Morgan Carey's Blog: All Categories

Wanted to annouce a new features that we just added to the "search" function of the beta lead manager - Previously the search could be used to query first name, last name, email and phone. In this newest patch you can now "refine" your search (Somewhat like your REW IDX) and select "just" users from particular groups and also further refine it by "lead heat" and "lead status (For admins and super admins)

As soon as this puppy is skinned, we will be releasing it to the beta and updating those users that are currently working with V 2.0 platform (There is no charge for these kinds of system wide upgrades in case you were wondering)

A sneak peak (Needs some designer love) can be seen below

Or maybe just a little bit of fun :)

My buddy Eric Bramlett who has been really firing it up doing his own SEO lately (He is first and foremost a Realtor - or at least he used to be heh) came up with an idea for a fun contest - the "Greatest Real Estate Agent In The World Contest" (He gets a link because it was his idea - this is NOT my idea and I take no responsibility for the great relationships you may build or the learning you may experience. Also as with any attempts at experimenting with your site to try to rank it - please be sure you are familiar and adhere to Google's Guidelines For Webmasters.

Anyways - what this is, is a good old fashioned SEO contest - We pick a phrase that is not very competitive (So everyone can compete on a reletively…

One of the first things you will want to do when starting to use version 2.0 REW lead management is create groups.

What are groups?

Groups are ways to organize your leads into specific types of leads such as "registered IDX users" or "relocating next year". Groups are tied directly to the drip email system, so creating and organizing your groups is the first step in creating a successful drip email campaign, which is the key to success in processing online leads.

The new REW Leads system allows you to create and manage unlimited amounts of groups, and assign any particular lead to as many groups as you like or you feel they fit into.

Creating a group

Ironically as important as groups are to laying the groundwork for your lead management, they are…

On Wednesday, February 6th 2008 we will be launching our new backend for customer use as a beta.

We are very excited about the new funtionality that this system provides to our customers and with this upgrade this should make 2008 the best year ever for client closings from their REW websites.

This very affordable upgrade represents a complete overhaul of our backend including new CMS (With new wysiwyg editor) new featured listings management, and most importantly new lead management. Some of the more significant changes I will list below:

REW CMS: (Content management system) - Our system still includes all of the great features our customers are used to such as adding unlimited pages and sub pages. Creating custom titles, meta descriptions, meta…

As any REW community member knows, a few days ago we took a hit in our Google rankings. I am still working on getting these issues figured out and it will likely be a timely process as Matt Cutts and the rest of great folks of Google have their hands full as you can well imagine with webmasters contacting them with "My site has dropped in the rankings, can you look into it" type inquiries.

I am of course concerned with getting my rankings back up to their former glory. But it has actually been really nice having a chance to turn some of my focus inward towards the REW site as a whole trying to figure this whole mess out and while I'm in here - I might as well make even more improvements to our great community right?

Speaking of our great community and…

On Monday January 28th after much consideration and a lengthy discussion with a focus group comprised of both staff and clients I made a decision to cancel our contextual linking program.

So why cancel contextual linking?

It all started on Thursday when it was reported that our domain www.realestatewebmasters.com was no longer in the top spot for our name (an ominous sign to be sure). Immediately I went into SEO detective mode, completing a full audit of every inch of REW, with a focus on linking activities (both inbound and outbound). You can read all about this audit here.

I must admit – I am still surprised by the penalty as quite honestly, I was not intentionally violating any of Google’s TOS – however, what I determined through my audit and…

Well, it was a really long weekend - anyone following the "Not ranking for Real Estate Webmasters" knows what I am talking about. For those of you that don't - It appears that Real Estate Webmasters has been assessed a Google penalty (Dropping us a couple of pages down the SERPS) after a very long investigation and audit, and speaking to several notable search engine personalities including Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz.org (Rand you are a great friend, thank you) the general concensus is that we likely got caught up in the "paid links" net due to the fact that we do in fact sell featured listings in our directory, and technically we did provide a search engine friendly link - so although it was not our intention to "sell links" (Free listings get the exact same…

Just checking out the features and creating a profile on a new social networking site Gooruze.com

For the most part it's focus seems to be online marketing, but as Real Estate "Webmasters" online marketing is huge part of what we are looking to improve upon, so might be cool.

I will update this post as I find out more however for now, I need to post this RealEstateWebmasters.gooruze.com to my blog in order to verify my RSS feed. We know one thing right away, they do have verification measures in place for their RSS feeds - but one has to wonder, what harm could someone possibly do by placing an RSS feed that was not theirs in a profile on a social networking website? Hmmmm

Incidentally, it is a little bare right now, but you can check out my profile at…