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?

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.

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?

Don't you hate seeing a thousand other real estate agents right next to you on the real estate agent directories out there? There's certainly a need to be listed in as many places on the Internet as possible.

But what if you could be the only agent listed in your primary service areas...permanently? And what if your city name could link directly to your website (or any page on it)?

I've designed a way for every agent in the U.S. to do just that. It's extremely affordable; it is a one-time cost, not a subscription. Once you're in the directory, you're in for good. And when space runs out, that's it. There won't be more listings added.

Here's how it works...

How much time did you spend writing your bio for your real estate website? Five minutes? Maybe even less? Uh oh. Dig it out right now!

Writing a persuasive bio for your real estate agent website is very important, because you're selling yourself long before you're selling a house. You won't convert a single lead to a client unless you sell them on who you are and what you do, first and foremost. Only then do you have the opportunity to list their home, or help them buy a new home.

When a visitor goes from one real estate website to another, participants in the Alexa program allow that information to be collected and analyzed for "related links" and traffic estimates.

Here's why this can be beneficial for website owners. You spend a lot of time on your own site, right? (If not, you probably need to talk to me about your website!) With Alexa, you can add your own traffic to your own website into the Alexa database, as well as the other real estate sites you visit on a regular basis.

There are many different SEF components available for Joomla to make URLs like this:

index.php?option=com_content&Id=1

Look like this:

/joomla-sef-component-reviews.html

SEF stand for Search Engine Friendly. Each Joomla SEF component has its strengths and weaknesses. I have tested each of the components mentioned in this article, although some more extensively than others. I will review:

• OpenSEF Review
  
• JoomSEF Review
  
• SH404SEF Review
  
• JPromoter Review
  

The two I have spent the most time with are OpenSEF (a popular open source component) and JPromoter (a commercial component). I have also done some testing on JoomSEF and SH404SEF.

If anyone doubts the high value Google places on internal linking (deep-linking), I have hard evidence that should blow them away. Google recently bumped a client of mine up from no results for a particular set of real estate keywords (local schools) to the top ten over a weekend. Yes, that included a coveted number one rank. All this for nothing more than taking the time to internally link, directory-style, to a number of very relevant pages for these terms.

Nothing too fancy, but very powerful.

This SEO project involved creating a page of useful keyword friendly links to internal pages (MLS listing searches, actually) on his own site. I knew it would be worth the investment, but even I was shocked at how fast this strategy would be reflected in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Most standard website statistics packages leave a lot to be desired. They provide data in a very one-dimensional way that don't really give you a good understanding of your website traffic.

I've been trying out Google Analytics lately on my Joomla sites, and I highly recommend it to my clients. The presentation of the data is understandable and empowering. It is a very visual platform, allowing you customize which metrics you want to track on your "dashboard." You can also browse your own site with an overlay that shows you click patterns and stats right on your own site. That's pretty amazing!

How to Install Google Analytics in Joomla

I run across a lot of questions about parking domains or redirecting them:

• If you have multiple domains, should you park them, or redirect them to your main site?
• What about creating "micro sites" on their own domains? Is that a bad practice?
  

I've read articles that have it completely backwards, recommending domain parking and staying away from microsites that direct traffic to your main site. In order to make sense of it, it's important to understand what Google is trying to avoid, which is duplicate content (AKA spam).

Scenario #1 - Using domain redirects rather than parking

Let's say a site has good content on one domain. Then the owner goes out and parks 30 more domains on it, with no redirects. That otherwise good content is watered down now, duplicated x30. Google's index is now bloated, and they feel (correctly) that they're being "gamed" with spam. Google's recommended practice is to redirect domains, not just park them.

Read this article about domain redirects from beginning to end and you'll get it.

Scenario #2 - Using micro sites

Let's say you have one main domain, but focused content that you want to put up on another domain directing traffic to your main site. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as the site is unique, the domain is unique, and the content is unique. Those are huge caveats, don't violate them.

Using micro sites is no different than another content site linking to yours. The only thing different is that the owner is the same. In a "free speech" world, you can have as many micro sites as you want if you have the time and resources to write them, and if they are not spam articles solely for the benefit of search engines. Then it's okay to link from them to your main site.

Whether they'll rank well and actually bring in significant traffic is debatable. What they can do, however, is add an inbound link to your site from a keyword-rich page. It doesn't have to have a high PageRank to help in that effort. Building micro sites is not something I would devote a lot of money to...yet I believe it can help in the whole SEO equation.

Think of it like Proctor and Gamble having a main site with a product page for Charmin, but also having a micro site for Charmin that deals in a more focused way with promoting that specific product. Both these sites point to each other. You could actually remove the link back from the main site and have it be a little more advantageous, since one way links are better than exchanges.