Hi everyone, this article comes straight from our resident expert in online marketing, Aaron Jones. He’s good at what he does, so listen up and give it a shot; you won’t be sorry!

In this market, it helps to have an edge. Our ‘Internet Marketing for Real Estate Agents’ series is here to help you succeed in this fast-paced information driven business environment. It’s Easier than you Expect & more Important than you Realize.

Search engine optimization (SEO): The process of improving the visibility of a web site in unpaid search results.

Hold on there, get your finger away from the ‘close’ button – don’t let the technical terms spook you – this is a very valuable tool and you will have a grasp on the basics if you give this article a chance.

Ready? Here we go.

First of all, if you have an online presence and want people to be able to find you, your website or your listings, SEO is a valuable tool for you. You do not need to have a website to implement this type of internet marketing, but it certainly helps.

Let’s define what I meant when I said “Online Presence“. If you have ever commented on a news article, set up a Facebook account or posted a listing online, you have an online presence. Most people consider their company or personal website to be their ‘online presence’, but that is only a part of it. Internet marketing and SEO is all about promoting yourself, your listings and your business online, making every online interaction and website as effective as it can be for driving search results and getting found.

So the first real step in search engine optimization is to know what your online presence looks like. How do you do that? Google Yourself. It may sound silly, but if a referral customer is looking for a way to contact you, they will probably be typing your name into a search engine. Look for content that casts you in a less than professional light; you may be surprised at what you find! There are ways to get content removed from search engines, but the best way to clean up your online reputation is to create and promote the content that you want customers to see.

Your personal brand is important, but business comes first. SEO is one of the keys to selling real estate online – this is the #1 way to get more eyes on your listings, and with a little patience, you can do it yourself. Now, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, but since Google has over 70% of the market share for online search, we will stop saying “search engine” and start saying “Google”. Don’t worry, most search engines work in a similar way, so if you work towards good scores in Google, you will get results in the rest as well.

I should also mention that, while I do Online Marketing for a living, there are a lot of people out there who will charge an arm and a leg for what I’m about to explain to you, so be very careful if you decide to hire someone to do this for you, you might get taken for a ride.

Without further ado, here is part one on how to use SEO to build your business online. Stay tuned for part 2 next week.

The Three Ways that Google Ranks your Online Presence

1) The Content

This is the first and perhaps most valuable piece of the puzzle. Google can only read text that you can copy and paste, so if you upload a picture of your amazing listing flier, you shouldn’t be surprised if no-one can find it; Google needs the text to correctly categorize and rank it. There are ways to do SEO for images, but it is always better if there is text accompanying or explaining the image. The best thing about this is that since your website is already mostly text, you are halfway there, the next step is optimizing that text.

Google categorizes and ranks your content based on what words you use and how often you use them. If you were using Google several years ago, you may have run into websites that were just huge blocks of nonsensical text. People used to use this technique, called “keyword stuffing” to promote their website on Google. Now it will just get you banned from search results.

Think along these terms. If you were a customer, what would you search for to find this piece of content (house, agent website, blog, etc)? What specific words would you use? If you use those words in your website or online listing, you are helping your customers to find you, and that is great news for everyone! Well, except for your competition.

2) The Context

Context is very important for SEO and Google is really starting to use context to drive search results. For example, if you search for VA Loan or VA Mortgage, your results will be targeted towards Veterans, but if you search for VA Housing or VA Property, your results will be about Real Estate in Virginia – computers are getting smarter, so you need to make sure that your content has the right context.

How do you give context to your content? Part of it is the website that the content is hosted on. A post on Activerain.com or Trulia.com will have the natural context of real estate information, while a article from the Wall Street Journal will automatically score higher on financial topics. If you are putting the information on your website, Google gets that context from your websites “Meta Data”. Long story short, Meta Data is information that is in the code of your website (or isn’t, but should be, depending on who designed it) and it tells search engines what the website is about. If you are brave, look at the source code for your website (usually can be found by right-clicking on your web page) – otherwise simply use this tool to discover what your meta data says about your website. If you want to change your meta data, you have to edit your website – I would ask whoever set it up in the first place to do that for you, or Google it if you are feeling brave.

