If you own a real estate website (or intend to), or have a need to produce real estate related marketing materials, it's a great idea to invest in some real estate stock photos to spruce up your pages. For those of you who have spent time on the phone with me, you know that I'm a content freak. The written word is definitely king when it comes to search engine optimization, but you also can get some additional marketing mileage when you use images.

First, even for avid readers and text-fanatics like me, images break up the page and make the text more readable. We all need to take a visual break sometimes, like coming up for air during a long swim. A well-placed photo or graphic can do that and refresh the reader enough to keep moving on.

Second, you have some good SEO opportunities you can use to add value to your content if you spruce it up with some real estate stock photography. You can give your text some additional keyword density by carefully selecting the filename as well as the title, and alt attributes of your image and anchor tag. For instance, if you are writing about Long Island Real Estate, you can do this:

1. Name your stock photo something like "long-island-real-estate.jpg" and make sure you add title="Long Island Real Estate" and alt="Long Island Real Estate" to your img tag.
2. Next, if you are using the image as a link, use title="Long Island Real Estate" in your anchor tag.

Third, your readers will stick around longer and you'll convert more of them to leads if you use graphics and stock photos to ease the eye. I'm not a fan of sites that are all graphics for SEO reasons, but there is a balance required to make the site be appealing to visitors.

Fourth, using high quality real estate stock photography simply makes you look more professional. That will get you a lot of mileage and may make the difference between a phone call from that buyer who's on the edge...or not.

What I do is sign up for a month at a time and download as many as possible during that time until I need more photos for my collection. Try it out:

The intersection between webmaster and real estate agent is pretty big these days, just because of the online marketing involvement required of agents these days to compete. That, along with the fact that many of my readers are increasingly other real estate webmasters, makes it worthwhile to share here a little database download I'm releasing.

If you are a webmaster doing real estate sites nationally, sooner or later you will need to have a city database -- a list of U.S. cities -- at your disposal to complete a project. You might as well pick it up now for only $15 for a single site license or $30 for a developer license. You'll be amazed at the extra features you can build into your next national site, not to mention the extra geographic SEO you can do to increase its organic rankings.

The package is a zipped folder that includes the database of U.S. cities in several formats, including Excel, CSV, and MySQL database format. If you have any MySQL experience at all, you can set up your first national city, county, and state database in minutes using this package.

Check it out and This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it if you like it. I'd love to get some testimonials from you.

Mobile real estate search is here, so you better get ready to deliver your listings over yet another medium. Are you reaching these home buyers on the go?

A growing trend among increasingly tech-savvy home buyers is to browse real estate listings from a mobile phone. For some, it's counterintuitive. "Why would they want to browse the Internet from such a small screen," you say. Well, you've probably never browsed on an iPhone or some of the other touch screen devices, have you? My first experience was on my son's iPod Touch, and I have to tell you - it's pretty slick. Since you can zoom in and out of a page quickly, it is fairly easy to navigate, and the browser screen is rendered almost identically to a Safari browser window on the iMac desktop machine.

What does that mean to the real estate industry, and you in particular? Well, it means that real estate searchers are increasingly browsing the Internet from their mobile devices, because the technology is now there to make it convenient and actually productive. No more clicking through text-only screens. It's a near-desktop browsing experience on the go.

Here's a little statistic for you. Did you know that 48% of all mobile web browsing in September 2009 was done on an iPhone? That's astonishing, but what are you going to do about it? With mobile real estate saerch on the rise, I'd suggest making sure your IDX website provider has an iPhone app available for your potential customers to download. If yours doesn't, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or call me at (208) 249-8893 and I can help you out.

The benefit of offering an iPhone app is both obvious and exciting. You can do postcard campaigns and other advertising promotions to draw people to your site to download it. Once they do, they'll have a slick interface for searching properties in your area. They probably won't delete the app once they install it, either, so it's a great way to build a long term relationship with them. The best part is that all the leads come to you...on your mobile device, no doubt. How's that for mobile real estate search?

I still remember the moment a Wall Street Journal reporter returned my call and said he wanted to do the story I had proposed. Wow, what an adrenaline rush that was!

It took a couple of weeks to work with the reporter to gather the quotes and facts, but when the article came out, our phones were ringing off the hook.

As an experienced writer for real estate media, I know what it takes to write a real estate press release that newspapers, trade journals, and your prospective clients will notice.

I've successfully pitched artices to the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Business Journal, Orange County Business Journal, Los Angeles Times, Orange County Register, and numerous newspapers and trade publications.

There is a new way to get additional online exposure for your real estate listings through real estate feed syndication. I've designed this system get your listings crawled and indexed by search engines fast.

Why real estate syndication works

The goal of real estate marketing is to get maximum exposure for properties so that potential buyers can find it. Syndication helps accomplish that by taking your existing property listing data and re-publishing it in other places on the Internet.

If you know you need to invest in your real estate website, but don't know where to start, I have a new program to help. I have had clients asking me for years for an ongoing maintenance agreement, so I formulated a plan to meet this need.

As passionate as I am about educating my clients to take an active interest in their own site, some agents and brokers are just plain too busy working real estate to do the tasks that need to be done to get ranked well. At some point you have to decide—are you in the real estate business or the web publishing business?

Ever wonder what keywords you ought to be targeting in your real estate SEO and blogging efforts? I get that question all the time, which is why I created a simple (and free) tool for agents to use. It will generate a nice keyword list for you based on the localization and keyword variables you select.

This is how it works:

1. Select your state
2. Type in up to ten local city and/or county names
   
3. Choose several of the most popular keyword variations
4. Click "Submit Keywords"

You'll get a list of up to 1,587 keyword variations you should be using in your blogging and website SEO, depending upon how many options you select. I have the most popular variations selected by default, but you are free to select them all or be very choosy and select your own. That's actually what I recommend...you don't want to waste time optimizing for condo keywords if you live in a rural area with no condos!

Check out the Real Estate Keyword Generator. If you like it, please share! If not, please This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and I'll work to improve it. :-)

I've had several clients ask me how I check their sites for keyword rankings on Google.

Here is an SEO software download I've been using for years to monitor my clients' rankings for hundreds of keywords at a time.

It is a free trial, so you have nothing to lose by giving it a try. This tool is invaluable in helping me achieve high rankings for my websites. I have actually been able to achieve page one Google rankings before a site is even launched!

You'll be amazed at how much information this SEO software download gives you about your website. (In fact, it is great for checking your website rankings of your competitors as well!)

So what is your website worth, anyway? This is a much more philosophical question than it may sound at first glance. Add the words "to you," and maybe you'll get my drift. Think about this for a moment; what is your website worth TO YOU?

If you're like most website owners, the question is easily answered by checking your credit card statement for last month: $29.95 per month, no more, no less (or $49.95, or $99, etc.).

Now let's ask the question a different way. What long term value have you invested in your site to make it perform better than the other agents who are forking over $29.95 or $49.95 for the same cookie cutter site? And you wonder why you are suffering such dismal results from your website?

Email newsletter marketing is a tool used by highly paid pros in Big Business to add customers to their sales pipeline and big profits to their bottom lines. If you as a real estate agent are not using it to its full potential, you are leaving sales (and commissions) on the table.

If you want to grow your real estate business, learning more about automating your email marketing efforts is an essential item on your to-do list. It doesn't have to be intimidating, and you don't have to be a disciplined or accomplished writer to make this tool work for you.