It took a while, but Realtors are finally coming around to Web 2.0, Web 3.0, social networking, whatever you want to call it. It is becoming clear to Realtors (finally) that building a website and waiting around for Google to find it simply doesn’t work. This is a good thing! It means that they are waking up to the reality that we are LEAVING THE INFORMATION AGE and that we are ENTERING THE PARTICIPATION AGE. While this is a positive step, and Realtors are using more of these social solutions online, many see them just as a tool for profit instead of a tool for SHARING THEIR KNOWLEDGE and building credibility.

Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0. What does it all mean?

Web 1.0 was the “information age”. In regards to the web it was from 1995-2001. Building your website, getting a domain name, and having a presence with email were about all a Realtor could do with Web 1.0. Adding meta tags to your website and some other formatting is what web designers did to get you found on search engines. There were a LOT of search engines back then. Today there are just a few. The old meta tag days are gone forever. It will never again be that easy to spoof search engines and become #1 on Google with a meta tag or even a blog post.

Web 2.0 is about shared content, online applications, and syndicating content. It was also about mashups and the new nature of syndicating, cataloging, and making data discoverable by using tagging to create a more democratic search. Mainly, it was about applications and new ways of posting and sharing data. For Realtors it was the MLS systems, blogs, photo sharing sites, and other websites that are now indispensable tools for Realtors.

Web 3.0 (to me) is about relationships. It is the “participation age”. It is about much more than building applications that automate marketing (Web 2.0). It is about knowledge currency. Trust. Honesty. Transparency. Reputation. Networking. But you can’t have any of that if you don’t understand the unwritten rules of being a good net citizen, known as Netiquette.

Yeah, us geeks are full of ourselves, and we talk too much.

Well, hey… there is a lot to know with all this stuff. So in this article, I will answer the fundamental questions that I am getting from Realtors as to how to best use these new methods of networking to grow their real estate sales. How to come up high in Google. How to really use a Blog. And why how you use Facebook matters to your reputation.

Rule #1. There is no simple path to coming up number one in Google.

It can be a little draining explaining to folks how to come up high in Google because most people don’t want to hear the truth. Everyone wants to believe that there is a quick fix or trick to coming up high in Google, but there isn’t.
Some Truths:

• You need a site that has a lots of content.
• You need a site that has an old domain. The older the domain the better.
• You need a site that has well-formatted content.
• You have to have ORIGINAL content. Lots of it.
• You have to have a high Google PageRank, which can take quite a while to develop, and Google doesn’t update it often.
• There ARE formatting things that you can do to your website, like text linking, deep linking, adding a Google Sitemap, better page titling, and MUCH more.
• To get your Pagerank higher, you have to GENERATE A LOT OF INBOUND LINKS to your websites.
• You have to have time to wait – it sometimes takes a generous amount of time, especially to develop your site’s PageRank.
• There is more.

Stop thinking of Google as “something to be done” or handled, and think of it as a report card of your online work. ALL of your online work.

There are no free lunches with Google, no quick and easy tricks. But there ARE tricks and techniques. Most small web development shops don’t know all them. The more experienced web developers that understand how Google works charge a fee to work on your website.

Your blog can help you with Google. Your Facebook page can help you with Google. Simply adding tags to your blog posts WON’T MAKE YOU NUMBER ONE ON GOOGLE! But if you do them right, then they can help. I really want all of my clients’ websites to come up #1 in Google. But only 1% of my clients are willing to do the work it takes and wait for it to happen. This creates a natural conflict for us, especially because it is complicated to make happen. This is why there is a strong cottage industry of thieves that will take your money to “get you ranked in the top 10″. I have looked at many of them, and 99% of them are thieves.

I will focus on additional things that you can do to come up higher in Google outside of Blogs and Facebook in a future article.

Rule #2 Your website solution company should be your SEO consultant too, not just your web designer

It is up to YOU to contact your web design company, perhaps every 4-6 months, to give your site a checkup. Going to Google and typing in some words to see your ranking is NOT how you should be testing your site. Did you know that when you are logged into Google they change your search results based on what they know about you? It is true. So typing words into Google is not the way to test your site. There are many tools for testing your site outside of Google.

Rule #3 If you use a template company for your website, your Google Pagerank WILL suffer.

There are a LOT of companies out there offering turn-key Realtor websites with MLS listings in them. For the non-technical Realtor on a budget, these sites are an easy way to get a site live with listings. A Realtor was in my office the other day, and we pulled her site up to look at it. She is a friend, so I wasn’t charging her. I was just taking a look at what she has. Her site is build by a company that does Realtor template sites. So I check her Google PageRank, and her ranking is ZERO out of 10. That’s right – zero. So no matter what this company can offer her, the site won’t come up high in Google. I pointed this out to her, and she quickly back-peddled saying “most of my sales aren’t from my website anyways”. But it is pretty obvious that this is a copout, because why have the site if it isn’t going to generate leads?

