With more and more people signing up to use twitter both as a place to post news but also a place to read news aggregaters such as this will become used more and more.

Because agents write their content and give it to us before it gets on the net, in effect, we are their editors.

Why is that good you ask?

Well you see, it’s all too easy to go off-topic when it comes to an open-access approach to web publishing. By off-topic, we mean posting information about things other than those things that people are searching for.  If it’s not in your content, search engines arent going to find you.

Because our job is to get our real estate agents’ websites to the first page of search engines we need to ensure that all additions to their websites help, rather than hinder that goal.

What blogging does to some extent and twitter does to a large extent, is remove that filter. In searching real estate terms on twitter we see a lot of off-topic tweets.  That in itself is harmless enough, but too many can fall into the category of sounding-off.

Try this: do a real estate search at twitter. Pick on an agent, then read all their tweets. Its too easy to think of our tweets as being singular snapshots of a moment in time. However, when aggregated, its remarkable the picture of the agent that comes into view.

Reading one, which inspired this post, we see that:

• the agent’s current deal is problematic because of a mess with the mortgage financing,
• that the car is in the shop for another day,
• the kid is sick,
• and they seem to be counting down the minutes until phone duty is finished.

Individually, none of these are unreasonable or a-typical. However as we read down the list we get a picture of an agent that is less than impressive.

Keep your tweets, positive, informative and above all on-topic.

What really astounds us is the potential for twitter to be a game changer for search.

Chatting with a google engineer this weekend, it really dawned on us how twitter has made google look like a sleeping giant. Funny huh, we thought that was Microsoft’s role these days too. The phrase that really stuck out for us was ‘real time search’.

How? Well look at it this way, a google search yeilds a list of websites that they know, maybe that have been around for a while, almost by definition. (You’ve heard the myths about those truly lame websites that still retain their page on position even though they are past their sell-by-date. You’d be surprised how many of these one page relics remain! ) And that says something too about major search engines. Once you are on the first page its pretty hard to be taken off.

“Dusty data-strata”

And that’s the point, traditional search engines, (can we really be referring to the same google?) have been made to feel like a dusty historical archive, an amalgam of data-strata displaying good content but in a very un fluid way.

How has twitter managed to unseat the darling of the net?

Well its the applications that have made this possible. A solitary tweet is almost useless. Only your ‘followers’ would get to read that.

Traditional real estate farming will tell you to gather as many names and (email) addresses as possible to send your information to and try to grow that list. That concept is very limited in it potential scope.

Applications such as tweetdeck enable people to search tweets from people they are not following. In fact, they enable people to search the content of other peoples tweet for keywords that they are interested in.

Want to see a new listing on the MLS? You can a). wait for you real estate’s MLS board to spit out the listing to your email the next day or b). you can craft a search in tweet deck to see who’s listed what as soon as they list it.

We are at the start of something amazing! Buckle Up…

People don’t search for real estate agents. I know, i know, you have heard that before, but it is so true. Even though you have heard this many times, and even though you might even believe this (reluctantly), the strategy to build a successful real estate website goes against everything you have thought about how to build a successful real estate career.

Old school: It’s all about your name. Promote your name across everything you do.

You want buyers and sellers to think of you, when they think ‘real estate’. Sound familiar.

However if you use this focus as the main strategy for defining your website, you’ll only show up when people search for you. The reality is that anyone searching for someone by their name online will usually find you/them pretty easily. Hopefully this will be via your professional(ish) social networking or website, rather than the risque birthday pictures of you on facebook ‘tagged’ by someone else! (Ohhh yes, this can happen)…

The main problem with the old school method is that your reach can only extend so far. If they are already searching for you, you have probably already ‘got’ to them. But how many people does that add up to?

What about the other 99% of opportunities. Those are the people who are not looking for you, they are looking for the best real estate information for the town they are looking to buy or sell in.

The other 99% are not looking for you.

However a few times a year that peace and harmony is broken by some change, often quite subtle, to the morning routine of scanning websites, reading news and email. Today it was my browser. Something had changed. A few months earlier I had a rather unfortunately case of the ‘browser hijackers”. And today, i thought the same had happened again.

Bing, bing, and there it was again. This odd, overly photographic search tool kept appearing, seemingly everywhere. Fortunately before I popped in the system discs, restarted and began tapping F8, to “boot from CD” i did a google search, the irony of this was not lost on me, to find that microsoft had launched their search tool.

Didn’t they just launch ‘live’ whatever that was?  Did Live go where Vista’s going?

We’ll also be tracking bing’s popularity in our real estate website stats. Currently it goes Google about 80%, Yahoo 10% and Live or MSN 3%.

Anyway, for now the jury, and my system discs are out. We’ll let you know what we think in coming posts.

Beautiful websites that can’t be found are useless.

When these agents approach the companies that created their sites, the are told that they can now pay an additional fee for SEO, or search engine optimization.

SEO is not the bit you do at the end!

How a search engine is to be presented with your content has to be considered before you have even bought your domain name. To only consider how your website appears once its constructed is rather like figuring out how to close the barn do once the horse has bolted.

At limeyboy we construct real estate websites that appear within the search results you would like to appear in.