Quick primer on meta data – there are MANY types of meta data, the three most important for SEO are Keywords, Description and Title.  Keywords should be words that are relevant to your content, separated by a comma.  Description is a short (160 characters or less) chunk of text that describes your content.  Title is the “name” of your page, and should not exceed 60 Characters,

The last way that Google gets context for your information is through outbound and inbound links. If both Activerain and the Wall Street Journal link their readers to your post about the financial aspects of real estate, you will get an added benefit for both Financial Topics and Real Estate Topics, because known experts have linked towards you. If you are linking out to them, it gives added context to what your material is about.

3) Competition

Online marketing has been a big thing for several years now, so your competitors might have beat you to the punch. Don’t get discouraged , just because you are starting behind is no reason to not start – you can and will catch up, but it will take a bit of time. If you are just starting with online marketing, you are not going to stand a chance against Amazon, Ebay, Zillow or other internet powerhouses, so I would encourage you to start small.

Here are the questions you should ask yourself – what piece of the market do I own? What clients do I really connect with? What are specific words used for my area (town, county, city, nicknames).

People tend to “search” like they talk, so remember that you have to put yourself in the customers shoes. A person coming into town to find a house to move into will not necessarily use the same words or phrases as a local. They may use zip codes, landmarks or other non-standard language to try to find what they are looking for. Once you know who your audience is, you can start talking like them. If you have multiple audiences that use different language, it is better to have multiple pages or articles that target each audience rather than trying to talk like 3 groups at once.

In the second part of this article we will give you some examples of how SEO works with social networking and blogging. We will also show you how to track your progress for the best results!

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Follow us on twitter for current news, advice and market status updates.

Have a question or something to add? Leave a comment or send us an email

Geoff Boyd – PrimeLending – Clackamas, OR

If you keep doing what you have always done, you will keep getting what you’ve always gotten…

And yet, it seems like as we try to tackle this recession, we are largely using the same tools that were only fairly successful in the 1900s (yep, some of these tactics were used to “fix” the great depression). Our country, infrastructure and economic system are radically different than they were just 20 years ago, so it seems as if we are fixing a system with outdated tools.  While using leeches has come back into vogue, most of us wouldn’t use 100 year old medical tools to cure a modern disease, and our economic doctors should be doing this either.

This isn’t a political blog, so we won’t go too far down this path, but it seems to me that a good portion of our administration, and specifically some of the financial regulators and policy makers just doesn’t get it. I am not joking when I say that we are still using metrics that were designed when the fastest you could get information person-to-person was via telegraph.  Or, to put it another way, the heads of our financial system: Bernanke, Bair, Congress, others are looking into their bag of tricks and are quickly realizing that they’ve run out of options; stimulus programs, tax cuts and government spending are, after all, effective in some economic climates. Unfortunately, none of these programs make sense for an economy that has somewhere between 10%-20% unemployment. Our current leadership reminds me of the band playing on the deck of the Titanic.

Am I saying that we are heading for complete economic collapse and that our time as a superpower is fading into the past? Of course not.  That scenario isn’t close to playing itself out yet.  We are home to some of the brightest, most forward thinking, creative people on the planet…. and we tend to attract those very same types of people from countries across the globe.  One big problem that I do see is what I like to call “the Greece Complex”.  Our nation has become “used to” certain things and we will need to let go of a few of them in order to survive.  To fix our current mess, we will need to sacrifice and our leaders are afraid to tell us this. Instead they tell us that things will be fine, “keep spending”, but never dealing with the real issues………..because that would be unpopular. They are regulating, legislating, and leading according to polls, focus groups, and rumor.  For example, in our recently passed FinReg bill, derivatives were not dealt with.  ???  This was one of the biggest problems and causes of the mess that we are in, and it wasn’t even addressed!