So you might be wondering, why do template sites get penalized form Google? Duplicate content. Google is now smart enough to notice when a bunch of websites all look the same, and it hurts your score when your content isn’t unique.

Rule #4. Blogs are great for SEO, but are you using your blog correctly? Probably not.

I recently had a Realtor asking me for tips to make their website come up higher in Google. It happens all the time. Looking at their site, I saw a lot of things right away that could be done to make them come up higher in Google. It would take me….. 5 hours to explain all of it to them. It would take…. 20+ hours of work to implement it all. At $110 per hour, that gets expensive. Would they pay for that? Probably not. But some of my clients do. So, an easy to fill, glaring gap in their online marketing efforts that I saw was to add a blog link to their website. Why a blog? Because a blog makes it easier for the Realtor to add UNIQUE, ORIGINAL CONTENT to their website. Rich, juicy content that Google will respect when it reads it. Is that all there is to do? Fire up a WordPress blog, enter some articles, and sit back and wait for the Google gold rush? Hell Friggin No. There is still lots to be done.

Your blog needs articles that people actually give a shit about. Articles like this one! A rule in the new web world is that you have to stop holding onto your “secrets”. If you are an expert, you have to prove it with valuable information and less hype. The realtors that blog about Obama’s stimulus bill and who post their opinions about politics or their political affiliations on Facebook and their blogs are COMPLETELY MISSING THE POINT OF HOW THEY CAN HELP MAKE NEW RELATIONSHIPS. Why would you alienate 1/2 of all of your prospective customers by being political? Leave your ego and your confrontational political opinions at the door in this new web world. If I am a potential home buyer that wants a Realtor that can be trusted (and some can’t be), then SHOW ME that you are an expert and that you can be trusted. TELL ME WHAT I SHOULD KNOW about what it is like to live in this area. Posting a list of links to area parks and restaurants is a cop out.

OK, so how to choose content for your blogs…. Ask yourself “If I was a home buyer, will this content help me?”. If the answer is “no”, then don’t post it. Also remember that blogs are chronological. They are for telling the story of the moment. The top ten tips of the moment. The top recent problems that you are solving for customers. The top resources for customers, etc. etc. It is OK if these get old over time, because if you are a TRUE PROFESSIONAL, then you will constantly have new subject matter that is unique, easy for you to write, and relevant for your customers. THAT is what blog content should be. Content like link pages, information on neighborhoods, taxes, employers, zoning, entertainment, restaurants, mortgage lenders, all that content that isn’t time sensitive – that content should be on static pages in your website. That content is not time-sensitive. It isn’t storytelling. It is resource stuff, not blog content. Don’t repost listings into your blog – it looks desperate. It looks even more desperate on Facebook.

Rule #5. Blog Content Needs to Be Described AND LINKED to Be Found

So you wrote a great post to help potential home buyers. Terrific! Then you go to Google and you don’t see it. Not even a month later. Something must be wrong, you say! My web designer led me astray with all of this blogging malarky! Those bastard web designers. Well, before you blame the web designer, you have to ask yourself these questions:

1. did I add tags to my blog posts?
2. do I even know what the hell the tags are, how they work, and what they do?
3. does my blog have a decent number of posts in it?
4. am I linking my blog to other blogs?
5. are my tags formatted as complete keyword phrases?
6. am I linking to my blog from lots of other websites?
7. am I emulating this blog content and posting strategy to match the leaders of my industry?
8. have I created adequate categories in my blog so that I get the quality text links in the blog?
9. is my blog IN my company website, or is it linked from my company website? (hint: link it).
10. am I using the right blog software? is it the latest version?
11. am I using link directory websites like Digg.com, delicious.com, Technorati.com, and the other MANY sites?
12. am I tagging and linking words WITHIN my blog posts to other websites? hrm?
13. am I getting press coverage to get inbound traffic and links to this valuable blog content?
14. am I tweaking the permalinks in my blog posts to create adequate search engine safe URLs?
15. am I using Wikipedia to lookup all this crap that John McKown is telling me?
16. if I don’t want to learn all the blog crap, can I honestly blame my web designer for not doing it for me for free?

Digg.com and Delicious.com are nice, solid ways to get your blog content indexed by Google. It isn’t foolproof, and no SEO tip is. They are all part of what is required today.

Rule #6. Facebook is a powerful networking tool. But no one wants to be friends with a jerk Realtor.

