I held the Blackberry Storm....Finally

Hello again everyone,

I wouldn't call myself an impatient person all the time. Only when there is something new I want. Like the Blackberry Storm. I have literally been bugging the poor Verizon people weekly to find out any information I can about the release date of the storm. When I ask "When does the storm come out?" I always get the answer "They don't tell us that".

Well today was a little different. I am currently in Orlando FL at the NAR convention 2008 and I ran into the big Verizon Wireless booth. When I asked the young lady behind the booth when the storm was being released she said......."They don't tell us that!" AHHH! It drives me crazy. I then went to another area of the NAR expo and found the actual Blackberry booth. I figured where better to get the information I need than from the source.

I approached another young lady at the Blackberry booth and asked her the same question. As she began to mutter the words "They don't" I had to stop her and tell her my story. She gave me a sad look and handed me some pamphlets about the storm hoping to make me feel better. At this point I knew I had to pull out the big guns to get the info I needed. I started to ask her all kinds of technical questions about the storm like processor speeds, EVDO rev, storage capacity, OS capabilities etc. and finally she leaned over and whispered "There's one here if you want to play with it."

HOLY COW! There's a storm at the convention and she is willing to let me play with it. FINALLY!! I obviously agreed so she took me behind a curtain behind the booth and handed me a real fully functional Blackberry Storm. I was in heaven. The phone is everything they said it will be.

She asked me not to take any pictures or videos of the phone because it was not even supposed to be at the NAR convention much less activated and turned on. So I did the reasonable thing and recorded a short video while she wasn't looking. Below is a very short clip of me holding the final blackberry storm. I hope you enjoy it and from what I can tell this phone is going to take things up a notch.



Thanks,
Matt Rains
Real Estate Technology Online

SEO Series | Part 2 Search Engine Compatible

Part two in our series is going to ensure your website is "search engine compatible". Now that we have discussed the keywords and key phrases you are going to use in part one we can actually go into the guts of the website by discussing how to keep search engines happy with your site.

The first area we have to look at is what are the search engines looking at? What makes a search engine dislike you? Search engines have small programs or "scripts" that run called robots. These robots search through your site looking at your "code" and "content". Things that turn robots off are things like pop-ups, an over usage of pictures instead of text or all flash and no text content.

The key to keeping search engine bots happy is simply valuable easy to navigate content. Just be sure to keep your methods ethical and your content valuable. I tell people all the time that most search engines have gotten to the point where if your website truly deserves to be number one in the search result it will be.

Now for those of you that build your own site or have one built the following is for you. Make sure your "meta" tags are all relevant to your content and keywords. Always make sure your internal pages link back to your homepage so bots do not get lost or hit a dead end. Use external CSS whenever possible. If your using flash have a text version available for people without a flash player (iPhone users).

What this all comes down to in a nutshell is - the most important part of your website is how valuable and relevant your content is to the spectrum of visitors you are trying to appeal to. Like I said in step one the search engine world is a giant popularity contest and even if you have a sure fire way to become the most popular site on the net people will never consistently return if your content is no good and remember returning visitors shows Google that your content was worth coming back to.

PS - Our LIVE Real Estate Technology show will be aired Saturday 8pm instead of Sunday 8pm. We will be out of the country starting Sunday morning.

Have a greay day,
Matt Rains
Real Estate Technology Online

Just testing out a new toy.

Hope everyone is doing well. I just got a new toy I wanted test out in the back yard.

Hope everyone is having a great day and enjoying this great weather.

-Matt Rains
Real Estate Technology Online