Morgan Carey's Blog: Search Engine Optimization

I was talking with some friends the other day regarding a new Gated Community called Woodbury Junction in Orange County, New York and one of them mentioned that they "heard" (And I am only repeating what they "heard" I do not know if it is true or not) - that the sales manager of the Woodbury community was emailing real estate agents who were (well within their rights) reporting about this exciting new community, telling them that they are not allowed to write about the community on their websites because they are showing up on search engines for searches such as:

• Woodbury Junction
• Woodbury Junction, Orange County New York
• Woodbury Junction Community
• etc

IF this is true (And I am not saying that it is) - the sales person from… Read Full Post

This is the first installment in a series of posts I have promised in order to help REW Bloggers create the best blogs possible and hopefully win some really great prizes in the REW Blogs Contest.

The topic of this blog post is how to properly use the "Relevant Reading" (Formerly named "links" ) section of your REW Blog.

I renamed this section in an attempt to further educate members in terms of the purpose of this section and to help them understand that it is not just about sending yourself backlinks, the true purpose of this section is to provide your readers with access to other great external websites that cover complimentary materials to those being posted at your REW Blog.

Now the most important first step to using this section of REW… Read Full Post

Blogging brings real traffic.

Earlier today, we were having a discussion on the forum about using tags in your blog and it was stated by one of the members that we should care more about the SEO benefits of our blogs VS the actual benefit to our readers because this Realtor (And I quote) was "not convinced the general public is reading these things"

Now I already knew better and have been teaching bloggers and webmasters for years to always write and construct your content first and foremost for the benefit of the reader. Only after you have made sure that your writing is as good as it can be, go back and adjust where you can (Without sacrificing quality) and tune for SEO - This btw mainly means massaging your title's and headings a bit to make sure…

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This post is for those of you with multiple blogs

As many of us have found out, there are many great places to blog and increase our online exposure and solicit new business. Often times REW members will not only have an REW Blog here at Real Estate Webmasters, they will also have an Active Rain Blog and a blog on your personal or company website such as Jim Olenbush's Austin Real Estate Blog.

Now "hopefully" users are not posting duplicate content on each of these blogs as having unique content is a bonus from a search engine perspective, but also at each website you post, the readership will be slightly different.

Ok so I have 3 blogs and I want to make the most out of them by getting myself some link juice, but how can I link to my other blogs… Read Full Post

I would imaging that got everyones attention - It's not true, but it could happen and unless some changes are made, it may very well become a reality.

This will be a very long post, but if you would like to see Active Rain stay in Google's good graces like I would, I think it's important that you read this.

Active Rain is a social networking / blogging community that has opened it's doors and very graciously allowed it's users (Realtors and other professionals servicing the real estate industry such as myself) to post unmoderated user contributed content. Now I do realize there is a flagging system in place and there are in fact moderators who respond to flagged posts and profiles that may violate the terms of service of Active Rain, but where are the…

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Ok, so not everyone is a search engine expert - I need to accept that, and I do, I really do. I also cannot expect people to know what is not acceptable when publishing an REW Blog unless I spell it out for them so here it goes -

Unacceptable REW Blog linking practice #1: Irrelevant outbound linking

I come across this one particular situation quite a bit and it just flat out bothers me. What I am referring to is the practice of hyper linking keywords within a blog post to your websites that are not relevant (Or so loosely associated) to the phrase being hyper linked and more importantly the context of the article - THIS IS NOT GOOD SEO and quite frankly it makes your blog post look spammy, and provides your readers with a very negative user experience.
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Posted: 1 year ago, Comments: 5, Average Rating: Views: 1075

Ok, so I don't just do real estate - I actually have quite a lot of my own websites that I have owned for years and done affiliate marketing on. This provides me with a way to test search engine optimization techniques away from my client websites (None of my personally owned websites are hosted on (Or even hosted in the same state as) any of my REW clients so don't worry folks!

Anyways, I was looking at testing out the Clicksor "Publisher Webmaster Affiliate Program" - This is a program much like Google Adsense (A contextual ad service) which shows ads relevant to the content on the website. Their message states:
Clicksor offers webmasters the opportunity to earn more income by simply underlining a selection of clickable text (inline text links) or… Read Full Post

I have done some crazy things in my days as a web developer to test theories, or prove points, but I think this one will probably take the cake.

I have decided to try to test online traffic generation vs traditional real estate marketing in order to prove to my Realtor and friend how effective the internet can be as a sales tool. We have what some might call a small wager going - a bet if you will:

I think I can sell a house (Without any prior real estate sales experience or training) using internet marketing tactics faster than he can sell a house using his traditional methods of advertising.

And in order to make this thing happen, I am putting up my house

The Wager:
I am going to attempt to sell my house faster than my Realtor

The Terms:

…

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