Am I bashing Realtors? No. I am not bashing Realtors. There are a lot of great Realtors out there, some are my close friends. Some, unfortunately, are jerks. There are also jerk web designers and definitely jerk mortgage brokers. Hang with me here…. I think it is great that Realtors are using Facebook. I have a Delaware real estate license and I pay the National Association of Realtors and KCAR dues. So I AM a Realtor, at least technically. So are you a “Jerk Realtor” you ask? Well, that depends totally on your behavior. If you joined Facebook because some guy in a marketing seminar told you to add everyone in your address book to your Facebook account to make money, then yeah, you might be one. My point is, I will help you. I don’t care if you are a Realtor or not. I help people because, quite frankly, when I do so it ends up helping my business and it makes me feel good to share what I know. My ego likes me being considered an expert. I’d be a jerk web designer if I used my knowledge to exploit people like I see happening EVERY DAY from other companies in my industry. If you are HONESTLY interested in me, my experience, what I have to say, how I can help you, then great. Add me as a Facebook friend and I will accept you. Again, I really don’t care if you are a Realtor or not. If I help you and gain your trust by doing so, then you should return the favor and recommend me as an expert too. But….. if you sponge me for information and then blame me because you didn’t do ALL of the things that Google and Facebook and your website require for online success, then you are a Jerk Realtor. If you use your Facebook account to post all your listings, then you don’t look professional. Why do I want to see all of your listings in my Facebook account? I don’t. And you will be removed from my friends list in a hurry. I bet other people feel the exact same way. Relationships are built on trust, sharing, and listening. Not by adding a hyperlink to someone. Use Facebook, but don’t be a ….. you know.

You are on Facebook. Is your company?

You can create a FREE business page for your real estate company. I added one for Delaware.Net, check it out and become a fan real quick: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dover-DE/DelawareNet-Inc/41553338643?ref=s . This a great way to get traffic, and to mass email your friends list with news from your organization. But BE CAREFUL. Don’t overdo it. Add content that matters, and don’t do it too frequently. Get all your business friends to add themselves to your new business page. There is a link at the bottom of the page when you look at my business page. That is how you can add your business site to Facebook.

Are you syndicating your OWN content?

If you are posting a good article to your blog, you should also use that article for an email newsletter. You don’t have an email newsletter? You should. The content that you mass email people is almost as sensitive as what you blog and post into Facebook. One thing that email newsletters are better at, is letting the visitor choose what content they want to get from you. For example, they could chose to get emails about new properties. So it is totally acceptable to email them property information. It is much different to dump your listings into your Facebook account.

Build a link share network – it is important

Earlier in this article I mentioned getting inbound links to your website to build your Google Pagerank. Google Pagerank can be thought of as a multiplier. Meaning, if your site has lots of jucy articles and keywords, but your Google Pagerank is a 1 (out of 10), then you are going to get beat in the search results every time. So your Google ranking can be thought of as this formula: Google PageRank * Relvance of Content = Ranking. One of the things Google looks at to determine how “important” your site is, is by measuring the number of websites that are linking to yours. It also takes into account RECIPROCAL LINKS. This is critical. So you should link to other large websites that have a good pagerank, and most importantly you should try to get them to link back to you. Start to look for sites that have a high pagerank, and then try to get a reciprocal link between their site and yours. Now repeat this dozens or hundreds of times, and you will start to see your Google Pagerank climb.

I wrote this in one sitting while watching TV. Ask me questions about any of this and I will do my best to answer you and explain further. Use the form below this story to post your questions. Thanks for reading, and I hope it helped.

I purchased the Delaware.Net and Delaware.com domains about 7 years ago, and I used the Delaware.Net domain for our web development company, and I’ve always had a plan to use the Delaware.com domain for a local portal. That plan is being put into motion as I write this post.

The real estate directory is but one of many features that are going to be launched in the site this spring. For example, this week we plan to launch a business directory CMS module that will contain thousands of Delaware area businesses when it launches. Our new Content Management System that just launched also feeds into the Delaware.com portal. This means that area businesses will be able to post jobs, syndicate their products, and market their businesses in new ways – AUTOMATICALLY.

Combined with our exceptional Google Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work that we perform for our clients, we can now provide our local clients a Delaware-Centric portal that will greatly enhance their local marketing efforts. With our best-possible local domain name (Delaware.com), our cutting-edge database applications, and our reasonable advertising pricing, we feel that we can offer a much better value than other Delaware-area portals.

If you are interested in marketing your company on Delaware.com, or if you have a question about the new portal, post a response below and I will answer your questions.

Looking back at 2007

After a relatively flat 2006, we approached 2007 with a refined game plan. Specifically, to get the best talent I could find for our four teams; creative, programming, sales, and engineering. Mission accomplished. We now have 15 professionals, all working to bring the latest web technology to our clients. We are also looking for more employees to join our technical on-site team.
Some of the smaller office upgrades for 2007 include painting our office, getting all new computers for our staff, upgrading most of our software, and getting large dual flat screen monitors for everyone. We upgraded our office kitchen with new appliances and food choices. In the data center, we purchased a bunch of new HP and Dell servers, Cisco switches, and additional storage devices and drives.

