This March, I have been invited to teach Search Engine Optimization at the REMAX Convention 201 in Orlando Florida. I have mentioned in previous posts about having lots of REMAX and really enjoying getting together every year and reconnecting (and trading war stories-grin).

REMAX Convention 2010 - The Agenda

Actually, MY agenda will be including meeting up with Marnie Blanco (see my previous blog post about her). I am also looking forward to the keynote speech by mary matalin and James Carville as well. That ought to be a hoot! (Two presicential advisors - from opposite sides of the political spectrum...and they are married. Yikes!)

My biggest agenda item is going to be hanging out with as many REALTORS who have websites as I can and turn them into…

Sunday night, I was sitting at home, when a co-worker from our real estate office called me. For over a week, she had been feverishly working on getting paperwork and all of the other issues tied up to bring an 11 year old girl, Natasha from an orphanage in the Ukraine to America for an 18 day visit and eventually for a potential adoptive family here in North America.

I was touched by her efforts at trying to give a young person a new life here in the USA (or Canada for that matter...). I did not wait for permission, I simply bought a domain and put up the site. We agreed together that this site would belong to Natasha and that if we could raise awareness and possibly find adoptive families for even a few of the thousands of wonderful kids in the Ukraine…

Yesterday afternoon ComScore reported that there were over 10 Billion (yes that is a B) videos viewed in September alone. Here is one account of what that means that I hope you will find interesting.

In case you did not click on that link and read to the bottom, please do. These statistics are telling. YouTube is WELL ahead of Yahoo in terms of searches as well. And look right below that to the video of Coldwell Banker at SES 2009. Interesting at least to me

Google was #1 with 9.4 billion expanded search queries.
YouTube was #2 with 3.5 billion.
Yahoo! as #3 with 2.7 billion.
Bing was #4 with 1.2 billion.

Granted, much of it is teenagers viewing fun stuff. My kids came to me and told me to check out the Vitamin String Quartet doing Bohemian Rhapsody…

I find it interesting some of the changes that I have been observing lately in R,com. Up until now, they have shunned an SEO centric approach in favor of name recognition. Now it seems, they are playing the SEO game for real.

Those who know me well realize just how much I dislike REALTOR.com and those who portend to help REALTORS while not helping anyone but themselves. Anyway enough of that....

Here's what they are apparently starting to target:

Google this phrase:   Homes In (insert city here) Try Austin if it does not work in your neck of the woods. If you look at the page that ranks, you will see that it is far more SEO'd than a regular R,com page...

I'd be interested in folks' thoughts on this.

Eric

Good evening!

First off, thanks a BUNCH to the REW Crew for a great Summit!

I wanted to post the slides from my presentation at the REW Conference. After looking at them, I realize that they are just bullet points and leave some of the things that I said incomplete. As I get time in the next day or so, I will be writing about some of the techniques that we talked about at the conference on this blog.

Thanks again to everyone for making it a great event and to all who were able to make it.  My second visit to Nanaimo was the best yet... and it will not be my last.

Eric

First off, Thanks to Morgan and ALL of REW for a GREAT conference. I personally had a blast, connected with some great people and things could not have gone better.

These are just a few of the many wonderful photos that Gary Ashton from Nashville took. Great guy, Gary. You don't see him because he is behind the camera, but THANKS.

More great photos from Gary and Top Ten things we found out on the REW Conference 2009 will be coming up in my next post...stay tuned! ;-)

For the next 7 days, I will be on a schedule that will be wild. Instead of tweeting about it or putting everything onto Facebook, I have determined that my handy dandy REW Blog will be where I provide the updates on ALL of this trip!

So what's on the Agenda?

Item 1 is the Real Estate Webmasters conference. Then on to my 25th high school reunion from Calaveras High School. Then on to HomeGain Live Nation 2009 where I will be speaking next Monday.

OK. So you wanna be me? Maybe you don't want to spend the money, but want an all access pass? (grin) No worries! I will be editing this post and sharing photos. (YES, I brought my camera this time. MAJOR mistake last time.)

I have been up since 3;30am Eastern time and it is almost 5:40...next step is to get on…

This last week, one of the members of our blogging group, Anne Mayhugh, asked me one of those questions... the kind that keep nagging at you until you do something about it.

Here's her concern. She and partner David Hartlage are both highly experienced real estate investors and REALTORS in our office. Anne focus with her first blogging effort was for those who wanted to buy and hold. She is looking now to expand that to all areas of real estate investing here in Louisville.

One thing that she is still struggling with is that she finds noobie investors an incredible waste of time. (And there seems to be more and more of them every day. Anne can smell them a mile away. They are fresh off of this seminar or that. They haven't and won't buy anything. They…