Seth Siegler is the cofounder of Simplistate, an eco-friendly, virtual real estate brokerage. He is also the owner and founder of Robot Workshop – a real estate technology solutions company specializing in IDX and PPC based lead generation. You can find his real estate industry blog at www.sethsiegler.com. We are also pleased to announce that Seth will be speaking at Real Estate Connect NYC 2011 in January!

Most readers of this blog would probably consider themselves more tech savvy than the average real estate agent.  (But, that’s like saying you’re smarter than an average chunk of concrete …)

The truth is though, that most of you reading this actually are pretty tech-tastic but there may be a few small ways that you’re online presence make you look otherwise. 

Here are some critical mistakes that make you look tech illiterate.

1.  Your Site is Not at a Dedicated Domain

What’s the difference between jim.com and jim.wordpress.com?  The second choice makes you look like you probably write emails in all capital letters.  Losing the “.wordpress.com” part means that you’ll need to setup a Wordpress.org framework site on your own hosting package or server.  If you go with a hosting provider like Media Temple, and choose their bottom tier Grid-Service plan, you can set one up with one click.  Then you have an internet-universe full of themes that can make you look professional.  Plus your URL will give you the street cred that you think you already have… (And no, redirecting a URL to your .wordpress.com site isn’t the same thing)

2.  Your Logo is Ridiculous/Non Existent

You shouldn’t make it yourself, and you shouldn’t let your young relative make it (unless that young relative is an advanced design student).  Your logo is important and you should spend some money/effort on it.  If you have the budget, you should go with an experienced design team to brand your consumer experience.  If you don’t have the cash, it may be worth trying a crowd-sourcing site like 48hourslogo.com.  You can get freelance designers to compete for your business, offering logos for your brand and can award a prize as low as $79 to the winning designer.

3.  You Have an Email Address That isn’t on Your Domain

Do you think you’d get an email from someone who works at Ford from their Gmail address?  Or worse, an AOL or Yahoo address?  Your email address should match your website URL.  mike@mikerealestate.com  Don’t disconnect your old email address though.  Forward it to your new one and answer all emails from that new email address.

4.  Too Many Nav Options

The best sites are the ones that are simple to navigate.  Do you really need 15+ options on your nav menu?  Options should be simple for your visitors and all signs should eventually point to your contact info, your IDX or your blog.  Everything else is just an obstacle to lead conversion.  Plus it makes your site look crowded, messy and amateur. 

5.  Non-Existent or Bad HTML Title Tags

Take a look at the title bars of your website pages.  Do they simply say “home” or “index”?  Or worse, are they 50 words long, grasping for every last drop of SEO benefit?  Either way they make you look bad.  If you haven’t taken the time to add real, descriptive title tags to your pages, people assume you don’t know how.  (If you don’t know how, just Google it.)And by the way, Google doesn’t like artificially inflated title tags. 

6.  Auto-Starting Video on Home Page

If you have a video on your home page, make sure it doesn’t start automatically.  People often browse at work or with other people in the room.  If their volume is up, they could be startled and even embarrassed by the unexpected noise, and immediately leave your site.  Not good.

7.  Dramatic Brand Descriptions That Include Cheesy Buzz Words Like “leverage” or “revolutionizing.” OR Attempts at Words That Seem Big Like “Cloud Computing”

The word “leveraging” is so vague and overused that I force myself to imagine a kitten being killed each time I almost use it.  Also, remember that you want to relate to people.  If you are trying to blow them away with techy sounding words, it won’t end well for your bottom line.  And besides, when I see someone taking pride in using cloud technology for their CRM or email system, I know that they just learned the term within the last couple of weeks. 

8.  Your Facebook Profile Is Unlocked

Having a completely unlocked Facebook profile is most like being that weird 45 year old who hangs out at college bars with the top four buttons of his shirt open.  You can make it much worse by using a professional glamour photo as your profile pic and making your entire Facebook presence about your real estate business. 

Have I missed anything?  I’ll be the first one to admit that I have a few items I need to address in my own web presence.  How about you?  Did anything on your site make my list?

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Last week I stumbled across a really interesting and easy-to-use personalized search plugin – Kikin.

Kikin, plugin you download for your browser, was launched in late 2009 and is still in beta form. When you search on Google, Bing or Yahoo – in addition to your regular search results, it will also aggregate relevant content from: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google Reader, iTunes, eBay and/or Amazon.

Although Google is beginning to aggregate social media into its search parameters – what is different about Kikin is that you see results from YOUR streams – which means you are getting richer, personal and more relevant search results.