Looking ahead to 2008

For 2008, we have some exciting new services and technology for our customers. Some of it I can talk about here in my blog, and some of our plans are proprietary and I can’t give too much information (yet). Here are some of the highlights…

1. New corporate web site for Delaware.Net, Inc.
   We’ve built so many web sites, that unfortunately we have had very little time to keep our own web site up to date. Now that we have a larger staff, that is all about to change. The conceptual designs for our new site is already complete, so you will see the new site in early 2008. We’re using this opportunity in redesigning our site to show our commitment to web standards, our newest applications, and more (the secret sauce).
2. New micro sites for our applications
   In addition to our new company web site, we are also working on new, smaller versions of our site for our applications. These sites will launch after our main site, and will contain more resources for our clients.
3. Team-Logic 2.0 AJAX Beta
   We completed our new AJAX-powered Intranet system in the fall of 2007, and it’s fast becoming our new web application hosting platform. When compared to commercial Intranet and ecommerce systems from other providers, there simply is no comparison because we offer more features, a better application, and for less money. We are undergoing live data testing in-house, and also with select customers now. This is going very well. In early 2008 we will add more functionality to this system and officially launch it with it’s own new microsite.
4. NEW – Mail-Logic Newsletter Server
   Starting at just $12 per month, our new newsletter server sets the standard for sending value and performance when you need to send out email newsletters to your customers, and your staff. Unlimited groups and mailings, automated bounce processing, web site signup, and HTML generation makes sending newsletters easier than ever.
5. NEW – Updated Real Estate Applications
   After leaving our real estate applications alone for years, they are undergoing a complete transformation. It is no longer good enough to simply have IDX listing feeds in a real estate site and call it a day. Our new real estate suite combines rentals, MLS feeds, lead tracking, content management, and local portal advertising. The new applications will launch in February, in time for the spring real estate season. Existing Delaware.Net clients will get special upgrade packages.
6. NEW – Updated Vehicle Dealership Application
   We’ve been rebuilding our dealership applications to use our latest CRM, email marketing, and content management applications. These will also feed used vehicle inventories to Delaware.com.
7. New Delaware.com Marketing
   Can’t talk a whole lot about this yet, but suffice it to say that we are building a local portal that will compete with other popular area web portals. We won’t be satisfied unless we create the best marketing portal for local area businesses.
8. Lots More
   More detail on our latest applications will be released soon.
9. Dream Home
   On a personal level, My wife and I have begun building our dream home, which will be complete in 2008. It is an exciting time for us as we pick out all of the options for our new home. We have already purchased a one-acre lot in the most prestigious neighborhood in Kent County, and our architectural plans are complete as well.

• FrontPage was a beginner tool, that professional web designers shunned.
• Adobe Dreamweaver is the defacto tool for professionals.
• Company Intranets became more critical to businesses, and yet most businesspeople are not web designers. So it made sense to make FrontPage into something even easier to use for web design newbies.
• Due to the last point, FrontPage because the built-in authoring tool for Microsoft Sharepoint (Microsoft’s limited Intranet product).
• Professional web site design requires tools that generate standards-based code, which FrontPage could not do.

Microsoft replaces FrontPage with “Expression Web”
For users that wish to build a web site, and who don’t need a basic corporate file-sharing Intranet like Sharepoint, Microsoft created a replacement tool for FrontPage called “Expression Web”. So far, it appears that this new program has been a colossal failure. Why do I say that? Because no one (and I do mean no one) asks for it. Back in the day, folks would go to Staples or their local office store and purchase FrontPage so that they could put up a web page quickly. Those days are gone. Those that need nothing more than an extremely basic web presence today can use online page-building tools to generate simple template-based web pages quickly.

More about template sites
Template sites built through a web interface have widened the divide between building a basic web presence, and building a professional web site. This divide means that it is both easier than ever to build a web site, and it is also harder than ever to build a web site. It all depends on what you call a “web site”. Domain registrars make a killing selling those template sites, and yet they really are hideous to look at. Superpages web sites that you can buy from the local phone book are also just as bad, and they fall into the template category. I stopped trying to talk first-time web site owners out of those template sites a long time ago, because if a quick and dirty web presence is all they feel that they need, then it will take a year or two of enduring zero business from the web before those web site owners smarten up and purchase professional web services from a firm like mine (Delaware.net). In a strange way, those template sites actually gain us customers because they serve to educate future customers of the value of a custom web site. Features like search engine optimization (making your site come up in Google) are sorely missing from template sites, and more web savvy customers realize very quickly that their template site is under-performing and is actually costing them money.

Web Video Overtakes Microsoft – Microsoft Responds
With the wild popularity of video on the web, thanks to sites like YouTube, Microsoft has been left behind in this important era of the web. Since Microsoft’s arch-enemy is Google, and Google bought YouTube, the situation has looked even worse for Microsoft. This is another reason why FrontPage went away. For example, you can’t even VIEW the web site for Expression Web without installing a “Microsoft Silverlight” plugin into your browser. What the hell is Silverlight? It is Microsoft’s attempt to complete with Adobe Flash – the web’s standard video player. Once Adobe got Flash to play video, it put another nail into Microsoft’s Media player (my least favorite video player). For Microsoft to get adoption of SilverLight, they have tied it very closely with ExpressionWeb.

