If not, here’s the easiest way to optimize your site for Bing:

• Consider editorial links (those links that come from within the body content), as Bing seems to prefer them when considering rankings. Although all links are valuable in the eyes of Bing, it seems as if editorial links are the most valued.

• Consider the relationship between your site and your links. In other words, make sure your site and the site you are linking to has some kind of relevance.

• Consider using domain names that utilize keywords. In other words, your real estate domain name will be all the more relevant to Bing if it includes keywords (realtor, real estate, etc.). However, don’t try to cram as many keywords into your domain name; instead, choose a primary keyword phrase that best relates to your website and business.

• Make sure your website has lots of good content. Bing doesn’t seem to favor smaller sites when it comes to ranking, so fill your website will useful content.

• While you’re at it, make sure your pages have at least 300 words because Bing seems to place a higher value on those pages.

• Don’t forget to use relevant keywords throughout the body of your text; but at the same time, don’t flood the text with keywords.

• Make sure each page contains its own theme. Covering more than one topic on each page does not do well in terms of ranking with Bing.

• Make sure the content on your site is completely original. Any plagiarized content will likely be picked up (regardless whether you cite your source) by search engines, and your ranking will suffer.

If you are setting up your PPC campaign, it is advantageous that you get it right the first time.  Although there are many factors that will determine how your PPC campaign is structured, the truth is that your budgetary restraints are usually the number-one factor.

Before setting up your PPC campaign structure, it is important to consider the following:

• Your budget (of course!) -  Instead of breaking down your budget into campaigns at this point, just consider how much you are able to spend, in total, on advertising. Often times the best rule of thumb is to consider how much other agents in your area are paying on their campaigns. Otherwise, set a budget and then determine which campaigns you can afford. You may need to start small and then build as you generate revenue.
• Geography – As a local real estate agent, you may want to target different areas, particularly if you know you have better business in one area than another. In other words, geographic targeting may be an important part of your PPC campaign. Geographical targeting may also be necessary if you want to use separate campaigns for different areas.
• Language – If you know some of your customers speak English and others speak Spanish, you will want to create separate PPC campaigns that target both languages. These efforts will also allow you to send your potential clients to a page that features their native language. Your conversion rate will likely skyrocket just by creating campaigns in both languages.
• Mobile Users vs. Computer Users – With the use of smart phones on the rise, many real estate agents structure separate PPC campaigns for websites that are best navigated on a mobile device. In other words, you may want to create separate campaigns that target both your mobile phone users and your computer users.

For most real estate agents, it just makes sense to use numerous campaigns to address the above factors. It is important, particularly if your budget is small, to resist combining your targets, as this will not translate into quality conversion rates. Instead, focus on fewer campaigns that are likely to perform better and generate more traffic and revenue for your real estate business.

Your Offline Advertising Needs

If you still market and advertise offline, there are a number of options available to you, such as radio, television, print and billboards. Although each of these types of advertising and marketing differs in terms of effect and cost, you can usually track your offline advertising a number of ways, such as using separate domains, custom URLs and custom phone numbers.

As a small business owner, you can use a service such as Google Analytics to track your offline advertising efforts. This service allows business owners to track their offline advertising and marketing efforts, and it is free, aside from any costs associated with the implementation of the service by a professional webmaster. Analytical programs like Google Analytics are usually quite easy to use and prove to be very effective for small business owners.

Google Analytics also allows small business owners to organize their offline marketing efforts and the tools they use to track them, and they also offer annotations that allow you to understand the net traffic effect of an ad campaign by allowing you to enter the dates in your traffic graph area.

Your Options for Tracking Offline Advertising and Marketing

A custom URL is a popular way to track your offline marketing and advertising efforts, as you simply switch up the URL slightly so you can better understand from where your potential clients are coming from.

You may also want to use separate domains to track your marketing and advertising efforts. Many companies use separate domains to track their different advertising campaigns.

Finally, many businesses use custom phone numbers to track their advertising and marketing efforts. Luckily, getting virtual numbers to accomplish this is quite easy. There are several services that offer virtual numbers, like Phone.com, and the cost is quite low, too.

If you are concerned about spending money on marketing and advertising campaigns that just aren’t effective, there are a number of options when it comes to tracking those marketing and advertising efforts.

You may think your website is planned, organized and ready to go, but you may be missing a number of things. The ultimate goal, of course, is to produce a quality website that is SEO friendly and appears high in the search results. But forgetting key SEO details could end up costing you big in the form of low rankings.

