There is no better way to establish your credentials than through the voice of your clients. Combine this approach with search engine optimization, and it's called reputation management, or defensive SEO.

So, are you letting your clients speak for you? Most agents don't collect enough testimonials, and they certainly don't repurpose them effectively. To succeed in real estate, you should be making full use of your happy real estate client's testimonials, and I'll share some tips on how to do that.

• Collect testimonials religiously. Even if you had a rough transaction, you can still foster good will and get a good testimonial by showing a strong effort to keep the wheels on the bus.
• Don't be afraid to ask several times if you sense that the client is happy to do it but is forgetful. Remember, it doesn't mean as much to them as it does to you, and they may not understand the importance of it to your livelihood.
• Ask permission from those who have provided you with testimonials to use their name in your online marketing materials.
• Post your testimonials prominently on your website. Personal stories are much better sales copy than marketing language.
• Create new websites and web pages to host and disseminate your testimonials. You should be syndicating testimonials using HubPages, Wordpress.com, Squidoo, Blogger, etc. Don't be shy about creating a site you only intend to update once or twice a year.
• Optimize various websites and pages for keywords like "Your Name REALTOR Reviews," "Your Name Reviews," or even "Your Name," and post your testimonials there. Often, Google is starting to "suggest" review search terms as soon as someone starts typing in the name of a real estate agent, so think about that and be proactive.
• Build backlinks to those new pages so they rank highly on Google for those terms. That means linking to those pages from other blogs, sites, and pages you control, or asking other webmasters to do so.

Need any help putting this plan into action and getting your testimonials "out there" on the web working hard for you? Let me know, and I can help.

You may find it strange that I'm writing about the offline marketing technique of using real estate postcards on a blog that deals primarily with online marketing and real estate SEO. The truth is that you can't afford to ignore either online or offline marketing techniques if you want to compete for your share of real estate transaction in this market or any market.

Make sure your online marketing techniques are up to date, such as your IDX website, drip email marketing campaigns, organic search engine rankings, etc. Then make sure you are still marketing to your community using offline methods such as real estate postcards, radio ads, and print ads. Offline marketing is not dead--it just needs to be done intelligently.

If you are renting a home, how likely are you to upgrade the kitchen, or invest in new landscaping to increase the resale value and curb appeal? Not likely, I imagine. After all, when you rent, you know that any investment you make in your home will be lost when you decide to move.

But here's a question for you: Do you rent your website, or do you own it? Are you one of the million or so agents who choose to pay a regional or national real estate technology provider for the privilege of borrowing their server and their content management system on a monthly basis? Yeah, I thought so.

While many real estate agents encourage an ownership mindset when it comes to real estate decisions, they have a hard time shaking the renter mindset when it comes to their own real estate website. Are you really going to invest serious time or money in a website you don't actually own, knowing that if you decide to switch providers, you'll have to give it back and start over? Of course not.

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 search 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 with a mobile real estate site of your own.

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. :-)