If you still use FrontPage, its decision time
Since FrontPage is going away, you are going to need to get a new tool for building web sites. If a low-tech tool for a simple web site is what you want, then I would use Adobe Contribute, which is an easy to use tool for Creating simple web pages and Intranet content. Several licenses of Contribute can allow a small team to create a static Intranet that is a good start for having a basic Intranet. If you want to build web pages for a living, or if you are learning web design in college, then you need to start using Dreamweaver, Adobe design products (Photoshop, Illustrator), and Microsoft Visual Studio. Those are the tools that the pros use.

Lastly, there are other alternatives and hyrbids to all of these choices. It is now possible to have a web site designed fairly inexpensively, which can also have robust applications to help your business run. At Delaware.Net, we have many of these applications ready to install in your web site – like calendars, e-commerce, signup forms, file management, and more. If you have a site built in FrontPage, we can help you to come up with a newer, better way to manage and improve your web site.

Do I hate Microsoft?
No. We have a lot of Microsoft servers in our data center, and we are adding more every month. Most of the workstations in our office also run Windows, with the exception of some graphic design workstations that are Macs. But when it comes to the web, web authoring, or Microsoft’s attempt to compete with Flash, they don’t have a chance. Even their Internet Exploder (Explorer) browser is a CONSTANT headache for web designers because it is not standards-compliant. So how are we supposed to believe that MS will make their developer tools compliant, when their web browser isn’t? The answer is that they won’t. You can see the frustration of web developers over Internet Explorer in an article that Computer World just released, and if you read the second part of it you can see how much hassle IE causes developers. Every chance I get, I try to encourage customers to use Firefox instead of IE.

Our new slogan for the company is “World-Class Web Works”, and this has several meanings for us. It defines our goal – to build and host “world-class” solutions for our customers, and to give them the best support around. It also defines our advantage – the fact that our world-class solutions make customer’s web sites work better for them. Even though we are miles ahead of local competitors, we are committed to constantly improving our services across the board. To that end, I am happy to share with you some of the milestones we have reached already in 2007, as well as a sneak peek at our TENTH anniversary announcements that are coming in October.
Our New Hosting Framework – Team-Logic 2.0
We’ve built a Software As A Service (SAAS) web application suite that allows us to launch and manage ALL of our web applications more quickly. We call this new system Team-Logic 2.0. We’ve looked at “foundation Intranets” and hosting panels offered by other web design and hosting companies, and I have to say that our new framework blows away what these other firms can offer.

Our new Team-Logic system combines roughly 30 of our hosted applications into ONE new interface. By creating a new security system for all of our applications, customers can now log into ONE interface to control their web site, handle their marketing needs, and track sales.

This is a MAJOR deal because we can build dynamic web sites faster than other companies, and these applications are easier to manage and improve. Turn-key applications running on Team-Logic 2.0 include; custom web sites, blogs, content management applications, eCommerce storefronts, real estate MLS systems, Intranets, mailing lists, and much, much more. We completed this new framework back in July, and deployment of the system is underway now for some large clients. The new system works for all clients large and small, and it offers a significant performance boost over previous versions of our applications when they were separate. We’ve also invested in new hardware for this system, which will run much faster than the virtual servers that other companies use. As you can imagine, it has taken over a year of planning to build this new framework, and now that it is complete we will be able to offer an incredible amount of value for web site hosting customers that they will not be able to find anywhere else.

New Email Marketing Newsletter Server – Mail-Logic
Our newest on-demand application is called Mail-Logic. Mail-Logic is a complete re-build of our email newsletter application, and it is now complete and undergoing testing for a large client. Mail-Logic makes it possible to send out your newsletters, special flyers, and more to a very large audience easily. Mail-Logic will be sold as an on-demand product that can be used within minutes for any client that we host. Existing Delaware.Net newsletter clients will get a free upgrade to Mail-Logic. The feature list for Mail-Logic is very long, and there will be a new web site for it soon. We have designed Mail-Logic to compete with Constant Contact and other email marketing vendors. Mail-Logic can be used as a standalone solution, or it can be used within ANY existing web site. Pricing will be very competitive with national solutions. Mail-Logic is built as a module that runs on our Team-Logic framework, which means that it takes only minutes to deploy the newsletter server for new clients.

New eCommerce Engine – Store-Logic 2.0
Our Store-Logic engine is undergoing a complete upgrade. The store administrator will work as a module under our new Team-Logic 2.0 framework, allowing us to deploy eCommerce store with new features quickly. Store customers will enjoy new data migration features, as well as enhanced UPS shipping, AJAX, XML, and other features. The new eCommerce administrator is much faster than before, and busy stores will be able to manage their stores more easily due to the AJAX technology. Since our CRM, eCommerce, and Mail-Logic programs all run under the same framework, we can custom-tailor an eCommerce solution that includes email marketing and sales tools for any size company.

More!
There is much more coming that we will release information on soon.