Here is your checklist when it comes to making sure your website is ready to launch:

• Have I achieved quality, well-written content?
• Have a conducted extensive keyword research? Did I find the appropriate, relevant keywords for my real estate business?
• Am I sure the keywords I have chosen are competitive with others in my industry?
• Is my content relevant and have I performed basic spell check to ensure quality?
• Does each of my website pages have unique titles and descriptions? Do my title pages have important keywords, meta-descriptions and HTML headings? Is my text optimized for my chosen keywords?
• Did I produce quality titles and meta-descriptions, thereby ensuring readers will want to click on my page in the search engine results?
• Are my keyword combinations optimized on my pages? Did I also use text synonyms to ensure better results from queries?
• Did I produce quality content that is not over-optimized with keywords, and have I avoided hidden text and keyword stuffing techniques?
• Are my pages and content targeted and concise by using a small number of keywords?
• Is my website content relevant? Is the content of my pages relevant to the theme of my real estate website?
• Did I take care to ensure the important keywords are located at the beginning of my content?
• Did I take care to make sure different pages haven’t optimized the same keywords (so they don’t compete with each other)?
• Have I produced a website that it easy to navigate, and have I provided text links for all the pages of my website to accomplish this?
• Have I ensured that I did everything to reduce the loading time of my real estate website?
• Are my important keywords included in my website’s URLs?

Google Places is a work of art, for business owners, as it allows people to use Google to find businesses all over the world – or in their neighborhood.

Google Places help people from all over the world make better decisions regarding where they shop, where they eat, where their children play, even where they bring their dry cleaning. We like Google Places because, in addition to providing people with local business information, it also includes photos, reviews and facts. Best of all, as a real estate professional, you can update your business in real-time as much as you want.

If you want to claim your real estate business Place Page on Google, you can do so through the Google’s Local Business Center.  You can verify and add to your business information by claiming your Place Page, which therefore allows you to include important information about your real estate business, and also allows you to post pictures, videos and special offers or updates.

In addition, Google Places also allows you to communicate with your real estate clients, which always helps when it comes to reaching out to new clients.

Google Places, in addition to allowing business owners like you to update information and communicate with your clients, provides these new features:

• Google Places now allows you to communicate your areas of service with your customers. This is ideal for real estate agents who service more than one area.
• You can now make your listings stand out from the crowd on Google.com and Google Maps for a small, monthly fee.
• You can now participate in a business photo shoot. Google Places has started providing business, in select cities, with the opportunity to request a free photo shoot of their business.
• You can now post real-time updates on your Place Page, which may include any relevant information you want your customers to know about. Many business owners use this opportunity to offer coupons, special events and special offers.  You can advertise and get the word out about an open house you’re hosting this weekend!

However, writing good ad copy for search engine ads may not be as easy as it seems. In short, ad copy for PPC advertising will instantly draw customers to your real estate site. So, it is vital that you have a firm grasp of who your customer is and the key drivers for your real estate business.

If you want to write the most compelling ad copy for your PPC advertising efforts, here’s what you need to keep in mind:

• Make sure the customers who click on your ad will be taken to an appropriate landing page that contains relevant and content-rich content, In other words, fulfill the promises of your PPC advertising and give your potential clients something worthwhile to read. If you made any promises in your ad copy, keep them when your visitor lands on your landing page.
• Don’t over do it when it comes to keywords in your ad group. And, more importantly, make sure your keywords are closely related to each other, as well as the landing page, so your visitors can be certain your landing page copy is relevant to your PPC ad. Your reader should have answers to his questions upon landing on your page, so make sure the keywords in your PPC copy directly relate to the content found on your landing page.
• You have just 25 characters to get your point across, so make sure you get your point across in a clear and concise manner. In other words, these 25 characters will likely be much more difficult to write than any other 500-character web page copy! Use your ad groups as your main theme and always use your most important keywords in your headline. And again, it pays to mention that every keyword in your ad copy should work with each other and make sense.
• Consider using questions to grab the attention of your reader. If you think you know a common question asked by your clients then, by all means, pose this question to grab your readers’ attention. This is where knowing your client – and knowing your client well – is a vital part of understanding what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to your PPC ad copy.

This can be your year to watch your business soar; provided you have effective strategies in place to make it happen. There are a number of ways you can start the New Year off right and begin building your real estate business so 2011 will be a year to remember — for the right reasons!

