Good Article on Search Engine Ranking

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

If you've ever wondered how search engines rank websites but were afraid to ask, you can find the answers in one concise, easy-to-understand article:

How Do Search Engines Rank Websites

This article does a good job at explaining search engine ranking factors by comparing two hypothetical websites about bee keeping. Just plug "real estate" in for "bee keeping" and it's an informative and relevant read!

Until next time,

-Brandon

Real Estate Postcards - They Still Work!

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

Lately, the Internet is the only thing I see being talked about in real estate marketing circles. I'm the first to admit I'm guilty of this as well ... just look at my last few blog posts.

But I'm here to remind you that the Internet is only one way to reach your audience. And the more marketing channels you implement, the more chances you have of gaining that next client.

Take it from Yahoo
What prompted me to make this post? Well, today I got a postcard in the mail from Yahoo. The postcard gave me $25 off Yahoo's search engine marketing services (pay-per-click). So here we have one of the smartest and most sophisticated Internet companies using postcards to reach their audience. There is a lesson to be learned there.

Learn more
If you want to learn how to incorporate real estate postcards with your online marketing efforts, I highly recommend my book, Real Estate Postcard Marketing. Sure, I'm biased. But I really did put a lot into this book, and if you use postcards to market yourself, you owe it to yourself to download a copy today.

Until next time.

-Brandon

New Article on Real Estate SEO

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

If you're interested in search engine optimization and improving your website's search visibility -- as most real estate agents are these days -- you'll probably find this new article helpful:

This article covers the importance of creating high-value content for your real estate website. Good content helps you improve your search engine visibility, but more importantly it helps you increase your conversion rates by giving website visitors what they need.

Read the article here:
In Real Estate SEO, Content Matters

Hope you find it helpful!

-Brandon

The Power of Article Marketing - Demonstrated

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

John Caples wrote one of the most successful ad headlines of all time. It was for the U.S. Music School, and it advertised a piano instruction course:

"They Laughed When I Sat Down At the Piano, But When I Started to Play..."

If I were to apply this headline to my marketing experiences, it might go like this:

"They Laughed When I Recommended Articles for Marketing, But When I Showed the Results..."

When I tell people to publish articles for better search engine visibility, I usually get blank stares and/or laughter. But then, once in a while, I get the opportunity to prove the effectiveness of this technique.

This is one of those times.

If you've read my books or articles on search engine visibility, you'll know the importance of backlinks (links coming from other websites to yours). Well, what if I said that one article could get you published on hundreds of websites, mentioned on thousands more, and earn dozens of quality backlinks to your site?

Recently, I published this article about search engine optimization at ISEDB.com, and you might say it has spread pretty far. Here are the thousands of websites that have mentioned the article. Hundreds of these sites have also published it, with the link to my own website intact.

The article (and its effects) also caught the attention of Aaron over at SEObuzzbox.com, which led to even more publicity, web traffic and inbound links.

All from one article!

I don't tell you this to brag. I tell you this because article marketing is a strategy I've long recommended to real estate professionals, and I'm happy to demonstrate its effectiveness with a real-life example.

I hope you take this to heart, and I hope you can use this strategy for equal success!

Brandon Cornett

Author, Agent's Guide to Article Marketing

Service Matters - A Car Buying Story

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

The Importance of Offering Good Service

My wife bought a new car recently. There's a Nissan dealership about 5 miles down the road from our house. But she went past that dealership to another Nissan dealer near where she works, quite a ways from where we live.

Why did she go to the trouble? Because I've bought a car from the closer dealership, and the service was terrible. It took three months to get my license plates (I had to keep going back to get updated 30-day tags). The finance guy talked down to us like these matters were outside our comprehension, though we're both financially smarter than he is. The sales lady told me to give her all "excellents" on her survey so she could "get her fifty bucks."

Yes, it was a joke.

So my wife drove out of her way to avoid buying her car from the same dealer. Actually, both dealerships are owned by the same person. But they service she received was totally different that what I received.

When it's time to trade in my car, I too will drive out of my way to the other dealership and ask for her salesman by name. I will recommend the other dealership to friends. And she has given the dealership all "excellents" on their corporate survey, though the guy certainly didn't ask for it.

