My name is Phillip R***** and I am representing interested parties looking to unload some top-level real estate .com domains. Here are some examples of these domains available:

austintexasrealestateagent.com
desmoineshomerealestate.com
desmoinesrealestateagent.com
desmoinesrealestateagents.com
idahohomerealestate.com
newyorkcityrealestateagent.com
newyorkcityrealestateagents.com
newyorkhomerealestate.com
arkansasHomerealestate.com
batonrougelarealestateagent.com
berkeleyrealestateagent.com
bethesdarealestateagent.com
brooklynrealestateagents.com
coconutgroverealestateagent.com
costamesarealestateagents.com

These domains, because of their keyword rich nature, will surely send an optimized website to the top of Google, Yahoo, and Bing, which can save you a tremendous amount of time and money in the optimization process.

Should you or a client be interested in purchasing or leasing any of these domains – or would like to inquire about additional domains we have available to us, please contact me at 206.xxx.xxxx via email at his.name@gmail.com.

Wow, that’s just completely wrong! The fact is that your web address does not affect your Google ranking at all. Google Doesn’t really care if your URL is bostonlogic.com or Google.com or anything else. Google cares about the content on your site, how new it is, and how many other people think it’s great.

Now, a good URL can be helpful. If you were doing a search, would you click on a website with an unfamiliar name, or would you click on a website that has your search term in it? ex. if you were looking for Newport real estate, would you click on newportrealestate.com or realestateagentsRus.com?

So, there is some value in a good URL, but don’t get carried away. Having the right URL doesn’t vault you to the top of the search engine results pages.

One last note: A lot of folks think it’s just SO HARD to find a web address that’s not taken. They search sites like GKG.net for an available domain name in vain. Well, we help clients do this all the time. Most of the time, clients are just so frustrated that the names they come up with are taken. Well, in most markets, the marquis names are taken. You’re just going to have to get a little creative.

Don’t worry if you missed this LogicClassroom session, you can view the slides below at your convenience. Enjoy!

Our next LogicClassroom will be on 3/9/10. Learn how agents and brokers can create effective and engaging email marketing. Please email Katrina if you would like to attend.

Boston Logic is a fast growing company with clients throughout the country. Our culture has a fun, energetic feel, but we are intensely busy and maintain a professional, dedicated working environment. Our employees embody an entrepreneurial, independent, passionate nature and a work hard/play hard attitude. The desire to be a part of the development and success of a growing company is a requirement for this position.

OVERVIEW:

The Search Engine Marketing Specialist will work with clients and Boston Logic staff to manage and develop online marketing initiatives for our clients. These campaigns leverage a mix of marketing and technology strategy and implementation. The Search Engine Marketing Specialist will be responsible for the planning and execution of campaigns involving Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click management, and email marketing campaign design, implementation, and tracking. You will be expected to produce results.

QUALIFICATIONS:

Preferred skill set and experience:
* Hands on knowledge of search engine optimization best practices
* Demonstrated performance in achieving prominent search engine ranking for multiple websites
* Experience working and communicating directly with clients
* Results oriented online marketing experience and an understanding of analytics and performance tracking techniques
* Working knowledge of pay-per-click advertising systems including Adwords and Overture. Google Adwords Qualified is a plus!
* Understanding of search engine marketing strategy
* Experience with industry standard analytics packages and metrics
* Working knowledge of social media platforms and strategy
* Email marketing experience is a plus
* Strong writing skills are a requirement

You should have experience interacting with clients and effectively communicating with several parties to achieve results. You should have 2+ years of demonstrated success in an internet marketing role. Knowledge of search engine marketing, pay per click, email marketing, web analytics and market intelligence are must haves. The ideal candidate will not only have strong technical skills, but also demonstrate superior client interaction, communication, and time management capabilities. Experience in real estate is also helpful.

Interested candidates may submit their resume to: techjobs@bostonlogic.com

1) Click “Join”
2) Click “Invite People to Join” to the left
3) Invite all your friends.

Here were the results:

Day 1: 987 members.

Day 2: 2,191.
Day 3: 5,175
Day 4: 8,798
Day 5: 17,408
Day 6: 38,852
Day 7: 105,119
Day 8: 202,262
Day 9: 508,726 members!

It looks like by the end of today they’ll have their 1 million fans. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=info&ref=mf&gid=283600686512

Now, this is a group that supports same sex marriage. They produces a huge amount of awareness in just a week and a half. You might have heard about another group, supporting the fight against breast cancer, who encouraged women to post the color of their bra on a particular day. Millions of women were simply posting a color as their status update. Black. White. Blue. The results were incredible.