Okay, enough “opinion” – here’s what you need to know. Things are not good in our economy, especially in any metric related to housing. Rates are at a historic low, and I mean just rock bottom.  The best numbers that we see are that refinance volumes are through the roof, which is a pretty obvious reaction to the market.  This helps a few people reduce their monthly expenses, but doesn’t really stimulate anything new.  New/Existing home purchases are at 10+ year lows, and when you consider that our population is much larger now, those numbers show a much bigger gap.

Here’s some more good news: some markets are improving.  Businesses are beginning to show interest in expanding. They are accomplishing this expansion first and foremost, by making more effective use of their current staff.  Over time, the job losses will taper off, and we will begin to see a true “bottom” in several important metrics, like employment rates and business spending.

OK, some not so good news? Housing is going to be way behind the curve in regards to recovery. The American public as a whole has shown remarkably low demand for new Mortgages (preferring to Rent vs. Buy), even with house prices way down and rates at, like I said, all-time lows.

Stocks, always known to be a volatile investment, have lost their gains from the last 10 days. Bonds have been more favored and, as a result, rates are still trending down. At this point, you should read “lower rates” as “more refinance activity”; we used to have a strong correlation between lower rates and new home purchases, but that link has been broken for about a year now.  Especially as the market begins to price in a “bond bubble”, we could easily see interest rates stall out and not drift lower.  This is because investors are becoming concerned about the value of those bonds, their ratings (as Moody’s, Fitch, and others have suggested that downgrades could be coming), and their relative risk.

So, I’m not trying to be negative, just realistic.  As I have said many times, accepting reality means that you have a good foundation for success in the future.

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Follow us on twitter for current news, advice and market status updates.

Have a question or something to add? Leave a comment or send us an email

Geoff Boyd – PrimeLending – Clackamas, OR

Hey Guys,

A quick fyi, we are doing a short hiatus from the blog due to a new baby!

Your regularly scheduled programming will resume in the next few weeks.

Thanks!

The MortgageProBlog Team

from the Wall Street Journal.

The following is the full statement following the Fed’s June meeting.

Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in April suggests that the economic recovery is proceeding and that the labor market is improving gradually. Household spending is increasing but remains constrained by high unemployment, modest income growth, lower housing wealth, and tight credit. Business spending on equipment and software has risen significantly; however, investment in nonresidential structures continues to be weak and employers remain reluctant to add to payrolls. Housing starts remain at a depressed level. Financial conditions have become less supportive of economic growth on balance, largely reflecting developments abroad. Bank lending has continued to contract in recent months. Nonetheless, the Committee anticipates a gradual return to higher levels of resource utilization in a context of price stability, although the pace of economic recovery is likely to be moderate for a time.

Prices of energy and other commodities have declined somewhat in recent months, and underlying inflation has trended lower. With substantial resource slack continuing to restrain cost pressures and longer-term inflation expectations stable, inflation is likely to be subdued for some time.

The Committee will maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and continues to anticipate that economic conditions, including low rates of resource utilization, subdued inflation trends, and stable inflation expectations, are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period.

The Committee will continue to monitor the economic outlook and financial developments and will employ its policy tools as necessary to promote economic recovery and price stability.

Voting for the FOMC monetary policy action were: Ben S. Bernanke, Chairman; William C. Dudley, Vice Chairman; James Bullard; Elizabeth A. Duke; Donald L. Kohn; Sandra Pianalto; Eric S. Rosengren; Daniel K. Tarullo; and Kevin M. Warsh. Voting against the policy action was Thomas M. Hoenig, who believed that continuing to express the expectation of exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period was no longer warranted because it could lead to a build-up of future imbalances and increase risks to longer-run macroeconomic and financial stability, while limiting the Committee’s flexibility to begin raising rates modestly.