Here’s a screen shot from a search I did with the word “news”:

Who wouldn’t prefer the recommendations of friends through Facebook or Twitter over results returned by a search engine?

There’s a few things I really like about Kikin:

1. It’s compatible with Firefox, Safari and IE (Chrome coming soon)
2. Quick download. It took just seconds to download it and I instantly start using it.
3. Re-tweet function. Within the twitter stream you can instantly re-tweet something.
4. Customize Twitter stream. You can opt to view just your Twitter stream or all tweets.
5. Facebook news stream. Kikin connects with your news feed via Facebook Connect.

I also really like that you can easily moderate what content you want to see and which content isn’t useful to you.

You may not be interested in results from eBay for your searches, which you can disable (of course, it will still show up in your Google results). And if you tire of Kikin’s results, you can easily minimize the pane. It will interesting as Kikin moves out of it’s beta phase to see what kind of impact this may have on real estate home searches or agent searches.

For fun, I typed in ‘Realtor’ into Google using Kikin, and this Twitter post came up:

“If the realtor & her client next to us each stopped answering incoming cell calls they might get their biz mtg finished. Weird. Rude. Unpro.”

I also typed in ‘Realtor Bay Area’ and from iTunes dozens of real estate podcasts came up! from ReMax and Prudential. Interesting!

The bottom line is this: search is becoming more and more personalized and relevant. Not only that, but Kikin makes perfect use of how so many of us interact on the web – we surf from one site to another looking for prices, reviews, etc.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this company evolves!

What do you think? Would love your feedback, please leave me a comment below!

Written by Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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Yahoo Real Estate, the nation’s #2 real estate search portal, launched a redesign today.

The site, which has adopted a much more muted color palette (lots of earth tones), offers up a new dynamic search results page and much larger photos in its listing pages (see Inman News story). It’s a decent catchup effort but still needs to go a bit further to keep pace with some of the technology leaders.

While the new Y!RE experience is intuitive, I found as I dug deeper into the results, it began to feel like there was often one too many clicks to get to where I wanted to go. This was a little frustrating frankly.

More importantly however, the individual listing pages still felt somewhat spartan and vaguely underwhelming, especially compared to some of the newer search offerings like those on MRIS’ HomesDatabase (see MRIS Takes on the Search Sites).

All that said however, Steve Schultz, Senior Director for Yahoo! Real Estate writes on the Yahoo! blog that this is just the beginning; more is coming, including “a greater emphasis on property photos and meaty new personalization and sharing services.”

In conjunction with the new public face to Yahoo! Real Estate, the company has also introduced a range of new features for Real Estate professionals. Brokers, if you’re already syndicating your listings to the portal, you can now log into Yahoo! and manage them all online.

Agents interested in tapping Yahoo!’s reach can purchase a classifieds listing on the site for $49.95 and are also encouraged by the company to give Yahoo! Sponsored Search a whirl to build traffic to their websites.

Despite a tough market and months of turmoil at the company, Yahoo! has made some impressive strides over the last couple of years in this space, and it looks like they are still committed to seeing their presence dial up. I’m looking forward to seeing more from them in the future.

Yahoo! Real Estate, Yahoo!, real estate search, real estate 2.0, real estate

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Microsoft launches a $44.6 Billion unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo.

Let’s assume for a moment that the deal will stick (and it certainly sounds like it’s farther along than we think) – what does it mean for online real estate?

First and foremost, it likely means consolidation at the top of the real estate portals as the #2 and #3 sites (according to ComScore) will probably merge.

MSN Real Estate has been the ugly stepchild of the Real Estate 2.0 crowd to date – merely an afterthought, despite its massive monthly traffic.

Yahoo Real Estate, by contrast, has been pushing out new features steadily and is clearly the superior of the two destinations. No doubt in my mind – Y!RE will win out and become the dominant destination. This is surely great news in the minds of the folks at Yahoo who have been troubled by their future for weeks (see What’s in Store for Yahoo Real Estate).

Who this impacts most is Move.com – partly because they’ll see a combined entity nipping at the heels of Realtor.com, but also because they currently power MSN’s real estate searches (and no doubt draw a bunch of their own traffic from those searches).

Will Y!RE under its tent, MSN will likely push that relationship to the side and focus on tying all of its new properties under a revamped real estate destination.

A revitalized MicroHoo mega-portal is something that the other Real Estate 2.0 participants must dread as well. Especially since most are now into the second and third years of operations and are still hoping to gain traction amongst consumers. This could be the final nail in their coffins.

In any case, all speculation at this stage. But definitely fun to think about.

More:

• Greg Sterling gives ‘Micro-Hoo’ the Local Angle

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Just in case you hadn’t had enough already, Yahoo! News has re-purposed Redfin’s controversial 60 Minutes segment into a new microsite called Real Estate: Buying And Selling Online.

Unfortunately, the original Lesly Stahl segment has been split into several short clips, losing whatever coherence the original had and making it nearly unwatchable (this was presumably done so they could sell more advertising spots). Also, the video, when played, launches sluggishly into a separate browser window — a web-video practice I thought had disappeared along with RealMedia and WindowsMedia codecs. When you lump this all together, the whole exercise really looks like a way just to repackage old content to sell ads.

That said, the site is cleanly layed out and incorporates some interesting social features; a lively comment section, video ratings (only 2.5 stars so far) and polls (60% would buy or sell a house online). It also features some cheeky copyrighting; the words ‘Old School’ under a thumbnail of a Remax agent loading a sign in a car, for instance.

Ironically, no link to Yahoo! Real Estate to be found on the site, though Yahoo! Finance (with a bad link to boot) and Yahoo! Answers are featured.

But probably my favorite feature (and one that nearly made me spit my tea over my screen) was the Most Popular Viewed Segments section, which perhaps subconsciously reveals the watching habits of the microsite’s visitors?

[h/t Matt Goyer for the head's up]

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Yahoo! Finance is the online Goliath in the financial news space. Netratings puts its December page views at over 600 million, more than twice its closest competitor, MSN Money. (Source: 24/7 Wall St.: Yahoo! Finance Beats The Competition)

Last week, they retooled the site and added a number of new content options. CNET reported that these included “how-to guides for tax planning, budgeting, real estate planning, and saving for college and retirement.”

Of course that second-to-last option caught my eye, so I headed over to check it out. All in all, Yahoo! Finance’s real-estate section is pretty comprehensive; it features a number of expert opinions, mortgage rate information and a selection of calculators (none as comprehensive as HouseMath 2.0 ), as well as it pulls questions from Yahoo! Answers.

I wondered how this redesign would impact Yahoo! Real Estate however, so I emailed Michael Yang, General Manager of Yahoo Real Estate with the question. Here is a portion of his response:

We are sister units. Y! Finance is designed for people who want to enjoy, manage and grow their money. They are focused on programming rich editorial experiences around money. Naturally, real estate certainly plays a role. Yahoo! Real Estate is tasked with providing users with the specific tools and products they need when making a home purchase or renting an apartment, etc. The groups work closely together to ensure we’re offering our users the right tools and information, regardless of which site they are visiting.

More specifically, yes, you will see more sharing between the two groups, with Yahoo! Real Estate consuming Yahoo! Finance content and publishing on our side, and Yahoo! Finance consuming Yahoo! Real Estate listings and publishing on their side. If you look right now, Yahoo! Finance has links to “Search for Homes for Saleâ€? and “Check Home Valuesâ€? (which leads users over to Yahoo! Real Estate) as part of the “Things To Doâ€? section in the footer of every page of Personal Finance. We have a roll-out plan with them over the next few months – starting with the incorporation of a Real Estate Search Box in Personal Finance.

Overall, I like the look of the new page, but it does feel kind of static. Kind of soul-less.

One glaring omission is the lack of any real estate blogs. I’d love to see them supplement their ‘expert’ columnists with a smattering of real estate related blog posts. You could allow bloggers to submit their RSS feeds for inclusion, as a way to liven up the page with fresh content, for example. In my opinion, that would make the page far more immediate, and much less cold, than the current incarnation.

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Yahoo! Search Marketing rolled out its new advertising platform, dubbed Panama, today.

The biggest leap forward with Panama is that Yahoo has greatly simplified the process of signing up and purchasing CPC advertising on its properties. This is great news for all marketers.

Panama basically boils down the process to down to five simple steps, which means most folks will be up and running in no time flat.

So, to try this out, I thought I might try and buy some advertising for this blog. Here’s what I found.

Step 1. Choose a Geographic Location

I chose Entire Market (United States and Canada). I figured I might as well shoot wide – but you could refine your location to target a particular geographic area. Panama lets you plug in a zip code and a radius search to localize your ad even more specifically.

Step 2. Pick Your Keywords

Quite often when I get to this point I start to draw a blank about which keywords I’m going to choose. Thankfully Panama’s algorithm lets you type in some words that describe your product or service and it returns a number of suggested keyword combinations for you.

For the purposes of this experiment I used the terms ‘real estate’, ‘real estate marketing’ and ‘real estate consulting’ (hey, why not?). Out of the list Panama gave me, I picked the following 16 keywords:

real estate marketing tool
real estate agent marketing
real estate marketing idea
real estate marketing online
realtor marketing
real estate advertising
real estate advertising marketing
real estate web site
real estate internet marketing
real estate marketing strategy
real estate marketing plan
real estate marketing technique
real estate marketing system
advertising for realtor
marketing real estate web site
real estate lead generation

Step 3. Set Your Daily Advertising Budget

I figured I’d spend about $4 a day ($120 a month). Not extravagant by any means, but realistic given what little revenue this blog generates. I suspect this is in line with what a single Realtor would be spending as well, with large producers or Brokers spending significantly more.

Panama tells me that’ll let me get a maximum bid of $0.85 and result in 99,330 monthly impressions and 197 monthly clicks.

Of course this will vary considerably depending on what keywords you select in step 2.

Step 4. Create Your Ad

Here you can let your creative juices fly. Unfortunately for me, it’s late in the day and I’m pretty wiped so this is the best I could come up with. Hopefully you’ll be more successful.

Step 5. Activate Your Ad

Punch in your billing information and off you go! And this is where I stopped.

I really like Panama’s ease of use and I think its localization options will be especially valuable to real estate marketers.

My biggest concern is that I’m not sure it’s the right place to be spending my money. Just looking at my own traffic logs, I get barely any traffic at all from Yahoo’s search engine right now. Traffic from Google dwarfs it nearly 10 to 1. And that’s the crux of the problem.

No matter how many improvements it rolls out to its platform, Yahoo will be the perennial second placer behind Google AdWords. Despite pioneering the PPC concept (when it was Overture), Yahoo just can’t compete to the depth of Google’s network and the stranglehold it has on search.

I suppose if you can afford to add Yahoo to your PPC advertising plan, or if you’re experienced enough with AdWords and want to extend your reach, Panama will definitely make it easier to add Yahoo to your media mix.

But if you have a small budget and are just looking to dip your toes into PPC advertising, as I suspect is the case with most Realtors, I still think you’re better off sticking with Google.

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Ms. Dewey is a different kind of search engine. Makes Google and Yahoo! feel a little boring. Check it out and you’ll see why. I’m not sure how relevant its search results are – but then again, does it really matter?

[via Chris Pirillo]

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A recent post on real estate 2.x stirs up the old question about Zillow’s business model once again. According to an anonymous commenter on that site (who lays out a lengthly calculation) “every man woman and child on earth must visit Zillow 2.0 times EACH per year” in order for Zillow to be profitable enough to pay back its investors.

Clearly, following that logic, advertising can’t be Zillow’s only planned revenue source. Now you have Yahoo’s CFO warning of a slowdown in advertising sales, and their stock drops 11% in response. Zillow has repeatedly said they are a media site – but I just don’t buy it. To bet the future solely on advertising revenue would be suicidal, in my opinion.

Of course there’s potential licensing fees from its partner deals, but even that seems limited since they’re just giving away their API. Some have even fretted about Zillow’s potential entry into the real estate brokerage game, but I doubt that’s likely to happen – I’m sure they don’t want the hassles.

What’s a site like Zillow to do?

WebHomeUSABlog brings up an interesting point that maybe Zillow’s endgame isn’t profitibility after all, but rather acquisition by one of the big three Internet giants (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft). I suspect this is the most likely exit strategy Zillow’s executive team is gunning for.

So, just out of curiosity, I thought I’d throw the question out to the crowd. If Zillow were to be acquired – who’s going to do it?

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I’m becoming increasingly intrigued by the number of “local” web sites that are being launched or revamped at the moment. Backfence.com, which launched its newest California site this week, is just another in a long line of similar sites in the same space: Kudzu.com, Judy’s Book (read my take on them here) and Yelp.com, to name just a few. Search Engine Journal reports that Yahoo! Local has updated this week as well.

While the ‘local’ concept isn’t new, it looks to me like many of these sites have finally hit on the magic combination of mashups, reviews, social networking and news that create the elusive “stickiness” factor that so many sites fail to find. Finally, many of these sites are actually useable and offer some great information to consumers.

I think we’re on the verge of a tipping point here, where some of these sites actually start to cross over into the mainstream and move out of the geek/Web 2.0 crowd.

Of course, with so many competing sites out there, there’s bound to be a shakeout. And I’m not sure which of these sites will still be standing a year from now (though the smart money is on Yahoo! being one of them), but as the dust settles I’m sure we’ll start to see who the clear winners are.

The bottom line is I think there is an incredibly rich opportunity here for some smart advertising by Realtors. As the feature sets become more and more compelling, consumers will migrate onto these local/neighborhood sites, and with the right ad buy a smart Realtor or Broker could be right there in front of them.

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