• Utilize a free, online monitoring tool (try Google alerts or Social Mention) to keep close tabs on what your clients are saying about you and your business. In this world of social networking, you can be sure your clients are talking about the good and the not-so-good, so make it a point to stay aware of the online chatter so you can use this information to better your business and build your real estate brand.
• Join in on the conversation so you can provide potential clients with insight and answers to their questions. Your presence on blogs and social networking sites will allow you get the word out about your business, while providing a useful service to potential clients.
• Pay close attention to your social media followers. In short, take note of actual clients who have used your services over the past year and take the necessary steps to reach out to them and to specifically target them with your marketing efforts.
• Take the strategies you developed in 2010 one step further. If you have a proven strategy for drawing in clients, keep doing what you’re doing, only consider taking it up a notch.
• Don’t underestimate the power of SEO to gain exposure online for your real estate business. Make sure you are the business pops up when potential clients search for information using key words. If you don’t know much about the importance of SEO, make 2011 the year to become skilled in the power of SEO and the important role it will play when drawing in new customers.
• Give your website a new facelift. If your website looks like it did three or four years ago, it’s time to make a change. Give your clients and potential clients something new to talk about, and optimize the content that is found there. Make sure your content is interesting, educational and worthwhile to read. Your clients will be able to tell the difference, believe me.

Analyzing your Competition

In short, one of the best marketing tools involves simply analyzing where your competitors place their citations. In other words, if your main competitor is placing their citations in certain directories, then it would probably pay off to place your citations there, as well. If you want to keep competition stiff with your competitors, then it pays to pay close attention to the location of their citations.

The Power of Citations (in both Large and Small Directories)

What will your citation include? Most citations are merely references to your business. It will usually include your real estate business name, as well as your contact information, including your address and your phone number. In some instances, citations will also include links to your real estate website, thereby facilitating your link building.

Let’s face it: your competitors are likely doing the same thing and using the same tactics, so it is wise to level the playing field when it comes to SEO marketing efforts.

Search Engines to Facilitate your Searching Efforts

There are also web searching tools that may help you locate directories that would be ideal for your real estate business. Simply by entering the key phrase into the citation search engine you can get yourself a nice list of citation sources. And then, of course, all you need to do from there is get your real estate contact information on those directories.

However, these Internet search engines may limit your account to one IP address, so if you work for a real estate company you will likely need to register multiple accounts.

We all know that our Internet marketing efforts are key to building our brand and our real estate business, so it is up to you to explore the many ways in which citations can prove incredibly practical.

Most of us realize that, in an effort to become successful in the real estate game, we must think about personal marketing. And the key to personal marketing is our real estate brand.

Many of today’s top companies use the power of branding to their advantage. Take, for example, Nike. Where would the company be without its well-known swoosh logo and marketing strategy?

Identifying the importance of branding is key in real estate sales, as a strong brand image is usually linked to superior service. Branding yourself and your real estate business with first-class service is certainly one of the easiest ways to trump your competition and attract new customers.

Making a Connection with the Customer

A strong real estate brand will connect with consumers and will ensure them that their real estate needs will be handled with the utmost care. In other words, if you show your customers that you care, your real estate brand will be a success.

Your real estate brand can be everywhere and anywhere you advertise or market your business. Your brand can be your logo, your company motto, your signage or your business philosophy. As long as you convey the image of quality services in your branding, you know that you have achieved success.

Think Long Term

Because the real estate business is not a short, one-time deal, the goal is often to build trust with your customer, as they are likely entrusting you with the biggest purchase or sale they will ever make. Think in terms of a long-term relationship when considering your brand and you can’t go wrong. Don’t forget, too, that your customer of today could very well be your customer in the next five or even 10 years.

Although branding efforts will vary greatly between real estate professionals, the goal will always be the same: How can I stand out among the crowd and offer a service that is distinctly mine? Whatever you choose, remember that consistency is key and long-term is the objective.

By sending a press release you had the potential to gain additional exposure from new sources. Whether it be from radio, TV, or print, the more exposure you got the better chance you could increase your business.

Print media who picked up and liked your press release would likely either run the information in the release, or contact you for an interview. The additional benefit from print media, especially those online, was the backlink potential to your website from the publication of your press release.

But recently in the United Kingdom, Google has bared its fangs at the linking process of major online news publications. Through the natural selection process of consumer demand, newspapers have been forced to shut down much of their paper distribution and create a news website where readers are picking up most of their news nowadays. But to pay the bills and to keep their website content free to readership, newspapers have practiced selling ads and accepting paid links for their article pages.

This practice of selling links is frowned upon by the search giant, Google. According to Google, links on another site to your website should be legitimate, not paid. Google blogger, Matt Cutts, says about the practice:

“Whether the paid links are in an “advertorial” or somewhere else on the page, that would violate our quality guidelines and Google would take action on those violations, both so that the link buyers wouldn’t benefit and so that the link sellers wouldn’t be trusted in the future by Google.”

Unfortunately this process of selling links has landed newspapers in hot water. Thus, they are removing these links to stay in good graces with Google. And, unfortunately, press release links seem to be categorized as a “paid” link and are also being removed. If this is true and Google continues to demand and enforce press release links to be removed from online news sources, real estate agents will have a much more difficult time indeed with public relations SEO.