Moral of This Story
Remarkable products and services create talkability and buzz. The same concept applies to the real estate business. If you offer an experience that makes your clients say Wow, this was really nice, then those clients will talk about you. And who knows, maybe somebody will go out of their way to have you as their agent.

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More real estate marketing tips
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When Pronouns Go Bad - A Marketing Tale

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

One thing I don't understand is why — in this age of social media and customer empowerment — so many companies strive for greater anonymity. Don't they get that anonymous is out?

You know the websites I'm talking about. You go to the "About Us" page and it's a bunch of talk of "we" and "us" with not a face or a name to be found. You go to the "Contact Us" page, and it's a plain old form without a name.

Surprisingly, I see this happen with smaller companies just as much as I see it with the mega-corporations. The difference is, a big corporation can afford to pump its message through multiple channels, while smaller companies often rely more heavily on their website.

There's a cost to anonymity. And if you ask me, it's too great a cost for any company, small or large. People don't trust anonymous businesses ... and why should they?

Is your website anonymous? Or do you welcome dialogue and interaction with your audience? What are your thoughts?

Comments welcome!

-Brandon

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Agree (on sitemaps)

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

All three blog posts hit me at the same time yesterday. One from the Google blog, one from the Yahoo blog, and one from Live Search.

The big three agree that standards are good, and what better item to standardize than sitemaps. Now, I'm not talking about the sitemap you create for your visitors to help them find their way. I'm talking about the XML file you create to help search engines find all your pages.

There is now a standard format for these sitemaps that all of the major search engines prefer. This is from Yahoo:

Together we're announcing www.sitemaps.org, which provides details of the current release of the Sitemaps protocol and will include future updates as we continue to collaborate on this common protocol. By offering an open standard for web sites, webmasters can use a single format to create a catalog of their site URLs and to notify changes to the major search engines.

Sitemaps are especially important if you have a large site, a site with lots of directories / sub-directories, or a combination of the two.

-Brandon

Zillow and HouseValues are Neato. So What?

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

I thought I would share a recent post I made over at ActiveRain.com:

Zillow and HouseValues are Neato. So What?

I hear a lot of online "chatter" from real estate agents talking about how the Zillows and HouseValues of the world are out to get them, or perhaps put them out of business.

So I played around with each of the aforementioned websites, and here's my report to you (from a non-agent to an agent). Zillow and HouseValues are neato. But so what? It's neat to see estimated values of homes near mine, but I'm smart enough to know they're only estimates based on publicly available data.

I'm also smart enough to know that a website cannot help me sell my home or buy a new one ... that a website cannot help me create or interpret a contract ... that a website cannot help me negotiate with a seller.

In short, I'm smart enough to know that a website is not a replacement for a real estate agent. They are two separate things. I see Zillow and HouseValues as information sources, not proactive services.

What are your thoughts? Have you tried these websites from a consumer's standpoint? Comments welcome. Use the "comments" link below.

-Brandon

New Article at ISEDB.com

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

If you're interested in real estate SEO, or search engine optimization in general, you might enjoy a new article I just published. It's available at ISEDB.com, and even though it's a bit tongue-in-cheek it covers a very real issue.

Read the article:
SEO Tunnel Vision - Signs, Symptoms and Treatments

Hope you like!

-Brandon

Another SEO Tool from Brandon's Favorites

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

I've delved into my Internet bookmarks again to bring you another of my frequently used search engine optimization tools. (Stick around ... you might get the entire "toolkit" within a month or so.)

This tool is called the Backlink Builder, but I think a better name might be the Link Opportunity Tool. One of my link-building methods is to write solid articles and publish them online (with a link back to my website). I often use this tool to help me find relevant websites that have the phrase "submit article" somewhere on the page.

Sure, I could probably use Google to do the same thing (and I do). But this tool saves me a lot of time up front by doing a lot of the query work for me.

Enjoy!

Try the Backlink Builder

~Brandon

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New Article on Real Estate Blogs

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

I just published a new article on the main website. It's about real estate blogs. More specifically, it's about gaining subscribers to your blog by publishing quality content, using RSS, and other helpful tips.

Read the article:
Real Estate Blogs - 3 Steps to Earning Subscribers

Related article:
SEO Benefits of Real Estate Blogs

Enjoy!

-Brandon

Tags: real estate blog real estate seo