2007: Leaving Seattle Real Estate behind?

I wrote this blog, while being on the couch all day watching the Travel channel. Not a bad life, but I was certainly down and out with the Flu. Hopefully you all had a better day. This year is going to be much better than last, so many things were up in the air last year. We certainly know what we are doing now, and have specific goals for 2008, at least for the first 3 months. Little by little, a little train engine that could, will make it up the hill. For those of you trying to achieve a goal, don’t give up, don’t ever give up. Just find a way, no matter what you have to do, keep the goal in sight. I thank my dear friends at RentExpert.com the Vacation Rentals Software people and ITEX the Barter Network for their support and help. Ok, I want to thank the Comfortzone Infrared Heaters people and LoveRelic.com silver jewelry people too, thanks all!

I find my self spending more time analyzing keywords to SEO my blog or one of our friends and clients websites, way more than I ever thought. Is this what my life in 2007 has come to? I do this by visiting adwords.google.com on a weekly or daily basis, way too much. How much time will you spend on analyzing keywords to SEO your favorite blog or website? Well, that depends on your intentions and professional goals of being an Internet Marketing person. The world of SEO has changed a lot, Overture for keywords is dead, it died in 2007, their system showed errors for weeks, it had in accurate data going back to Jan. 07 for months at a time.

No worries, Google is the key and top search rankings, every one knows that. And if you use any keyword SEO tool, please, please, make sure it uses the Google Adwords keyword API’s (tech speak for Google technology and data). It’s free, but it’s not perfect either, you have to use acronyms, thesauruses, and a dictionary for a comprehensive research. If you want to be a smart SEO, you have to look for differences in key word search volumes, and do your home work. The best way to figure out keyword search volume is to compare those bars. What you don’t know about these Google traffic Bars, have you been to adwords.Google.com yet, and done a keyword search yet? Do this first, but to get better results you have to actually buy Google ads for top 10-20 keywords. Why do I limit it to top 10 keywords? As a blogging guru and SEO expert, you have to manage things, and after 20 of any thing, it gets very hard. To start out any project, I actually recommend to go with 5 to 10 keywords tops. Focus is the key to achieving success in top rankings and promoting your business, not just in life.

No blog written on Dec. 31st is complete without mention of a New Year coming upon us. Yes, what a year it has been. We started 2007 with SEO‘ing for keywords “Real Estate IDX”, guess who is #1 on those keywords? Yes it’s us, and our success started with a top 10 result for Seattle real estate website UrbanTango.com back in 2004. That forced me to learn about SEO way back in 2003, because I paid some schmuck $300/month to get my site ranked on search engines, and I couldn’t even find UrbanTango.com, any where in Google. Forget about finding it under any keywords for “Seattle Real Estate“. This actually started my passion for SEO and back in to technology. My passion for marketing and for high rankings on Google drove me to many late nights reading and applying. Finally the day arrived when UrbanTango.com was ranked in the top 10 on Google for “Seattle Real Estate” and “Seattle Real Estate agents“. This feat, was already achieved with MSN and Yahoo months ago, but Google was the goal, and since those days in 2003, I have been following and learning everything I can about SEO and top rankings. This has led me to start promoting our vacation rentals software and online booking software site Blog.RentExpert.com and ITEX the Trade Exchange Network and Barter network for small business success.

We actually got out of real estate websites business back in May/June 2007, we were more passionate about blogging and blogcasting (which we called SEO and promoting your brand with Blogs). We are so thank ful, as we had no idea that the Housing bubble was going to pop this big. Thank God we are no longer selling software and services in the Seattle Real Estate or any real estate websites business. We have kept our websites around just for history’s sake, and we never thought we would get in to SEO as a service providers. But now days, we actually have SEO Clients, they are mostly friends who have businesses, we never wanted SEO clients. We have just been trying to promote our own properties, MyTypes.com for blogging, Free Blogs, GreenIsBetter.org for Infrared heaters, and MyTypes.com/Jewelry for our Cross Jewelry. Now I am an SEO for hire I guess, anything to continue our passion for blogging and to create community blogs.

That is why as a serious SEO, I check and recheck keywords, because I have a lot riding on this. Our clients are not just clients, they are our friends and our own small business blogs. I think any internet marketing 2.0 person today, checks and constantly analyzes his/her keywords quite often. Will you do it enough? You should, especially as you get ranked in the top 10 of your choice keywords to grow your business.

As always we thank our friends at ITEX Barter and Trade Exchange Network, LoveRelic.com for Cross Jewelry, and ComfortZone Infrared heaters which are better than any Edenpure Heater. We also have to thank our friends from Blog.RentExpert.com, they provide Vacation rentals software that has the most comprehensive features of any online booking software. But this is not just our humble opinion, check them out, thanks for supporting this blog and our financial supporters.