Folks are now waking up to the power of blogs, and how they can help their company’s image, their search engine optimization (SEO), and how to better communicate with customers. Unfortunately, most people setting up blogs are too lazy to realize their true benefits. And guess what else? Mediocre web design shops profit from this laziness.

People always want a quick fix – like taking a diet pill instead of eating right and actually doing the exercise they need. Hey, that sounds like me! So… when most folks realize the power of blogs, they say “I need a blog”, and there are many hosting companies that are more than happy to set one up for them, just like me (I sell blogs like this one for $50 per year, which includes a domain name). But here is the bad news. A good, useful blog isn’t just software. A good, useful blog is one that has information in it that clients actually seek out because it is useful to them.

Web 2.0 web technology, such as blogs, is changing the way information is being distributed around the net, as search engines now process this content differently than regular web sites. In fact, entirely new search engines are emerging that threaten Google and Yahoo because they work differently, put the collaborative search power into the hands of the people, and they are VERY effective. While I can tell you all about these engines and how they work in another blog post, this whole new genre of search and marketing power is called social networking and social bookmarking.

Do hosting companies and little one-man web shops take advantage of all of these features for their clients? Of course not. They just say – “we can give you a blog, it will help your SEO”, and most people unfortunately take the bait and set it up without any additional help or consulting. What happens next is an inevitable one-way ticket to an empty blog web site. Gartner recently did a study where they announced that 200 million blogs are abandoned, and while the number sounds high to me, I can easily see why so many blogs are abandonded.
Some examples of how NOT to deploy your blog

This week, I checked out the web site of a company located near me, whose name I prefer not to mention. Their web site was recently redesigned by a graphic designer that doesn’t really understand SEO, social bookmarking, or Web2.0 programming. How do I know this? Easy – from my years of taking drab web sites and making them work better. What this company’s new web site became, unfortunately, is nothing but an online print brochure, with some free blog software and photographs thrown into it. They probably think it is great. But 4-5 years from now, if they are lucky, they will realize that they missed an opportunity to have a site that could have added a lot more value to their company.

This company’s web site has a blog in it that says it is a knowledge base for answering customer questions. But it is empty! All this does, is send web site visitors to a dead-end, and it shows the world that this company is not really serious about their web site. Lesson: An empty blog or forum is worse than no blog or forum at all.

The Realtor Blog

Then there is a Realtor that has a “blog” in his/her web site. This Realtor has an under-performing web site, complete with an annoying Flash intro movie. If you really want to self-destruct your web site, put a flash into in front of it. The Flash intro fad disappeared (thank goodness) almost as soon as it started, waaay back in 1999. After you suffer through the flash intro, you are greeted with a very basic web site that has a “blog” in it. It can barely be considered a real blog, because it doesn’t take advantage of any of the latest Web2.0 features that blogs need to work well, like tagging.
Why is this blog useless?

• It has only three posts in it.
• Someone along the way told this Realtor that a blog is a diary (that is how blogs originated), so he/she uses it as a personal political soapbox. It is OK to have some of this kind of content in your blog, but it shouldn’t be the only content in the blog.
• Instead of educating folks about real estate, the area, schools, financing, or home improvement, the blog has three negative posts that complain about how the media affects the real estate market.
• All three posts say “I am selling more homes now than ever, even though the media says things are so bad”. That may be true, but it smacks of desperation.
• As I mentioned above, it doesn’t have social bookmarking or social networking technologies in it. This means that no one will find the site from alternative search engines.
• There is no SEO technology in the blog, so traditional search engines such as Google won’t index it well.
• No customer-focused content

Everyone has heard of the old famous saying in real estate – “The three things that matter most in real estate are; LOCATION, LOCATION, and LOCATION”. Well, in the world of blogs and Web2.0, the saying goes like something like this: “The three things that matter most with blogs are; CONTENT, CONTENT, and CONTENT”.

Before you start writing content like crazy for your blog, remember – it takes the right combination of design, technologies, content, time, and persistence to get the most out of your blog. Don’t just blog because you feel that it is something you HAVE to do to market yourself online. That isn’t true. If you write your blog content with customers in mind, they will repay you with their business. If you would like for me to help you with your web site, give me a call.

Wikipedia gives this definition:

A Blog (web log) is a website where entries are written in chronological order and displayed in reverse chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. Blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media.

Like all online tools and applications, blogs started out as a tool and a toy for geeks. If you look at email, forums, html, and now blogs, they were all used by geeks for some time before businesses found a way to monetize them. Blogs have fairly recently become the next online tool to become indispensable to businesses.

Blogs started as VERY simple online applications for posting online diaries. Those diaries were used as personal diaries, political activists, amateur news reporters, and for anyone that needed a soapbox. Today, that has all changed, and with this article I’ll show you some of the reasons why blogs need to be a necessary part of your online marketing.

