On March 22, LinkedIn announced it had surpassed 100 million users, growing at two new members per second. However, more importantly, LinkedIn has 3.6 million individual members who identify as employees, real estate marketing or board members of a non-profit. More than 1,000 non-profit organizations have established a company page, and there are 76,000 non-profit groups on LinkedIn.

Given that, it’s great news to hear that LinkedIn is putting more resources into supporting non-profit professionals and organizations. On May 9, the company launched LinkedIn Non-profit Solutions under its LinkedIn for Good brand.

LinkedIn brought on Bryan Breckenridge, former director of nonprofits and education at the Salesforce.com Foundation. The company has begun taking the steps to address nonprofits’ needs but will be doing a lot more, he says. For starters, LinkedIn has opened a learning centre page for nonprofits with great pointers, ideas and resources for maximizing a nonprofits’ presence on the site. Markets use LinkedIn for purposes such as real estate marketing. The learning centre specifically offers examples and best practices about how non-profit professionals and non-profit organizations can take advantage of LinkedIn.

Discounted recruiting solutions are a core part of the new LinkedIn Non-profit Solutions. Bryan says this year they will aggressively discount the price of three primary LinkedIn Recruiting Solutions products for nonprofits, starting as low as $400 per month (which is still a lot for smaller nonprofits):

• LinkedIn Recruiter
• Jobs Network/Job Slots
• Career Pages

LinkedIn Recruiting Solutions can help nonprofits differentiate themselves and recruit the right staff members, volunteers and board members to accomplish their missions. Visit the learning centre and click on the “contact us” button if you want more information about these products.

Companies, e.g. real estate marketing, make use of this network for optimization. This is great news for non-profit organizations that want to take advantage of the power of LinkedIn’s network. For example, a simple search for “volunteer manager” turned up in 287,985 member profiles within LinkedIn Recruiter. LinkedIn also foresees a formalization and globalization of its program at the start of 2012.

If you are involved in online reputation management and Real Estate Marketing, your goal is to displace negative results in the search engines with positive results. Let us look at leveraging social media profiles.

As with every search result in Google, the top results are generally made up of the most trusted and authoritative results, so it makes the most sense for us to talk about the most trusted authoritative social media sites at the moment Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus.

Facebook is by far one the most popular and visited sites in social media; however, for many people, it can also be the most problematic. The most common issue on Facebook is people or their friends posting unflattering pictures or unflattering status updates. That status update or picture from that party weekend may have been funny at the time, but it is not funny when you are applying for a job, trying to get the condo board to think you are a qualified, responsible tenant, or trying to prove that drunk driving incident really was not you. Thanks to Face book’s new timeline feature, it makes it incredibly easy for someone to skim through your profile and isolate those “wild college years.” Create a “close friends” group and edit all those items so only they can see them. Alternatively, you could block all the old info on your timeline. It’s much more drastic but also a lot more bulletproof.

If you are a Real Estate, doing Real Estate Marketing, you may not have those unflattering pictures of college years to contend with, but you may not have a rich history, or even a profile. If you don’t have a profile, start one. It is hard to link to a resource but, to be honest, Facebook changes so often that the link would need to be updated every few months. Google: “how to create a business profile on Facebook”.

Sadly, we all now have to treat our Facebook status updates like a Public Relations team. Do not post anything unflattering or crazy that you do not want to be associated with. An alternative course is to regularly post completely off the wall crazy information that is completely unbelievable. This gives you a bit of wiggle room and allows you to have plausible deniability. This really is only an option for personal accounts and is not for Real Estate Marketing.

For effective Real Estate Marketing here are all the different steps that are needed for an effective SEO strategy to get your sites found in a search.  For the real estate owner, who isn’t as familiar with the SEO terminology as some, it can seem like reading an instruction manual in Chinese.  Here are some favorite SEO terms to define and clarify in order to help those wanting to start the road to SEO success of Real Estate Marketing.

• Search Engine Optimization: Simply put, search engine optimization is the processes of improving the quality and volume of web traffic to a website by employing a series of proven SEO techniques that help a website achieve a higher ranking with the major search engines when certain keywords and phrases are put in the search field. This is great Real Estate Marketing.

• Black Hat SEO: Using unethical techniques to gain ranking in search engines. The search engines filter for such techniques and you may get banned from displaying in search engine results. This may include using keyword stuffing, using invisible text and doorway pages.

• White Hat SEO: The use of accepted SEO practices in order to get higher rankings, more traffic, etc. This includes writing quality content, using titles and Meta tags and doing keyword research.

• Search Algorithm: Google’s search algorithm is used to find the most relevant web pages for any search query. According to Google, the algorithm considers over 200 factors, including the PageRank value, the Meta and title tags, the content, age of the domain, etc.

• Doorway Pages: This is basically a fake page that the user will never see. It is purely for search engine spiders, and attempts to trick them into indexing the site higher.

• Keyword Stuffing: Since keyword density was an important factor on the early search algorithms, webmasters started to game the system by artificially inflating the keyword density inside their websites. This is called keyword stuffing. These days this practice won’t help you, and it can also get you penalized.

• Anchor Text - An HTML tag or text that allows you to create a link to another document or web page or to a bookmark within the current web page. 

• Nofollow Link: A link used to instruct search engines that a link should not influence ranking. They are used when you want to cut down on irrelevant content to improve the quality of search engine results. Don’t use nofollow when linking to internal pages in your website. Use it when linking to external pages that you don’t want to endorse. Dofollow links do not have the nofollow attribute and do pass on link juice to the sites they link to.

• PageRank: The algorithm that Google uses to estimate the relative important of pages around the web. The basic idea behind the algorithm is the fact that a link from page A to page B can be seen as a vote of trust from page A to page B. The higher the number of links (weighted to their value) to a page, therefore, the higher the probability that such page is important.

• Alt Text: This is basically alternative text placed for images, so that when you hover over an image a text box displays describing what the image is.

• Spider (bot, crawler, robots): Programs written to scour the web automatically for various reasons, like indexing pages, for spamming purposes.

• Cloaking - Showing a different web page to a search engine spider than what is normally seen. The purpose is to get the page ranked for specific keywords, and then use the incoming traffic to promote unrelated products or services. This practice is considering spamming and can get you penalized (if not banned) on most search engines.

• Link farm. A link farm is a group of websites where every website links to every other website, with the purpose of artificially increasing the PageRank of all the sites in the farm. This practice was often used in the early days of search engines, but today these sites are seeing as a spamming technique (and thus can get you penalized).