Author Archive

I caught up with Todd Carpenter in Miami at Real Estate barcamp this week.

This is a brain teaser for the SEO geeks. Most SEO decisions require a trade-off and this one has me in analysis paralysis so I thought I’d ask a few friends for their advice. The question is this; is Zillow’s Blog more useful to Zillow on its own domain or on the zillow.com domain? Here is the background … www.zillowblog.com is Zillow’s corporate blog. According to Yahoo! Site Explorer, the blog has almost 2 million inbound links. Yes, 2 million – and remarkably, this is … Read More »

Here’s a humorous look at blogging and copyright. Swallow your coffee first and then click through to this blog post by Faye Hendry. Faye’s blog tells you repeatedly that she’s a christian but that fact only adds to the irony of the image Mike Mueller uploaded in the place of the one she stole from his blog. Mike’s revenge is also posted here in case Faye gets copyright religion. Mike recounted the story on his blog and followed up with some wise advice for professionals in a tongue-in-cheek-titled … Read More »

We have a great view from our offices in downtown Seattle. This Saturday I set up my digital camera to take a series of time lapse photographs to record a sunset before the grey clouds return for the winter. This video is the very rough result of my first experiment with time lapse photography: As you can see, I totally overdid it on the the contrast and saturation. And the video needs music or a voice-over but you get the idea. The sunset view over … Read More »

Syndicating listings to 3rd party websites should be part of your SEO (search engine optimization) strategy. It’s a simple formula; you allow your listings to be published on other websites (comparison of who sends real estate listings to what portals) in exchange for a link back to your site. Link building, as the SEOs call it, is by far the most effective way to get good content to show up on Google’s first page and listings are a broker’s best option for link building. You … Read More »

This morning, I was fortunate to meet Gary Vaynerchuk, star of WineLibraryTV (and, interestingly, a top-20-to-30-most-followed-person-on-twitter.) Gary is a web video rock-star and his insights on personal branding and Web 2.0 marketing opportunities are seemingly endless. This video is just 3 minutes long; you can imagine how many tips he packed into the hour he spent with us. Gary publishes WineLibraryTV, Monday to Friday, to an audience of more than 80,000 people and he’s rather convincing when he says that you could do it too! … Read More »

Here’s some more great advice by the SEO-guru’s at SEOmoz. If you are considering adding a blog to your website, watch this short video to avoid making some common SEO mistakes. Note: the audio on this video is not so good but it gets better. SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-Blogging for Higher Rankings from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

A picture may be worth a thousand words to you and I but an image is meaningless to search engines until you describe it to them. In this simple video, Matt Cutts from google explains how to use the alt tag to ensure that search engines index your image content. If you’re trying to lift up your blog in the search engine rankings but find you’re competing for popular keywords, images could be useful content to help your site stand out as being fresh and … Read More »

I’m about to jump on a plane for Vegas and the NAR conference. This is my first visit to Sin City (yes, ever!) but it’s unfortunately also going to be a quick one – home tomorrow – things are busy (especially without Drew around.) Before I leave though, I wanted to remind all the geeks at NAR to come and Meet the Bloggers at booth #3444 throughout the day today and tomorrow. Damon Pace and Mike Price have put together a great line-up of blogerati … Read More »