The other factor here that should not be overlooked is Cause Marketing. Lots of folks are passionate about same sex marriage. Millions of us would love to see a way to cure or prevent beast cancer. If you’re in a for profit enterprise, there are ways to get the same zeal behind your brand. Here are a few ideas:

1. Work with an organization. Think of how you can be carried along with the cause. RE/MAX is doing some good work with Susan G. Komen for the Cure, just as an example.
2. Create something that people want to be a part of. It doesn’t have to be a cause. It could be a conversation group. Could be a place where bragging goes on. it could be a trend that people want to be a part of, just make sure your company is associated with whatever you create.
3. Make it a challenge. These folks said “I bet we can get 1 million fans in 10 days.” And people took this on as a challenge.

Final note: Look at those numbers above. They’re experiencing exponential growth. they started with 1000 people and grew by 2x or 3x every day. Just remember, they started with 1000. Now, I have a few hundred facebook friends and so do most of the folks I know. If this sounds impossible to you, think again.

Please join us for our next LogicClassroom session 2/9/10 on Search Engine Optimization 101. Please email Katrina to attend.

Lots of folks take the slow approach to real estate seo and seo in general and, well, this does work. In fact, it’s what we talk about most often on this blog. It’s no secret that with a well optimized site and by producing good, new, optimized content on a regular basis for months on end you will see better search engine placement and traffic. Some attention to strategy and detail is required, of course, but this is a pretty sure fire way to see good results over time.

But what about seeing superior results and sooner? What does that take? Clients ask all the time, how can I get to the top of the search engines without paying for every click?

Well, the answer is to make a splash. Provide something that everyone else does not. Give potential customers a reason to visit your site. Even better, give them a reason to talk about your site, to tell their friends about your site, to blog about your site and link to your site. In short, stand out from the crowd.

Now, the questions become:

1. How do you do this?
2. What effect with this have on my SEO campaign.

Well, I’m going to answer these questions in reverse order.

First, if you create something great, people will come and use/view it. Think about viral videos, Facebook, youtube, ebay, heck even google! If someone produces content or features and functionality that brings in the masses, there’s a lot to be gained from this. If you have the best information in town on your site, first time home buyers will tell eachother about your site. People will blog about it. They’ll tweet about it and include links on their facebook status update. They’ll do all sorts of promotion for you. You’ll get lots of inbound links and visitors and the leads will follow. But it has to really be something that sets you apart.

Now, to the tough question: How do you do this? How do you create something that gets noticed?

You have to either get very creative OR make a more significant investment in technology and functionality. Let’s look at these methods separately:

• Traffic through Creativity - People will consume awesome content. Great videos, good educational presentations, funny songs, well thought out lectures…we’ve all gotten an email to check out something cool, informative, even mind-blowing. You’ve probably even forwarded something like this on to a friend or family member. Put your energy into creating that and people will find you.
• Traffic from Innovation - Do you have the most innovative property search in your market? Is your website the most advanced? Does it have a design that puts it far above the crowd? If you’re hoping to take a $100/month site and make a splash, stop hoping, it just aint gonna happen. You’ll need to work with a skilled team of designers and technologists to produce something superior. Marquis examples of this are the guys at zillow and/or trulia. They made splashes 5 years ago and continue to ride the wave.

  But let me put this another way. If you have a $50,000 annual SEO budget, or even a $20,000 annual budget, consider setting aside a big piece of that budget to make a splash. Take $20k and build something that will be a huge leg up over the competition. Then, promote the heck out of it. This promotion will help drive and direct your content creation. People will take notice and they will come and use the tool you now own.

If this strikes home with you, if you’ve been looking for a way to have a coming out party, give us a call. We love doing these kinds of projects. Thanks.

Folks, I’m going to give you a simple formula to achieve more search engine traffic in just 100 days. The formula isn’t hard to write down. You will need to dedicate an hour or two each week in order to execute this plan.

You will also need to have a few things in order to follow these steps. They are:

1. A decent real estate website
2. A blog as part of your website ideally in the structure xyz.com/blog (if you have a boston logic website with a blog, you’re all set)
3. A site with a dynamic site map that updates when you publish a new blog post.
4. The pages of your site (not just the blog pages) should be somewhat optimized already. H1s, Title and description tags, sufficient paragraph text and a good internal linking structure all help.

Now, this is by no means all you can do before launching the following steps, but it should give you a nice starting point.

