of whether it is for real estate or personal. Just because you only use your facebook account for personal friends and acquaintances, remember that others can search for you and possibly see information. Google now allows you to search over social networks for information, so if you have pictures of you doing things you don’t want future home buyers to know about make sure your settings are done right

• Always add value to the social network. This means providing information that users actually want to know about. Now, keep in mind the specific audience of each network when figuring out what value is. On facebook with family and friends, a picture of your dog in a Santa outfit in front of the tree would be added value to your friends. That would not be value added information to your LinkedIn connections (but that market report on an up and coming real estate market would be!) Plus the better the value, the more likely somebody is going to retweet or repost it so you get to increase your audience without you lifting a hand

• Build quality relations. By quality we mean relevant. In other words, don’t spam invite a bunch of people. The days of who’s got more friends on myspace are over, it is better to have 10 relevant real estate specific ‘friends’ then having 400 strangers. In fact, a lot of professionals online will either think you’re a major party animal meeting bunches of people, or you’re a spammer concerned with quantity over quality

• Don’t SPAM! Let me repeat that DON’T SPAM!!! This goes back to value add. But it also means, don’t be constantly sending out requests to help you out with something, or asking people to post comments on blogs or asking for a retweet

• Remember the Golden Rule. Treat other people online like you would want to be treated. If somebody is wrong about something on a forum, politely explain the correct answer. Would you want somebody to attack you for being an idiot (or ‘flaming’ you) if you are wrong or to politely explain (possibly even in a private message) what the correct answer is?

• Try to listen to other people. This means that instead of posting meaningless “oh, that’s a great point”; try to add something to the conversation. If someone posts about 10 staging ideas, post another one in a comment. And just like any real conversation, make sure to adjust what you are saying to what other people are saying. If you are on a forum discussing accounting techniques and someone post a different opinion after you posted, listen to what they said, and make sure to reference what they said in your post

• Really all of this boils down to just be nice online. At the end of the day whether online or offline, nobody wants to be associated with a jerk

At Real Estate SEO Pros we get a lot of questions about keyword rankings and traffic.  People wondering why their traffic has gone up but their keyword rankings have not, or the reverse: keyword rankings have increased dramatically with only a few more hits in a month.  So I thought that I would take a few moments here and discuss the two methods of tracking SEO success and which ones as a real estate agent you should be looking at.

To start, keyword ranking is your webpage’s position in a search engine when someone types in the appropriate keywords.  How you rank depends on a wide range of factors like how much competition is there for that keyword, how long have other sites been around, and what actions they are taking to rank.  In theory, the higher your keyword ranks the more traffic will come to your site because searchers will find your site before they find the others.

Traffic relates to how many visitors you have to your site.  Traffic can be analyzed in a wide range of different ways.  The primary way to break down traffic is by direct, referral, PPC, and organic.  Direct traffic means that a user typed your url www.realestateseopros.com into the address bar and came to your site.  Referral traffic means they followed a link somewhere to your site.  For real estate agents this means they could have followed a link on an MLS posting, or a blog in Active Rain.  PPC [Pay-per-click] is traffic that came to you from an adwords campaign. These are the sponsored links you pay Google for.  And finally organic traffic is traffic that comes to your site through a search engine.  It is organic, not forced or paid for.  If someone types in “Real Estate SEO” and then clicks on our website, that would be organic traffic.  Strictly speaking most SEO companies look exclusively at that organic traffic because that is what is coming from those search engines they focus on.  Lately, as more SEO companies get their clients involved with blogs, article submission sites, youtube videos, and of course social media, we are looking more at that referral and direct traffic.  If you can create a really good piece of link bait (quality article about staging a home, a youtube video about repainting a home to sell it, podcasts on filling out paperwork, etc.) you will see leads coming to your site from this link bait referral.  As well, if you can get your url stuck in someone’s head so that they bypass Google all together and come to your site by directly typing your website into their browser, that would increase your Direct Traffic stats.

Let’s get back to those keyword rankings for a second before we talk about which one is more important.  The number one ranked keyword is going to receive the lion’s share of the traffic coming to that Search Engine Results Page. So the reason you want to be listed in the number keyword ranking spot is to capture that majority of the traffic.

So let’s get back to the question, as a real estate agent which should you be focused on, keyword rankings or traffic?  The quick answer is both.  If you can increase your rankings you’re going to see more traffic.  But remember increased rankings bring more traffic, so if your traffic is increasing regardless of what happens to your keywords you’re still meeting your primary goal.  Moving those keywords up is going to cause a significant increase in traffic, but any increase in traffic is still the primary goal and should be nurtured and analyzed so you can increase it whether it’s organic, referral, or direct traffic.

Kelley’s Tips: Kelley is the content manager at Real Estate SEO Pros. We’ve asked her to pass along a few of the important things she has learned during her time here

Real Estate SEO Pros assists with writing blog posts.  The first step to writing a blog for Real Estate is to find a good topic. Choosing your topic is very important because this is what will attract readers.

One way to choose a topic is by using Google Alerts.  Go to http://www.google.com/alerts to begin setting up your Google Alerts.  It is better to set up a few different alerts so that you have multiple topics to choose from.  The first alert I would recommend is Real Estate.  This allows for you to view any different real estate articles that are posted around the web so you don’t loose any possible topics.  If you narrow this down to a specific area you may be missing out on some interesting topics that are related to you even if they aren’t related to your exact area.

The second Google Alert I would recommend setting up is for your city.  Do not include real estate or anything in this alert as you already have an alert for all information related to real estate.  It is also a good idea to set up an alert for all the surrounding areas.  If you are located in a city, make alerts for all the different surrounding towns that are considered suburbs.

Google Alerts is the best way to assist with choosing an important topic for your blog.  The web is a very busy place and this allows you to keep up on the latest information being posted about your area.  Choosing a topic that stands out among all the other information being posted can be difficult.  Using alerts can assist with following what is occurring in the real estate industry.

Social Networking with Seth is a weekly blog showcasing new tips, trends, and technologies related to social media.

LinkedIn and Twitter have recently joined forces allowing subscriber’s of both services to link their accounts.  This means your connections on LinkedIn can now view all of your tweets from their LinkedIn pages.  People are using Twitter more and more as a platform to keep informed of business news and trends, so this partnership seems to benefit both parties.  Allen Blue, LinkedIn’s co-founder and vice president of product strategy states, “Twitter is not only a massively open platform, but also it’s a place where there’s a tremendous amount of professional information already being shared, and we wanted to be sure that was coming to our LinkedIn user base.”

To connect your Twitter to LinkedIn, first log into your LinkedIn account and click on Edit my profile located on the left side of the page.  On your profile options, you’ll now see an option to add your Twitter account.  Click the “Add Twitter account” link.

Next, you will be prompted to enter your Twitter account username and password.

The next step is probably the most crucial, which limits the amount of tweets that are visible to your LinkedIn connections.  If you choose the second option, LinkedIn connections only be able to see tweets that are labeled with a #li or #in hashtag.  This feature makes it convenient to separate professional and business-oriented tweets from casual conversation between friends.

Linking Twitter and LinkedIn accounts can begin to streamline your social media activities and increase the visibility of the information you are sending.  I recommend using the service if you’re looking to expand the scope of your professional identity.

Here’s a short video of Reid Hoffman (co-founder of LinkedIn) and Biz Stone (co-founder of Twitter) discussing the integration of their two companies.

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