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…

Note: 50% discount time period on CMS 2.0 has now expired - Please do not use this post as a pricing guide for CMS 2.0 upgrades - instead visit the work orders forum to request an estimate.

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…

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…

Many of you read my post last night regarding Real Estate Webmasters all of a sudden not ranking for our own name in Google (Well several pages down) - Naturally I assumed there must be something going on - a penalty perhaps? Well we are not sure as tonight everything appears to be back to normal so it could have just been a google glitch. However when it happened I immediately went into SEO detective mode and started a full audit on both our outbound and inbound linking activities (Always a good place to start looking if you suspect a Google penalty) - In doing so, I realized that there are a few areas that could really use some tightening up if we want to be able to claim that we are in complete compliance with Google's terms of service.

Where to start?…

This evening a user posted in the forums that they were looking for Real Estate Webmasters by Googling our name, and it did not show up in the first few pages (for our own name) – huh? I received several PM's about it as well.

Now of course I go and check for myself, and sure enough – the forums and blogs seem to be coming up fine for queries, but for searches that would normally return the main page of our site, nothing seems to be showing up. Of course my first reaction is one of shock – this can't be right, must be a mistake (every webmaster thinks they are squeaky clean right? :))

But seriously – as someone who has been around SEO for as long as I have, I know that this warrants investigation – I mean sure it would be nice if there was some mistake –…