One common way buyer and sellers meet online is through online classified ads. There is an endless amount of websites where people can search for homes.

Another option to buy and sell homes would be through an online auction. If you decide you need professional assistance, there is a real estate directory online where you could search for agents.

The property website service offers better exposure to your property that you want to sell, but for a fee. They guarantee search engine optimization of all property in their system.

A popular trend used to buy and sell real estate is social media sites. Social media sites and blogs create faster interactions between both the seller and buyer to facilitate the transaction.

Social media sites are more personal. People often feel safer and more secure when dealing with transactions through these sites.

Now a days, people who use real estate services to sell their home, will link the listing to social media sites in order to make it available to a broader range of potential buyers. Beware, though, some people might see this as spam and may stop following your blog or other sites as result.

The ways in which people buy and sell homes are increasing. The online option is becoming very popular now days. The internet makes the real estate market even easier to find what you are looking for as you can do it on your own, in your spare time and the area’s you can search are even greater.

Just as the Internet changed the way a real estate agent markets a property and looks to gain prospective buyers, mobile marketing, and specifically, text message marketing is going to change the landscape again. It is an important tool to add to your realtor internet marketing arsenal.

There are five key reasons why text message marketing for real estate is beneficial.

1. It is a 24/7 marketing tool. Once you set up the system it markets for you automatically, even while you sleep.

2. It is easy. You simply complete a few fill in the blank sections on the website and the system runs by itself

3. It provides great information. You can only include 160 characters in an SMS text message, but if you can insert a short URL into the message the user can click the link in a smart phone and open up the full MLS listing. You will never have to touch a flyer box again!

4. It is inexpensive. Compared to the cost of printing, reprinting and stocking flyers, text message flyers are very inexpensive.

5. It builds your database. When someone takes a paper flyer (or two, or three) from the box, you have no clue who they were. You could go through hundreds of flyers and never have any idea of who was looking at your property. With digital text message flyers for real estate you capture the cell phone number of the person requesting the information, and if the system has a mini-CRM built into it, you can send automated, triggered responses directly back to the prospective buyer.

Just as the Internet changed the way real estate transactions occur, text message and mobile marketing is going to change the landscape again. Even if you aren’t a big proponent of texting, your prospective buyers are, so you need to change with the ever changing technological environment.

As you can choose from which products or areas your leads are coming from, you can be assured that your leads are targeted and that all the information you are providing is right for your market and service. These leads usually come with details such as contact information and buying preferences with all the information vet through for accuracy. Your job is made much easier with the email addresses, phone numbers and their budget for their purchase provided by the service provider. As you are buying when you need the leads, most of the information is current and timely.

There are plenty of such service providers to choose from. Compare their service and price first over the internet before making a decision. It will be helpful if some of them can provide you with a free trial to their service before you decided to sign with them. There are a variety of price options, depending on the number of leads you are getting and the frequent of purchase.

The key factor is that time and energy gathering leads is saved and you will only be getting quality leads. All that you need to do is to register online and receive their service right away, hassle free. If time is important for you, then getting a lead generation service is perfect for you. You save time and energy gathering leads and you will be assured that you do not only get multiple leads but quality ones.

If you don’t already know, Craigslist is one of the most visited websites online today. It gets billions of hits and it is one of the top searched sites for every major city in the US. Not only is this site free, it’s great to boost web traffic and get in front of a targeted audience.

As a wholesaler, Craigslist should be on top of your must do list everyday. Although it may seem as easy as placing an ad on the site and calling it a day, its not as easy. As any marketing campaign you implement, there should be a schedule and an order of doing things. Here are my tips that will help you when posting Craigslist ads for your real estate wholesale deals.

Repetition – Make sure you put up 20 ads or so a week. Craigslist lists the ads based on the date they were posted so the later the day goes, the farther down on the page your ad will show. Make sure you post ads in the morning and in the afternoon. Friday and Saturdays are the best for some odd reason.

Headline – Your headline is high end real estate. When an investor or potential buyer goes onto Craigslist and looks up property in the real estate tab, they might use keywords in the search bar to narrow down the number of ads. By placing the words wholesale and investment on the headline, you will draw more attention from the search tools.

Un-Spam it Yourself – Never have a link back to your email, or an anonymous link. Just put a phone number along with a link to your website. When posting ads for wholesale real estate I get a lot of lame marketing attempts of no-name websites trying to get me to post my deal on their site. By limiting the ways people get a hold of you, you control the flow and filter the spammers.

SEO – Put your websites name inside the city box next to the headline. If someone does a search for wholesale deals in their city and up comes 30 different ads, yet 10 of those say your website, you will get people going to the site just to check it out. Its very important that you make yourself stand out, even this little bit helps go a long way.

Picture This – Having a picture whose root file name is cash buyers or wholesale deals, will help you in many ways. First of all, nobody wants to see an ad for a wholesale deal with out a picture. Its one less thing they can filter out. Also if you name your picture wholesale deals or cash buyers, when someone Google’s images for wholesale deals or cash buyers in your city, your image will come up in the top search.

There you have it. Those were five basic tips and things to know when posting wholesale deals on Craigslist. I know about other sites like Backpage and Kijiji, but who cares for now. Start with the sites that matter and work our way over when you begin branding yourself more.

More times than I can count, I’ve had to tell an unhappy real estate agent that the website company they just hired for thousands of dollars to do a beautiful real estate website produced a site that was virtually invisible to the search engines. I’ve seen tens of thousands of dollars wasted on bad sites that could never rank well on the search engines.

That’s because many graphic designers are not necessarily trained in search engine optimization, sales, and marketing. That said, everyone likes a nice looking site, and the pride of ownership factor should keep us all striving to produce visually compelling websites and blogs.

For the novice real estate agent/blogger, there is no easier way to spice of a real estate site than with some well-placed real state stock photos. To that end, I encourage all of my Real Estate Marketing Tips newsletter subscribers to invest in a small library of real estate stock photography.

In fact, it might surprise some to find out that studies have shown that relevant stock photography can improve the conversion rate of a site. As an author, you can hold the attention of your readership longer with some graphics to break up the text.

As a writer, I prefer more text than rather than less, but that’s not the norm. The right amount of graphics can dramatically increase the professionalism of your site and conversion rate.

You should experiment with what works in your market for your site. You may find that stock photos of homes get better response, or you may find that stock photos of smiling happy couples standing in front of their house work better. There is no single rule. That’s why it’s best to have a variety of stock photos to choose from.

The way I personally manage my stock photo collection is I subscribe to a monthly service that allows me to download 750 photos per month. I subscribe for one month at a time when I want to expand my collection, then I have them on hand for future website, blog posts, flyers, and other marketing materials.

Before Multiple Listing Services like Long Island real estate listings came into being, real estate brokers did not even collaborate with each other. Each agent was restricted to his own properties, which means buyers or sellers were compelled to employ many agents to find the property they were looking for.

After some time, different brokers started to collaborate with each other; the collaboration was limited to brokers only, who shared their listings (and commissions) with other brokers. It was still beneficial to property buyers or sellers who do not have to hire many brokers now. They just went to their broker and would pay a small fee in order to get their property listed on a multiple listing service (MLS). These listings were in printed form and limited to a small locality.

Post-Internet Era:

Numerous property portals have cropped up since the advent of internet. These property portals cover entire cities, entire states like Hawaii real estate listings, or even countries. And unlike the typical multiple listing services, these websites are not receptive to real estate brokers only. A big majority of these websites are open to all including brokers, agents, buyers, sellers, tenants, developers and other interested parties.

In the start, they were limited to just property details and prices but the more advanced ones are now listing the address, images, map, area, bedrooms, floors, pools or garages details. What’s more, some of these property listing services now allow the users to upload videos with their properties, which means that the sellers can have a virtual tour without even going to the property themselves. Such extensive property data means that buyers or sellers are no more bound to take agents into service, just to get their homes on listing services, though there are many other reasons to hire an agent.

This marketing technique builds upon knowing what a WordPress blog is. If you’re unfamiliar with WordPress or blogs in general, check out WordPress’s website and the rest of this article will make much more sense.

So now that you know some of the basics of what a WordPress blog is and what a Studio theme/template is for your blog, we can go a little more in-depth about search engine optimization (SEO) marketing for your blog, which is what’s going to drive all that wonderful, free, targeted traffic to your blog.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a big term but the concept is simple. And it’s a great marketing idea for us Realtors or agents to learn if you want free traffic visiting your website or blog.

Let me explain…

You know when you do a Google search for something and a list of website results are returned that match your search term you typed in? There are usually pages and pages of results but you only look at the first 1-2 pages, right?

Well, if you look in the upper search bar, you’ll see the total number of results that Google found, which is usually in the millions. You’d have to go through pages and pages of results to see the millions of website results.

So how do some of these websites owners have the marketing genius to get listed on the first 1-2 pages while the other millions of websites stay at the bottom of the results? SEO marketing!

There are ways to optimize your website so that search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN Bing, etc. rank your website to be most relevant to what the person is searching for. Therefore, you get rewarded with a higher ranking on the results page and get more traffic to your real estate website or blog.

Tons of SEO companies and tech guys try to “game” the search engines so their sites come up as the #1 or #2 result. The problem is that search engines like Google are changing their requirements all the time so it’s almost impossible to artificially get higher rankings.

But of course, there are some foundational ways to get higher rankings and most of them directly relate to the content on your site.

The content on your site, or the text/words, is one of the main aspects search engines scan to evaluate your website. This is why I think blogs are so effective because you are constantly writing new, relevant content for search engines to find.

You can do the same thing with regular static websites but it’s tougher. You’d have to constantly update and add new content, which is much more time consuming and technically difficult than with a WordPress blog. Plus, WordPress is much more user-friendly for “non-techy” Realtors or agents like me.

Here’s where we start to get a little more technical so buckle up…

Within your WordPress blog, there are tools called “plugins” that software developers have made to enhance different aspects of your WordPress blog. They’re incredible for all aspects of your marketing.

Many plugins are free, some cost a little money. They’re easy to install; you just search for the plugin you want, download it and activate it and “Forget about it!” (sorry, that’s my best Italian impression).

For example, I use a plugin called “Contact Form 7″, which automatically creates a contact form on our “Contact Us” page. I don’t have to deal with any programming, coding, HTML or any of that junk. I just download the plugin, adjust the settings and it’s up and running on my WordPress blog. It seems like programmers have thought of a solution like this for anything you can think of. It’s fabulous!

Since most of us web surfers don’t look past the first 1-2 pages of results when searching, we need to get our Realtor or agent blogs up as high as possible on those results pages, right? Of course, that assumes you want free, automated traffic.

This is going to be a little tough to picture if you haven’t seen or used a WordPress blog but we’ll try it anyway. When you write a post for your blog, you’ll be writing a Title, a Description and the actual Content (or Body) of your blog post.

The title you write will show up on the search engine results page. Go ahead and do a search on Google right now so you know what I’m talking about. See that blue colored “headline” for all the results? That’s the title. Just like any other marketing piece, the title or headline is vital to catch your prospects attention. So put extra effort into this part.

Underneath that title will be your description, which will tell the surfer what your post is all about, in a nutshell. See it? It’s usually about 2 sentences long, right under the blue colored title.

The content of your blog post won’t show up on the search results page but search engines will still be scouring that content with their little robots.

Now, there are certain “keywords” that people commonly search with, like “Seattle real estate” or “real estate jobs”. Search engines want to see good keywords in your title, description and blog post content.

Anyway, I hope this marketing idea wasn’t too hard to follow along with. If you’re a “techy” you’re probably saying, “Dude, give me a break. I already know this stuff.” And the rest of you are thinking, “Blog what? Search eng… huh?” In either case, this is a great marketing tool to use and learn more about.

Now go close some deals!

Here are what I consider to be some of the highlight points from the interview in note form:

• The number of pages crawled by Google is proportional to the Google PageRank of the website and its pages.
• PageRank decays as it moves deeper into pages.
• Minimize shared bandwidth to avoid failed crawled attempts due to host load limits.
• Duplicate content is merged into a single unit, not dropped or ignored completely.
• Avoid using Session IDs when possible.
• There is some PageRank loss in using a 301 redirect.
• The rel=canonical tag is okay to use with frequency and recommended when no 301 redirect is possible
• A blocked URL in a robots.txt is still indexed by Google
• Cutts recommends just letting Google crawl a website and sift out the duplicate or extraneous content. Excessive use of the robots.txt is unnecessary.
• PageRank sculpting is not necessary if a site’s architecture is sound.
• PageRank sculpting is being reduced in importance because Google wants search engines and users to see the same website linkage and have a similar experience when navigating the website.
• Be sure to use NoFollow links for ads on your website. Google does not want website advertisements effecting search engine rankings.
• Google has new link spam tools and technology that they will be implementing.

Of course, much of the information above is already known by most SEO professionals or was long suspected to be the case, but it’s always good to get an official word from Google itself on these matters.

Consider changing to a service provider that can place you higher in the rankings of search engine results. Granted, it doesn’t come for free or necessarily cheap, but it is absolutely crucial to drawing in visitors and potential leads. People should be able to find you on the first page or two of results, otherwise they’re unlikely to ever know anything about you!

Once you have a healthy stream of traffic coming to your site you still might not be getting the results you want then you have to first look at how you are getting information from visitors. Do you require them to give their information before they are allowed to use the features featured on your site? Do you let them decide whether or not they will give you their contact information?

There are two ways of going about retrieving visitor information. One way of looking at it is that if they are unwilling to provide you with information before they use the online services you provide, then there is little to no reason why they would after gaining access to it. The other way of thinking about it is that people will only give up that information voluntarily and will feel uneasy about giving it if they are forced to. In most cases, the second way is the correct school of thought.

The first thing you have to do is to set yourself apart from the rest of the Realtor websites. There are many real estate agent templates available to use, and odds are that you are using one yourself. Nothing is wrong with using what is already made and ready to use, after all it is probably best to use what’s tried and proven to work. But there is definite room for customization, and that’s what you must take advantage of to set yourself apart.

To appeal to those unfamiliar with the region, give a well-rounded description of the neighborhoods you work in. Those who are new or out of the area will appreciate them. Take advantage of these descriptions and work with local businesses to give coupons and discount in exchange for you advertising them in your neighborhood overviews.

Of course, you still need to give all the information your visitors will expect, such as listing information and prices, along with a great deal of photos and even online virtual tours with video. Combine this with the above mentioned tactics and you will have a winning web site. Your site’s visitors will be satisfied with the detailed neighborhood descriptions and they will be more willing to give you their contact information.

During the past week, Google cemented their effort even further by working out deals with Facebook and MySpace. They made the official announcements on their Google Blog.

We are already seeing tweets and other real-time data popping up all over the SERPS. Expect to see even more with Facebook and MySpace in the mix.