Blogs are different from forums
A blog is not a forum. This is a bit of a pet peve of mine, because I constantly hear people calling forums “blogs” all the time. When you post on a forum, you are not necessarily a “blogger” either. Forums are discussion web sites for discussing topics with a group of people. Forums are better than email listserves because the discussions are searchable, and they persist much longer than discussions in an email list. The main difference between a blog and a forum is that the main content in a blogs is written by an individual, small group, or company, and in the case of a forum, content is written from visitors to the forum. Since posts to a blog generally start from the inside of the group, the content is always relevant to the subject matter of the blog web site. Forums, on the other hand, allow posting from generally anyone that signs up and participates. This makes forums a real challenge to moderate and maintain, because people can discuss anything they want to. When you are trying to create a massive community around a demographic, then you want a forum. When you want to market the expertise of your company or small group, then you want a blog.
Benefits of a Blog

• Increased sales
• You become known as an expert in your field
• They get more traffic from search engines
• They get traffic from next-generation social networking search engines (like technorati.com)
• News agencies are more likely to do a story on your business
• Real-life stories and tips warm up your web presence
• Educating customers on how to be a better customer helps your business run better
• You can update your blog on your own without your webmaster’s help
• Helps build communication between departments that are posting to the blog

Blogs are rewarded handsomely by search engines

Search engines recognize blogs in several ways. At the most basic level, they naturally crawl them like any other web site, indexing the content n them. In this way, a blog provides your company with a second web site, which can cross-link to your main web site. If your company has only one web site, this can help. But blog software tends to be very optimized for search engines out of the box. As long as you are entering meaningful articles that contain your keywords, text links, and categories, then you should get most of these benefits automatically. Blog software typically generates nice page titles, text link titles, and search engine safe URLs. All of these Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tricks make your blog get noticed by search engines.

Blogs are Free

You can create a blog in minutes online for free using sites like Blogger.com. This has eliminated all barriers to creating blogs online. As you can see, this blog you are reading is not a blog on Blogger.com I don’t choose to use Blogger because It is a hosted application, and I can’t extend it like I can WordPress. WordPress is also free, but you will need a host for your blog. Naturally, Delaware.Net hosts blogs, so you can contact us about that. But the point of this article is not to sell you blog hosting. The purpose is to educate you so that you can realize the benefits of blogging for your business.
Blog content density is better than your web site’s
Since blogs are typically written by real people sharing tips, they are full of content that search engines can consume. In contrast, a corporate site might have lots of forms and other necessary pages that tend to water-down the overall content value of your site. Having a bloated site makes it harder for your web pages to come up in search engines without creating specific content that exists just for search engines, like putting big paragraphs of keywords on your site. People tend to get turned off when they see that garbage content, and they don’t trust the sites that have it in them. Blogs don’t need to resort to this, as long as they have enough articles in them.

Web standards help blogs
There is a lot of talk about using web standards in the web design industry, and blog software today uses many of these standards. For example, blogs can be skinned with new graphics very easily because they use CSS heavily.
Sample uses for your company’s blog

* Create a how-to section – these tend to get attention from search engines
* As a replacement for a static news article on your company home page
* Warn customers of possible problems that they could have with products/services in your industry
* Use the blog as an ask the expert section of your web site
* Tell customers about new products and services
* Link to related articles and web content from your blog

Who SHOULD have a a blog

* Anyone that is a trusted advisor to their clients
* Anyone that has written articles or tips that are designed to educate their clients
* Anyone that gets privileged access to services or products
* A person that is in support, or who fixes problems for a living
* Employees that believe in (and are allowed to) be open about their methods
* Any professional that has extensive training and/or experience on a subject
* Companies that need a way to share their victories and tell stories about their projects
* A senior professional that is willing to share lessons that they have learned

Who SHOULD NOT have a blog

* Unenthusiastic employees
* A CEO that does not wish to share
* A worker that punches the clock and who doesn’t care about community
* Someone that has terrible grammar and can’t write
* Someone that sees blogging as a chore

Blogs represent a part of the next-generation of search engines because they are a part of the user-driven, user cataloged part of the Internet known commonly as Web 2.0

Folksonomy – its probably not a word that you have heard before, but this simple concept helps to unlock the theories of social networking, social bookmarking, and it also explains how blogs are changing the way people search the Internet for content. If a taxonomy is the formal process of categorizing and naming things, a folksonomy is the democratic categorizing and naming of Internet content that is done by people when they categorize photos in Flickr, and when they categorize their blog posts, and when the describe links that they post onto Digg.com, etc. This social behavior change in how people categorize and rank internet content is essentially building a NEW SEARCH ENGINE that adds a piece to the puzzle that Google really doesn’t provide.

Folksonomies help drive Web 2.0
Every time someone posts a video to YouTube, others can comment on it. They can rank it. They can help make it more popular because the number of times a video is watched is also tracked. Below is a great video that explains how this is affecting the way people use the Internet to get and publish data, and how that interaction is being harnessed to allow people to collaborate.

Blogs can also be modified to take advantage of social bookmarking. By implementing plugins that take advantage of social bookmarking sites like Digg.com, Del.icio.us, furl, reddit, and other sites, it is possible to spread the word about our new blog posts quickly, but you have to start the ball rolling on you own. This can make things a little more time consuming, but it is worth it.

The purpose of this article is to explain what is involved in showing real estate listings dynamically in your real estate web site, whether you are an agent or a real estate broker. I’ll explain how it works, what you will need, what is new in 2007, and what the costs are.

1. Understand Broker Reciprocity (BR)

Before you get real estate listings in your web site, you need to understand what broker reciprocity is. First off, Realtors don’t own the listings that are assigned to them – their broker does. This is why Realtors must work for a broker, and why brokers have to start off working as a Realtor for another Broker for a number of years. It is almost like an apprenticeship.

OK, so the broker owns the listings. The broker also has an account with the local MLS system, where they upload the listing data. This is usually done by an office manager or data entry person at the brokerage. In the past, these listings were all that a broker could pull from the area MLS system for their web site. So just a few years ago, you would visit a local broker’s web site and only see their listings. When the market picked-up, it became nearly impossible for brokers to keep a listing inventory populated – enter broker reciprocity.

Broker reciprocity is a database of listings where brokers agree to sell and post each other’s listings. If your broker isn’t participating in broker reciprocity, then you are missing out because your listings aren’t being shown on all of the other sites that are also participating. You might be saying “but what about Realtor.com?”, and my answer is “what about it?”. Realtor.com IS the National Association of Realtors, so they obviously have special access to data. Their site is also hard to use and randomized to keep listings fair to all participants. This provides a great opportunity for brokers to build their own web site and shine much brighter in local search engine search results.

So before you can put listings from the MLS into your web site, you should check with your broker to make sure they already have their broker reciprocity agreements setup.

2. Understand that Broker Reciprocity feeds are tied to a domain name

This throws a lot of people, and I am really not sure why. I’ll do my best to explain it simply. When you get a listing feed, it is tied to one domain name. That domain name either belongs to the broker, or the agent. It IS possible for multiple agents to have web sites using one feed if the domain is the same.

There are three types of web sites for broker reciprocity:

1. The brokerage web site
   Imagine for a moment that your broker’s domain name is www.somebrokerage.com. Imagine also that the broker has a licensed feed from the local MLS provider(s), which is tied to that domain name. The broker can now have a site for the brokerage, where all of the local MLS listings are shown, as long as the broker of record for each of those listings is also participating with broker reciprocity. So far, so good. Your agency has a fully-functional web site with MLS listings in it.
2. The shared agent site
   What about the agents that want their own site, but who don’t want to purchase their own feeds? It is possible, with a little domain name trickery. Assuming the brokerage has a fully-functioning site with BR listings in it, agents can have a site under what I call a sub-domain, which looks like this: http://joeagent.somebrokerage.com. Here you see that the domain name is technically still that of the brokerage, so the agent is still using the listing feed in an authorized way. By changing the “www” to the agent’s name, a separate site can be setup for that agent. There are MANY real estate web design companies now selling templates to real estate agencies that give individual agents this type of site, but this is how it is done. Most of these templates are not very impressive, but it is a way for an agent to get started quickly.
3. The individual agent site
   The real estate agents that I meet that are really serious about leveraging the web for marketing all use this approach. They buy their own domain name, and then they buy their OWN listing feed from the local MLS service. The cost for the feed alone is typically around $350 per year, which is nothing if you are a successful agent. Agents that balk at this fee that say that they are serious about search engine results and online marketing are kidding themselves. After the feed is purchased, the agents also needs to purchase web site design. If the design company (like Delaware.Net) has already integrated feeds into MANY web sites, then it should be easy to choose between a turn-key templated design, or one that is more custom-built.

Since real estate listing feeds are tied to your domain name, and they are essentially a legal agreement, you can use them with any web design firm. My advice is to go with a firm that has been around for over five years, and that has a lot of experience with hosting and managing MLS listings. I know of several small shops that try to accomplish managing their feeds on their own, with a lot of issues (some legal). Currently, Delaware.Net manages the importing of over 70,000 listings per day from only two area MLS services. This gives us coverage over Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey. Delaware is the only state in that list in which we have 100% coverage, but our MLS integration keeps growing.

Delaware.Net’s RealMLS Broker Reciprocity Application has the following features:

• All TrendMLS listings
• All Offutt listings (both services combined into one search)
• Virtual Tours
• Search Engine Optimization for Realtors
• Google Maps for both city searches and for directions to listings
• New Construction Management (models, features, plot plans, much more)
• Open houses module
• Farm & land search and listing management
• Commercial search and listing management
• Manually add any listing (including rentals) to your site’s search
• Featured Listings (choose which listings show up on your home page)
• Multiple offices
• Dynamic agent roster
• Realtor CRM system with lead tracking (optional)
• Company Intranet (optional)
• Much more!

Contact Greg Austin for more information at 888-432-7965