So, we’re going to increase your site traffic by producing good blog content. Each week you’re going to blog 2 or 3 times so that you are posting 10 times each month. We’re going to use the following post types:

• Listing posts - You take on a new listing. Someone in your office takes on a new listing. Or you simply go on a showing. Write a blog post about the home. Here’s an example listing post.
• Market reports - Write about a present market trend. Prices going up, down, or remaining the same, for example.
• Guest blogs - Have a friend or co-worker write a post for you.
• Answering a common question - every day, practically, you answer questions from buyers, sellers, and renters. If you do this by email, which you probably do all the time, you can anonymize and re-use the content. Others have the same questions and this content is fantastic blog fodder.
• Real Estate news - If there’s an auction announced, a big closing  in the market, a national news story pertaining to real estate, or anything newsworthy, write about it. State some facts and give your thoughts. Here’s some real estate news.

Step 1 - Create 10 to 20 categories in your blog. Give the categories the same names as your keywords. If you’re trying to figure out what keywords to use, search this blog some and you’ll find posts on how to do that.

Step 2 - Set a schedule, put the time into your calendar. Write a check list. Do whatever it takes to make sure you’re going to do the posts.

Here’s what this can look like:

1. Week 1
   1. Real Estate listing post
   2. Local Market report
   3. Answering a question
2. Week 2
   1. House listing post
   2. News item
3. Week 3
   1. Answer a seller’s question
   2. New Listing post
   3. Guest post
4. Week 4
   1. Home Listing post
   2. Answer a question
5. Week 5
   1. Real Estate Market report
   2. Realty News item
   3. listing post
6. Week 6
   1. Answer a home buying question
   2. new listing post
   3. Guest post

I think you get the gist…

When you create a post, make sure it is listed in every category that is even remotely applicable. Tag your posts too, using keywords in the posts that are close to or the same as your category names.

Step 3 - track your progress. Make sure you’re posting 2 - 3 times each week. In the first 100 days, you should post over 30 times. Yes, more than 30 posts. If you want to see an even greater impact on your ranking and traffic, post 3 or 4 times each week. In short, produce content regularly and post it properly.

You will see results.

I want to thank everyone who was able to attend. Don’t worry if you missed this LogicClassroom session, you can view the slides below at your convenience. Enjoy!

Our next LogicClassroom will be on 1/12/10. Learn how agents and brokers can leverage free social media to generate leads and a loyal client following. Please email Katrina if you would like to attend.

Month-over-month, a client of ours just saw a 22% increase in traffic to their site from search engines. Looking at their list of target terms, there wasn’t all that much improvement in placement. Of course, this is to be expected, SEO isn’t a game of ranking for just a handful of terms.

A popular business book came out a couple of years ago. It’s called the long tail. It’s principles apply to SEO in great ways. First let me give you some basics:

The concept of the long tail is pretty mind-blowing. We now live in a world of options. Volume is often the name of the game. We no longer live our lives in a 25 mile radius. We have access to so much.

For example, google returns millions of records for most of your searches. Content on blogs is being created every second. itunes offers millions of songs, just imagine trying to fit all of those on the racks of a music store. Just a few decades ago, you could only get 6 or 10 TV channels. Now, you can subscribe to hundreds!

Long Tail of SEO

The Long Tail principle tells us that many actions follow a graph like the one to the right. The numbers start high, but degrade rapidly at first, then much more slowly. Total user volume is calculated by taking the integral of the curve. sorry if I just scared you back to high school calculus.

Let me bring this back home. 75% of those millions of titles on itunes sell at least once a month. The top 20 or 50 get a lot of press, but Apple makes the vast majority of it’s revenue from the millions of other songs in its catalog.

SEO works the same way. If you think SEO is about ranking for a few terms, you’re dead wrong. If you think that users only type in a few terms to search for the property that you sell or rent, that’s false too.

Searchers type in all sorts of strings. For example, if you think they’re going to google for “Newport Real Estate” and only for that term, then you’ll miss out on everyone who searches for terms like “Newport real estate for sale,” “Newport vacation homes” and “newport houses.” Not to mention the folks who might be very specific and google for “newport real estate open houses” or “newport 2 bedroom house.”

The point is that you may think that there are 20 or 40 terms that will bring you traffic, when the reality is that strong traffic comes from leveraging hundred and thousands of terms. Lots of those terms may only bring you 1 or 2 visitors per year, but when you add them all up, you’ll see real, lasting traffic.

The book: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More

Our next Logic Classroom will be on 12/8/09. Learn how to turn your blog into a lead generation machine!

If you missed the class here’s the slide deck: