Blogging For SEO

It’s no big secret that adding a blog to your web site can really improve your rankings on the major search engines, that’s because of the frequently updated content that good blogs provide. Unfortunately, most business owners don’t realise the potential of blogging in their communication strategy, and whilst the main point of blogging is to add the personal touch to your marketing, it can also be used as a promotional medium or to provide advice, talk about any subject you like, or provide customer service to your customers.

The main reason that you should add a blog is the impact it has on the search engines, in particular Google. When Google finds an active blog it tends to crawl it more frequently and often gives it a high ranking in the search query responses. The secret to getting Google to crawl your blog more often is to provide frequent updates, and I’m talking at least 5 times a week.

It’s this freshness and frequency of updates that Google likes to see in a blog, add to that, great original content that adds a new dimension to existing stories on the net and you have a winning formula.

There is no doubt that once your blog has been crawled and indexed and you are updating often, you’ll achieve a high ranking in the search engines, higher in fact that some web sites and you can use this to great effect with other pages on your site. You can select keywords or phrases that you want to rank highly for, write your post and in most cases your story or blog will achieve a top 10 rank.

You still need to do the basics of SEO on your blog, optimise your titles and write your copy with those keywords that you want to rank highly for included, and post often. Original content is the king, not copied or borrowed from someone else but your own thoughts and ideas.

Don’t be nervous about blogging, it’s a lot of fun and it really does add a very effective marketing tool to your business.

If you’d like to know more about blogs and blogging for business then email me here at SEOBOSS and I’ll be very happy to provide you with all the information that you’ll need to get set up and blogging to your hearts content.

If you’d like to learn to blog, you can find additional information on the Business Blogging Program at Social Media College.

Using QR Codes For Small Business Marketing

I’ve had a number of business owners approach me this week about QR Codes and how they could use them in their business, so I thought I’d write this post to explain what they are and how you can use them.


Lets start by looking at what they are and what they do, QR stands for “Quick Response”, and they are the next generation of bar codes. They have been in Japan for awhile with the Japanese going absolutely crazy over them and they are just starting now to appear in this country.

So what do they do?

•They contain lots of information such as your web site address
•They can be read upside down and faster than a standard bar code
•You can get a QR reader for your phone or iPhone – as long as it can browse the web.
•They can be scanned from a computer screen,a newspaper or flyer, magazine, billboard or advertising signboard.

So how does it apply to small business, by generating a code, which is a simple process, you can apply the bar code to any advertising or promotional material that you are currently using, use it on your sign boards,your advertising including print, magazine or flyers.

People can then simply scan the code and their phone will take them directly to the web site that the code has embedded.The code is scanned by simply taking a photo of the code from your mobile phone and the phone then opens up a browser which takes you directly to the URL in the code.

This is a great tool if you want to specify a web site or promotional offer in your advertising etc, as the code will take your readers directly to the URL you have specified. You can create your QR code to send people to a web site URL, a telephone number,an SMS message or text message.

You can add these to your business cards or letterhead as well, which is a great promotional tool for your business and best of all, they are free.

You can download a QR reader from iTunes if you have an iPhone and some of the new Nokia phones have the reader as standard.

To generate the bar code, it is a really simple process as all you do is search on the web and you’ll find a code generator site, in fact to make it easy for you here’s the link to one I used.

Good luck and have fun with this, it’s a great promotional tool and you can add it anywhere.

If you’d like to have more information on this or are not technical enough to add it to your marketing, send me a comment or email at info@mikeandrewconsulting.com and I’ll help you out as always.

Free Web Site SEO Report - Valued At $49:95

Image via CrunchBase

Some interesting research that has come my way just recently, points out a pretty obvious statistic, and that is that 75% of people last year did not use Yellow Pages, so where did they go to research business? to the web of course, over 80% of consumers use the web to research purchase decisions, and that is why your web site needs to rank well on Google and other search engines including Yahoo and Bing.

When it comes to ranking in the top results on the search engines for any search term, you really need to have your act together with regard to how your web site is set up and optimised. Have you picked the right keywords?do you know the trends and search habits of your consumers? more importantly, how do you get a Top 10 rank for your web site in your chosen keyword.

It is important to realise that 68% of peolpe do not go past page one of the results for any given search term, so if you are not there, you lose.

It concerns me that most small business web sites are not set up or optimised for search engine rankings and you do miss out on ranking on the first page for your chosen sector or keyword. Is it easy to get a top 10 rank? no it's not, but it is possible with some research, tweaking and keyword research.

If you'd like an SEO check up on your current web site to make sure your site is performing to it's maximum potential and you'd like to make sure that you have your site optimised for search engines, then I'm happy to provide you with a Free web site SEO health check.

All you need to do is click on this link, Free SEO Health Check Report, and I'll send you a report on how well your site performs and what you can do to get that TOP 10 Rank.

All part of the service.

Social Media – Your Brand Reputation Depends on Doing It Right

As part of any social media strategy, it’s very important that the impact of social media on brand building and the impact blogs have on the purchasing decisions of consumers is considered and factored into your strategy.


A social media strategy is not just about Facebook and Twitter, which is what some so called “experts” will have you believe, it is and should always be treated as a Corporate Communications Strategy for your business.

Blogs, play a major role in influencing the purchasing decision amongst women in particular, and in a recent survey in the US, 85% of regular female blog readers said they were influenced to make a purchase as a result of a review or comment posted on a blog. So with that in mind, if you’re the company that gets it right, you have a good chance of getting the sale, but what happens if you are on the receiving end of a negative review or comment. How do you protect your brand and how should you respond?

Your customers can now read, listen, discuss and research their purchasing decisions and you need to work harder at customer service than ever before, if you are finding negative or damaging reviews about you,your brand or service then use this as a wake up call. The world of social media networks, business review sites and blogs has provided the disgruntled consumer with a voice.

Every employee in your company is now responsible for your brands reputation, and when you as a company, start to live up to your reputation, it becomes a lot easier to manage your brand effectively on line.

If you do find a negative review on any of the sites, resist the temptation to respond defensively and do not allow any of your staff to respond, you could put the Streisand effect in motion.

What can be used to deliver a negative can also be used to promote a positive, so use it wisely.

Remember it’s very hard to remove a negative comment or search engine result once it hits the web.

Mike Andrew owns and operates an Internet Marketing Consultancy on the Gold Coast in Queensland

Emails and Social Networks

With more than a third of Internet users now visiting social media networks each month, a lot of time is spent in gathering information, and now it appears that 40% of email users visit social media sites to gather information about products and recommendations from friends.  A recent study called “Emails Gone Viral” by Silverpop found that shared emails delivered an average increase of reach of 24.3%, and that figure is due to increase as sharing becomes more mainstream in the future.
Social media sites do have an impact on the increase of opens for emails as well with at least an additional 1% of opens for emails when shared on network sites.
So when does your email have it’s biggest impact on social media users? the majority of opens and clicks on shared emails is within the first few days and the last click about 7 days after posting, although activity  on an email was extended as long 44 days.

If you'd like to read the full post on this subject you'll find it here at Social Media College

Social Media As The New CV

For some time now I’ve been using my social media network as my on line CV, suggesting to prospective clients and others I work with “to check me out on line and Google me” if they’d like to know more about what I do and a number of times this has been very effective for me and has led to new clients and speaking engagements on using social media to drive new business .

By using this method I’ve found it really gives them a good understanding of what I do, and of course, when it comes to working with them on a web campaign or social media strategy they have a clear understanding of what can be achieved. I’ve effectively replaced the old style paper resume with a new generation concept, and once they do a search on me they see all the web sites I own, articles I’ve written and those that have been syndicated and can see my area of expertise far better than I could explain or show on paper.

There is however a down side to all of this, and that’s why your on line presence or social network needs to managed very carefully and you need to be really aware of what information you put on line on your Facebook or Myspace page, as those photos, words or comments can really come back and bite you big time!!

Job seekers today are being urged to manage their on line footprint very carefully, because a recent report by Viacom in the UK, found that 1 in 5 employers had researched social networking sites and found personal information about prospective employees, and 59% said it had influenced their recruitment decision.

Amongst the reasons given for not employing people they had researched on the net, were and I quote, “His MySpace website showed a negative side to him including excessive alcohol abuse and disrespect for his job’ and ‘We found that the candidate was on the local police wanted list.’

The report also found that we as users of social media sites are leaving significant footprints of personal information on the web, as we use blogging sites, social networking sites etc.
The spread of people posting personal information on the web is not limited to younger generations though, with 31% of all internet users leaving personal information, which is searchable by anyone, on the web. However, the biggest group of information providers are in the age group 18-24, with just under half of those questioned for this survey, posting personal information on Facebook, MySpace and Youtube.

The biggest concern to come out of this survey though, is that over 54% of the 18 to 24 year olds questioned during this research,responded that someone other than themselves, had posted photos, information and comments about them without their approval.
So, with the rise of search engines such as Google and Yahoo, be aware that employers are never more than a click away from getting information about you the job seeker, and of course, the same is true for companies, as job seekers are able to research information about prospective employers, so this is really a two way street.

The upshot of all of this is that you really need to think very carefully about the information you put on social network sites and you need to protect your name or brand. Your on line reputation is so vitally important today that you can’t afford to neglect it.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this post, or even if you’ve experienced this problem yourself, so please leave me a comment.

Social Media Usage Grows In Australia in June

Image via CrunchBase

Facebook had the most increase out of all the sites, with Twitter benefiting from it’s mainstream popularity.

But here we go, I’ve written a lot about the impact social media usage is having around the world and having spent the first part of August attending the Inman technology conference in San Francisco, where social media was a dominant theme, I thought I’d take a look at what is happening in the Australian market.

Facebook led the sector with over 6 million visitors, growing 95% from last year.

What’s more, social networking use is quite high across the web, composing almost 90% of users that populated Australia’s top Internet properties for the month.

Other interesting facts are as follows:

Nearly nine million Australians visited a social network in June, making it among the more popular content categories on-line.

Another idea is to attend one of my forth coming workshops on social media.

So which sites were the most popular?

Social media is now an essential part of peoples’ daily on-line routine, providing a level of engagement and reach that far exceeds most other content categories, so understanding how to leverage this audience successfully is both a challenge and significant opportunity for most small business owners.

It’s amazing how quickly you can get out of the discipline of writing blog posts, and having just returned from the US and not having written any articles for awhile, it’s really taken me a little time to get back in the mode again.

As always, let me know if I can assist you or answer any questions you may have with regard to Internet marketing and web site SEO.

Windows Live Profile chalked up close to two million visitors, but Twitter grew the most, rising to 800,000 visitors in June — up from 13,000 in June of last year.

If you are still mystified by social media, let me know and I’ll help shed some light on how you can successfully tap into this medium for your business.

In June, over 70% of Internet users visited a social network site in Australia, that transposes into an increase of 29%.

Google Real Estate vs realestate.com.au

Image via Wikipedia

I've been reading a lot lately about the recent addition of real estate to Google maps in Australia and a lot of discussion has been generated over its value to the real estate industry, not to mention the general public who use the internet to search for property listings and rentals.


So far, to my knowledge, of the main portals only myhome and homehound have uploaded listings to Google, although I’m sure that realestate.com.au and domain.com.au internally have been in discussions about the merits of uploading all their listings to Google.


Google will have a full time job controlling the quality of listings available, and making sure that old, outdated or sold stock is removed, just look at the issues that myhome.com.au faced when it first launched in the market with trying to maintain quality with its listings. Keeping the listings current and fresh will only be part of the problem for Google, removing sold properties and watching out for the lead generators, that is 3rd party players who will list a property and then sell the lead on to the agent.


During a presentation to one of the major franchises on Tuesday night I was asked my opinion on this very subject and in follow up discussions with a number of people in the industry, this is it seems, more about the potential changing of the guard than anything else.


There is a feeling in the real estate community that Google may just break the monopoly of realestate.com.au.


Well, I thought I’d provide you with a link to an article that Simon Baker, ex CEO of realestate.com.au has written on his blog about this very subject, will it work for Google and what, if any impact will it have on realestate.com.au in the future.


To read the article click here

.Mobile Phones Beat PC’s for Young Women

Back in December of last year I wrote a post on the future of the Internet in 2020, and in that post one of the predictions was that mobile devices would be the primary connection tool to the Internet and social media for most people. Well I thought I’d revisit the progress of that statement and look at if the mobile device is in fact having any impact on searching trends.
Some new research from a company in the US SRG, has found the mobile phone is displacing the PC among US women in terms of usage – especially in the 12-24 age group, the survey has found that young women spend twice as much time with their cell phones as women over age 40.

The survey also revealed that more than 80% of US women now use a wireless device and 17% use a smartphone, such as an iPhone, BlackBerry or models from HTC, Samsung, LG or similar. Among those in the 12-24 and 25-39 age groups, smartphone ownership is now 23%. In contrast 11% of women ages 40+ own a smartphone.
When asked about the top benefits of owning a smartphone, the top answers among women were convenience, the ability to send texts and email, and access to social media online.
When asked what technology had the most impact on their life in the past two years, women overall picked the internet, followed by the PC/computer, and cell/wireless in a distant third spot. This changed amongst young women, where a wireless device took the #1 spot:

So how does that impact on how they use social media?

The study found that more mobile usage and smartphone ownership is enabling women to bypass the traditional PC to upload their pictures to social media sites:
Nearly 74% of 12-24 year-olds say they have taken a photo with their cell phone in the past month.

Young women are twice as likely have used the internet browser on their cell phone in the past month.

22% of 12-24 year-olds used their mobile device to access Facebook, MySpace or Twitter in the past month, making them four times as likely as older women to have accessed social media such as a Facebook profile or MySpace page on their mobile phone.
From that research and the upward trend of smart phone usage, particularly amongst women, who are the bigger users of social media, you don’t need to be Einstein to work out that the smart phone will be the primary connection tool for the Internet and social media online well before 2020.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this, so please leave me a comment on this post.

What Can I Share? Not ‘What Can I Get’ Selling

As many of you will know, I’ve done a some work in the past with Grant Thorpe, business coach, professional speaker and mentor, and he is always an inspiration when talking or working with him, so I thought that I would share with you some of his words of wisdom.

As I would like to expand this blog by including articles from other authors, I’ve decided to kick this series off with an article from Grant, so I hope you enjoy this and that you get some ideas and motivation from this.

So please read on and enjoy!

“One of the most effective ways to grow your business is to have your existing clients refer new business to you. After all, they are already using your services and continue to do so because they are satisfied in all respects.

People do not have a natural mind set to look for opportunities to refer our ’service providers’ to colleagues, friends or family. The focus is often on what am I getting not what I can share.
By referring a service provider to someone within your sphere of influence you are achieving three key things.

• You are giving your friend or colleague a chance to use a service or product they may not have been aware of if you had not brought it to their attention - a gift to them!

• You are supporting someone who is currently doing business with you (your service provider) and feeding them additional business.

• And you are fostering a reciprocal arrangement which will start to lead to mutual referrals between two parties that already understand each others businesses. A chance for you to get some business back!

Referrals work in such a simple way but it requires that you first train everyone around you to refer, remember it is not a natural state for them to think this way. This can be done in a couple ways, by referring to them first and by association they will start to see the rewards from this practice. Give and you shall receive!

And secondly by constantly asking all those around you if they know anyone who is thinking of ‘needing your service’ in the near future? A key point here is you are not hounding the person you know to do business with you, you are asking them to refer you to anyone they know who is thinking of needing you in the near future.

Once you get a referral it is very powerful, the new client comes to you with ‘advocacy’ the blessing of your mutual contact, and in many instances will not even bother to get your competition in the door for a comparison. The business is yours!
We have a natural filter in place that stops us seeing this ‘potential business’ which is right in front of us every day.So we need to first train ourselves, then all around us, to open up this filter and to start looking for potential clients through the people we already know and are already doing business with.

To ensure that you start thinking this way, the first step is to make it a new personal minimum standard to simply ask every person you are in contact with if they know anyone who could use your service in the near future. That’s everyone, even the person at the grocery store checkout, or your lawyer, or your mother! Leave no one out of the equation. Everyday we walk over ‘Fields of Diamonds’ and don’t see these opportunities because we are so busy working to create business, when if we just asked…….?

Read more about the results Grant Thorpe can achieve for you on his website at http://www.grantthorpe.com/

On Line Reputation Management

On Line Reputation Management, four words that you as a business owner should be very very aware of, why? because these four words can ruin your reputation and can directly influence whether a consumer does business with you or your company.

I’ll share a story with you about a friend of mine who has recently decided to upgrade their current home by building their own, and over the weekend ,visited a number of display homes of several well known national building companies. The sales people were very polite and helpful, the display homes beautifully displayed and as a result of this first experience, they were very excited about the prospect of building their own home.

When they got home, just to check out the credentials of both of these very well known builders, they typed into Google, “complaints about (I’ve removed the names for privacy reasons) company” and what was displayed was pages and pages of consumer complaints about the companies services, or should I say lack of service, once the contracts had been signed.

My friends have now decided not to use either of these companies because of the range of complaints against them.

One thing that stood out to me, was that neither of these builders had attempted to try and rectify or even respond to these complaints, yet this simple search has just lost them approx $500,000 in business, that was the cost of building the home.

Word of mouth has changed due to the influence of social media and where once a consumer who’d had a negative experience with a company, could only influence their circle of friends at a Sunday get together, today are able to publish their comments to hundreds of thousands of consumers via forum sites and blogs. So word of mouth brand building has changed forever, if you’re not aware of the impact of this then now’s the time to learn and quickly!

There are numerous forum sites active on the Internet, not just Google, that carry complaints from consumers about all sorts of businesses, in fact any company that has a transactional business, deals face to face with the public or advertises on the web is vulnerable.

When planning my last holiday, tripadvisor.com became my best friend, and I changed my airline or hotel choice after reading what other consumers had to say about complaints or comments about their experience with the companies.

It’s estimated that over 40% of consumers who see a negative search engine result, will not use that company, and I cannot imagine how much business has been lost to companies that feature on these forum sites, and more importantly, these businesses are probably not even aware they’re losing business on the web.

So it’s time for you to set up an On Line Reputation Management strategy for your business today, you need to Monitor, Manage and Repair.

Setting up Google alerts is a great start, include keywords that you want to monitor, and once a day Google will send you an email giving you all the information if your name or business is mentioned on the web. Sites such as trackur.com,serph.com etc will all help you monitor your on line reputation.

My advice to you is start monitoring your brand on line today, you just never know who might be searching you or your business right now.
If you would like more information on how to protect your brand on line, please let me know via this blog and I’ll be happy to assist you in setting up an effective strategy to monitor your on line reputation.

Twitters Got Worms!!

Back in January I wrote about hackers striking at Twitter and adding a few nasty little comments to Britney Spears and Barack Obama’s Twitter pages, well the hackers have done it again, with 2 worms being let loose over Easter.

The first spam worm from a web site called Stalkdaily, infected Twitter profiles and forced Twitter accounts to send updates towards the StalkDaily web site, this was then followed up by a second worm called mikeyy. This worm, posts unwanted messages on your update page and appears to be more of nuisance than a threat.

If by some chance you are a victim of this worm, you can visit this link to get it removed.

The best way to avoid these worms is to use the following 3rd party applications,Tweetdeck and Seesmic .

Good luck and watch out for mikeyy!!

The Growth Of Social Media Sites Continues

It seems there is no holding back the growth that social media sites are achieving with on line consumers month after month, and with new research published over the last few days, any company that does not seriously consider integrating a social media strategy into their marketing and communications plan really needs to rethink and refocus.

Just looking at Twitter, the latest Nielsen Online figures indicate a massive growth of 1,382% year over year in February 2009 with more than 7 million US unique browsers for the month, compare that to January when it achieved 4.5 million US unique browsers, a growth factor of 50%, in one month.

Overall, US visits to social networking sites increased 4% in February vs the same month last year, with Myspace and Facebook still competing for a share of the market. Myspace winning the overall battle according to Hitwise, with Facebook the big winner with a growth of 149% over February 2008. Facebook also achieved good solid growth from the 35+ market, which grew 23% in February, whilst Myspace's grip on the older demographics is starting to slip.

The social media revolution is also affecting the way the average internet consumer uses the medium, with the use of the internet for on line entertainment decreasing by 29%, being replaced by on line communication sites.

So if all of this wasn't enough to get you thinking about taking social media seriously, couple it with the on line consumers attitude to business and social media.

In a March 2009 Netpop Research study, 93% of social media users say companies should have a social media presence,whilst 85% believe companies should not only be present, but should actively interact with consumers via social media sites. 56% of social media users feel a stronger connection and better served by those companies when they interact in social media environment. So, there you have it.

In my travels within the real estate industry, I still have business owners tell me they have banned staff from using Facebook and Myspace in company time, well my argument against this policy, is to employ your staff to work on your company profile as a trade off, so if they spend 4 hours a day on Facebook, get them to spend 50% of the time on building your business profile and updating the site, after all the fastest growing demographic using Facebook is 35+, right in the middle of the real estate buying public.

As a start to creating your social media strategy, you can read my earlier posts here and here, these posts will help you enter the world of social media and show you how you can start to build a strategy for your business that will help you engage your customers more effectively and create the social media handshake.
Good luck and let me know of I can assist you in any way, to make this an easier journey for you.

Here is a copy of the latest Hitwise results for your information:

Social Media - Defining Your Social Media Strategy

Hi everyone, I thought you might enjoy my podcast: Mike Andrews Real Estate Technology Podcast

- - Mike

A Social Media Strategy - Where To Start

During my seminar presentations I probably sell the concept of a social media strategy like a salesman, get you on a high and all excited about the potential it brings to you and then leave you on your own to do it. That's the impression I'm getting lately, the more i do of the seminar presentations the less time i get to actually spend time with agents in their offices advising on where to start, so I've decided to post about the steps to take to get you on the road.

If you are wanting to start your blog or social media strategy, first thing to do before you set up, is listen.

Listen to conversations on blogs that are of interest to you and your business or the area you want to enter into.

Search for conversations from like minded blog writers and a good place to start is to sign up for Google alerts, create the alert on the subject you want to "listen" too, for example, if you want to follow real estate blogs, then create the alert on Google for "RealEstateBlogs", sure your email inbox will fill up with blog posts in no time, but this is a great place start and to see what topic is being written about and who is doing the talking.

Follow the conversations and take note of the way the writer structures the information, more importantly, take note of the content and whether it provides you with really good information or advice that you find useful. Once you have decided what you like, then start to engage.
Do this by commenting on blog posts you like, giving a blog writer feedback joins you in the conversation that blog writer is having with his or her readers.

Join Twitter and Facebook and any other social media site you'd like to participate in and listen.
Now, once you have all the research and are aware of how the conversations take place, is the time to get your hands dirty. It's time to create your own masterpiece and dive into the conversation.

Make sure your information is engaging, challenging and stimulating, continue to listen and join in conversations on other blogs, and you'll be on your way.
Next, I'll talk about designing your strategy and target market.

This post now available as a podcast here.

Social Media Marketing - What Not to Do!

As both a user and promoter I get to see the good and bad uses of social media. Recently I’ve started to get emails sent to me under the guise of a Facebook message. When opening the email there is a product sell for Viagra or some other medication.

This really annoys me and I instantly delete the email, the unfortunate part of this, is that one day, I will get a genuine message from someone on Facebook and I’ll instantly delete it, thinking it is a spammer at work.

That got me to doing some research and I’ve noticed a lot of new comers to social media blatantly promoting their product. On Twitter.com for example, you’ll see real estate agents using it to promote open homes or new listings without adding any content or information that will create a following.

The smart way to use the media is to provide the user with good quality content that compliments what you do as a business. Create followings based on your expertise not on your product.

I use Twitter only when I have something worthwhile to say or I have read an interesting article then I’ll share it with my followers, I Tweet on updates to my blog or podcast, but as these are information sources and are not selling anything they provide my followers with good quality content. I apply the same strategy to this blog, it only promotes content and technology relevant to real estate professionals and hopefully they find it a great resource, the numbers of readers and the comments I receive from these readers would indicate to me that they do and that’s why they keep coming back.

So if you are a new company using social media, put in place a good solid communication plan built on providing good quality content before you start to use it. Be smart about how you plan it and how you use it, don’t listen to the ever growing numbers of “Social Media” experts out there who will promote the use of social media as an advertising platform, it is a lot more than that and used strategically will repay your efforts in droves.

But please no more Viagra adds, I’m starting to get paranoid!!!

Follow Mike Andrew on Twitter at www.twitter.com/mikeandrewre

How Important is An Effective SEO Strategy to Your Business

Over the past few weeks I've spent a lot of time visiting real estate offices and conducting audits on their internet marketing efforts. The point of the exercise is seeing how vulnerable they are to competitors or where the weakness's are in their on line strategy, and there are a lot of them.

One area that comes up more often than any other is SEO, search engine optimisation, and how an office or franchise group can generate a better page ranking within their local region when searching on Google or Yahoo. I'm asked this question more often than any other and I thought I would share some interesting research and information with you on this subject.

Lets look at the US market first and then come back to how real estate agents approach this field in Australia, PCMS Consulting a SEO company in the US, has released a comprehensive study on the role of SEO as a marketing tool, within the top 50 US real estate companies.

It may come as no surpise to find that most surveyed felt that an effective SEO strategy was important to their on line presence, yet could not convince the decision makers within the companies to allocate traditional marketing funds to promote their web sites with new generation SEO optimisation services.

According to the report, real estate companies are overwhelmingly neglecting SEO optimisation and thus missing out on a considerable opportunity to boost their profits and thrive in todays economic conditions.

Most searchers use keywords to conduct a search. The most used real estate keyword is "real estate", not a brand name. Therefore, real estate companies of all sizes can effectively participate on line. As a result, even the most established companies need to optimize their websites to maintain their market position.

Now lets look at the Australian result, in August last year,NSW based SEO company First Rate, released a report on the performance of real estate offices and franchise groups in the country and the results were almost identical to the US result. FirstRate found that, individual real estate web sites are failing to compete in the search engines with the large portals, they lacked decent natural search engine rankings,did not partake in paid search engine marketing for the most popular real estate search terms and do not have good link popularity or page rank scores. As a result their web site traffic is suffering.

When you analyse the search trends on Google you'll see the the popularity of each keyword search in each state including the spike when the last interest rate decrease was announced.

There are lot of factors that you need to consider in optimising your web site, and these should include link building, this is often overlooked by businesses, but is now a vital element in gaining higher search engine rankings. High quality links need to be formed, to benefit the most from linking, and just as important is the creation of "Deep Linking", links that point to sub pages within your web site, search engines are likely to rank these pages higher when they have high quality external links pointing to them. Creating good organic search results should be part of your strategy along with using paid SEO.

So how much of this can you control yourself? Write great content, a lot of SEO falls within writing great content and building authoritative backlinks to that content within your web site.
Sites that are image heavy and text light,don't have headings and subheadings or sitemaps that search engines can't crawl won't fair well.

If you write frequent relevant content that incorporates keywords and phrases that searchers are looking for, your site will be found. This is where blogging and social media can help in the creation of good keyword rich copy and the building of backlinks to that content.

The other point to remember is that 99% of your competition don't know what their doing.
There's lot to understand about keyword rich copy, backlink and reciprocal link building and web site optimisation, so if I can help demystify this for you please ask, just send me a comment on the blog or email me from here mikeandrewonlinecoach@bigpond.com

Is 2009 the Year of Video? - Research Says Yes

Here we are 19 days into 2009, and there are lots of interesting news & blog reports about the growing usage of the net and what tools are becoming popular with on line users.

I've been looking at various trends with technology this year and I've mentioned Twitter and other social media tools that real estate agents can get on board with to communicate and share information with consumers searching on the web. One of the tools I've been pushing for awhile is video, and readers of this blog will know, as I've mentioned so many times in the past, I'm a big fan. Not just of property video tours, but video as a tool to provide market updates, create and build an agents profile, share information with other like minded people, training etc and the list goes on.

I'm predicting that 2009 will be the year that more and more of the real estate groups will integrate video into their marketing mix and we'll start to see more video tours on properties, and once main stream marketers start to utilise this medium more aggressively, that will open the flood gates.

A recent survey conducted by Permission TV revealed that over 400 senior marketers from advertising agencies & the media in the US will significantly increase implementation of their on line video initiatives in 2009.

The Key Findings of the survey were:

More than two-thirds of respondents (67 percent) identified online videoas a primary focus of their 2009 digitalmarketing campaigns, versus socialmedia campaigns (41 percent), search (34 percent) and podcasts/webcasts (32 percent).

In Q2 of 2009, more than half (52 percent) of respondents expect to be implementing or extending an online videoproject, whereas currently less than one-third (32 percent) are doing so.

Nearly 60 percent of respondents consider interactive video experiences to be the next evolution for online video. Also, 62 percent believe that non-linear, interactive storytelling will become the most effective medium for marketers. o Links to other videos is the most widely needed interactive capabilities for respondents, followed by graphic overlays, user comments and user-defined contents paths.

Respondents expect their 2009 digitalmarketing efforts (33 percent) to be least affected by budget cuts, followed by traditionalmarketing (24 percent), tradeshows (21 percent) and guerillamarketing (14 percent).

A majority of respondents (63 percent) are most likely to invest in a branded content/video destination next year. o Viral video (39 percent) and interactive experiences (38 percent) follow as the second and third priority, while only 22 percent plan to invest in simple syndication.

When asked how online video will enhance customer engagement, a vast majority(71 percent) stated it would help build brand awareness.

Driving lead generation was the second largest objective (47 percent), followed by enhancing loyalty/retention programs (44 percent) and converting customers (41 percent).

Here's a graph with the findings:

















Some additional Findings:

More than two thirds (64 percent) of respondents reported that strengthening relationships with existing customers and/or prospects is the primary goal of online video initiatives.
When focusing on respondents from the traditional and digital/interactive advertising agencies, more than 90 percent are overwhelmingly confidentin their ability to recommend online video initiatives to clients.

Digital/interactive agencies expressed more confidence in recommending online video to clients compared to traditional agencies; however, traditionalagencies claim more responsibility for driving online video initiatives than digital/interactive agencies.


Video in 2009, should be a high priority along with using social media in your marketing mix, but it won't be good enough to start a blog and then not target it correctly or post one piece of content and expect it to generate good quality leads, or make a home made video of very dodgy quality and then expect that to be viewed by the masses. No, all that will happen is you'll end up on a blog like this one on what not to do.

Social media including any public communication tool like video, needs a comprehensive strategy attached to it, so that your agency or business can really capitalise on it's strengths.

Understand the target market you are aiming at, be aware of the way the consumer uses social media and play to it's strengths, be very aggressive in syndication of your social media communications or projects and make it part of your broader marketing initiatives.

Social media will not be for everyone and it does take time to work at it, if you are not sure about how to put this strategy together or are not aware of what social media you can use in your business, then contact me. I'll help you put together a comprehensive communication plan that encompasses all the tools on the web, to drive leads and open up new doors for you and your business.

Source: Permission TV Survey December 2008

US Airways Crash Appears on Social Media

Remember my post back in November about the impact of social media in the Mumbai terror attacks?, Social Media - Leads the Way on Mumbai Terror Social media again proves popular in the distribution of news and information to the general public.

This time the The Coast Guard and National Transportation Safety Board has posted a video of the US Airways Airbus flight the crashed landed into the Hudson River. The Board has used social media platforms for awhile now to provide a distribution link for the viewing of major incidents such as this one.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that social media, as a distribution medium has grown in popularity in the past couple of years, given its speed and ease of use and its ability to syndicate and distribute information via RSS feeds etc to great numbers of people.

It goes to show that if you are not using this medium as part of your distribution strategy, wether it be for your brand or product or information, that you should seriously consider integrating it into your communciation strategy for your business and On Line communication strategy. If you are not sure on how to do this then contact me, and I’ll assist you in the set up of the strategy for your business.

Here’s the video of the plane crash, the aircraft comes into view approximately 2 mins into the video:

Tracking Your On Line Reputation & Social Mentions

Back in October I wrote how to set up Google alerts to monitor you and your brand on line,heres a reminder of that post, On Line Reputation Management - How To Set Up Google Alerts For Your Business , and looking at the growth of both consumer ratings sites and social media sites in Australia it seemed a good idea to revisit this.

Setting up Google alerts to monitor your brand will give you lots of valuable information on what and how your brand is being used on line. I have an alert set up for this blog and of course use lots of social media sites to help me promote the blog, so I like to know where and when I’m mentioned. I get about five mentions a week across the web on who uses my name and links to me, and thankfully to date, it has all been positive, but to me having a monitoring strategy in place is now so important to any business owner not just real estate. Well you can now add a new site to help you monitor your on line brand it’s called social mention and here’s the link for you to do some research. http://socialmention.com/

Social Mention is a search engine that scans user generated content such as blogs,bookmarking sites and comments. You can search on all social media sites by using keywords, phrases etc. I entered the search term for my blog, mike andrew’s real estate tips & technology and got a search rank of 35/100 and a result which indicates at least one mention every hour, I’ve been as high as a rank of 80/100 or 1 mention every 10 seconds, you can also set up RSS feeds for a particular search term and follow your mentions on line.

Below you’ll see the search result for mike andrew’s real estate tips & technology.
























Mike Andrew Real Estate Search Result

My recomendation is to set up your Google alerts and then add social mention, this will then be able to track your blog,bookmarking and comments etc on the web.
As always let me know if you need futher information on this.

Twitter.com - What's It All About

Just got back from Adelaide yesterday and over the course of the week, I’ve been chatting and presenting to lots of real estate principals and sales people and I talk about social media and other tools they can use to communicate and create cut through in a very cluttered market. Well they looked at me like I was a real live alien in their midst when I mentioned Twitter.

I’ve been using Twitter for awhile now and have posted about it a number of times including this post Hackers Strike at Twitter.com and Barrack Obama , I use it as an instant communication tool to let my followers know what I’m doing, reading, listening to etc as well as promoting my blog,podcasts and video updates. I’ve started to pick up a nice following, as well as following a number of like minded people and their travels and interests on the net.

I can’t get out of my head the image of me standing there and talking about Tweets and Twitter and trying to explain to them what the concept is, well I’m hoping it might just get a little easier from now on, given the growth that Twitter has gone through in 2008. Mashable has reported that Twitter.com has grown 752% in the last 12 months, that’s massive growth in the popularity of the service. Twitter had around 500,000 unique browers at the start of 2008 and finished the year in December with 4.43 Million Unique browsers.

So for those that don’t know what Twitter is, here’s a quick snapshot, and of course the best way to find out about the site is to sign up and follow me:

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, or email, or through applications such as Tweetie, Twinkle, Twitterfox, Twitteriffic, feedalizr, and Facebook. SMS available only in the US,Canada,India and the UK at this stage. So there you have it.

This still leaves Twitter behind the giants Facebook and Myspace, although interestingly enough , Neilson Online have reported that Facebook just finished the year ahead of it’s rival Myspace in the US, more on those stats in a later post.

So after this post, when I’m back in Adelaide next week, I’m hoping that I won’t come across as the Klaatu of real estate. If you’re interested in following me on Twitter here is the link: http://twitter.com/mikeandrewre

New Iphone Application Makes It Easy to Find Out How Lethal Your City or Suburb Is

Ever wondered when visiting a new city how safe you were, or when you’re looking for your dream home and find one in what looks like a great suburb, but you don’t know how safe that suburb really is? If this is you, then here’s an Iphone application that is just made for you।

Lethal is a new Iphone & Ipod touch application available through Itunes। The application draws on information in various data bases which has been compiled from government and academic sources. The app uses a lethal index system which tells the user how dangerous that area is. There’s a “Wildlife” index, a “Crime” index as well as “Disease” and “Disaster” indexs.

This application is ideal if you want to know what strange animals, or “beasties” might be lurking near you when you go out walking or if you want to check out how safe you are in your current suburb, this little beauty will give you the score। If you are travelling or sightseeing and start wondering how safe you are, this unit uses GPS to find you and then let you know how safe you are in your current location.

Unfortunately, this application will only work in the US at the moment, but if you are planning a trip to the states, this would be an absolute must have before you leave

Just imagine the impact this would have if launched in Australia on property searches or suburb choice।

The application is available at a small cost from Itunes and I’ve included a screen shot for you below: