This is one of the many formulas that can work with hard work, clever writing and regional focus. First pick a region and an audience….hopefully you are familiar with the region. If you are not then start doing your homework and write about it….be honest!

Posting
Write often, I would suggest five articles a week at least. More if you are doing this with a group. Even if you write and end up not posting, it is still important to write. Who knows that article may be helpful in a week, month or even a year.

Topics
Everything! I suggest having a couple theme days. For example post every Friday about hot spots in the area…”Friday Hot Spots”. You can send out a poll of 20 questions to all of your friends, or perhaps your target audience. Ask questions like best burger, best cocktail, best sports bar, best park etc… 20 questions = 20 Fridays and now you only need four articles per week. Posts like this tend to get comments and will give you ideas for other questions when you send your next questionnaire. These type of posts are region specific and will bring people back every week.

Perhaps Monday is the day that you write a short synopsis about the local market. This may prove to be a bit more difficult because you have to think, but also the market may not change a great deal from week to week. Keep in mind that you are a real estate agent, you should always have something to say about the market.

If you have a number of listings, you could showcase the properties that you are selling. This is another area where some times you may have more than enough, but more often than not you will not have a property to showcase.

Non real estate topics! Remember this is a regional blog and you are trying to build credibility as a a regional expert. your topics do not have to always be about real estate, in fact I would suggest writing about non real estate topics as often as possible.

Highlight local businesses, local personalities and local landmarks. Become the Anytown expert, trusted resource and authority!

Real estate blogging is not about being the best agent in an area, it’s about building a relationship online, just like in person. Have good content and be dedicated to writing, you will be surpirised that people are out there looking for you!

Good luck!

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I am still very active in the real estate technology sector and have done some fairly substantial projects in the search engine world.  I will be writing more often to discuss some of these projects and pass on what I have learned.

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Check out these queries by address…

3706 Perseus Dr, Sparks, NV 89436 - With Drive abbreviated

3706 Perseus Drive, Sparks, NV 89436 - With Drive Spelled out

3706 Perseus Sparks, NV 89436 - Now I will remove drive altogether

Interestingly enough, when the city, state and zip are removed the Zillow result is still returned first. Changing Dr to Drive not only removes zillow from the top spot…it’s nowhere to be seen?!?! I have found this to be true with Ave vs Avene as well. Now if I could only figure out why and how to fix this.

NOTE: During the half hour dedicated to this blog post I re-uploaded the images of the search results and now this post is showing up first in the SERPS with Drive spelled out.

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SEO

www.zillow.com/HomeDetails.htm?zprop=58382697

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SEO

At any rate, I just did a minor experiment placing a link from my me meager little blog to a Zillow local page. Zillow does not rank very well for any community pages in google. Oddly enough auburn wa real estate jumped to the second page in the google serps? So will now change that link to another small town and see if that page jumps. In theory all of this is not ground breaking , but I must see it for myself what kind of effect this has. I am dumping a ton of resources into getting good natural links to the local pages and I want to make sure it is time well spent!

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SEO

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Real Estate Web Sites, SEO

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Real Estate Web Sites

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Corporate Real Estate

Each key term has a current bid amount which determines your position in the sponsored links section. You can then decide how high up you’d like to be ranked based on your budget. Each time a search is made and your site appears as one of the sponsored links, is called an impression. These do not cost you any money but are worth looking into statistically to determine the effectiveness of your campaign. If someone clicks on your link, they are taken to the page on your website that you have linked it to and your account is debited with the amount you had bid for that term. This is referred to as the cost-per-click (CPC). You can set a budget each day and for the month and as soon as your budget for the day is depleted, you will cease to be found in the sponsored search results for that day unless you decide to reallocate more funds to your daily budget.

Ok, that may have been a bit of a mouthful to digest so let’s break it down and illustrate it:
You: a Las Vegas Realtor specializing in new home construction in Summerlin, Henderson and Las Vegas.

Your possible key terms: las vegas homes, new las vegas homes, summerlin property, henderson property, plus maybe about 70 other variations that are related.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s just focus on Google since it’s technically a verb and let’s only take into account 1 key term – “new las vegas homes”.
Your budget: $900/ month set at $30/day. That’s a lot of cash but that’s ok because Vegas is hot right now and you’re so money you don’t even know it. Let’s assume that you’re running your campaign 7 days a week because you believe that the market’s so hot right now that people are searching even on weekends instead of going to church or watching college football.
Let’s also assume that as of today, at this hour, the current cost per click for this key term is $3.00. That means, the person sitting at #1 is paying $2.75 every time someone does a search for “new las vegas homes” on Google, AND clicks on their link (which is sitting at #1 in the sponsored links section). The guy ranked at #2 has bid $2.50 and the third guy bid $2.35.
So here’s the guy at #1 at $3.00 CPC and here’s you – and you decide that this key term is so relevant to you that YOU want to be ranked #1 for the next few hours. So you access your AdWords account, set “new las vegas homes” to $2.76 to see if you’re now the new #1. Well, the guy in #1 is smarter than that and has set his campaign so that he’s bidding at a maximum of $2.99 to be in #1. You conveniently adjust your bid to $3.00 and hope that nobody else bids or it’ll make this example a little more painful to illustrate.

Congratulations, you’re now #1 at $3.00 CPC. So far so good… now watch the fish come to you!
As the day goes, and people Google (see how I used it as a verb?) “new las vegas homes” — some of them will immediately find out that your site is exactly what they are looking for and will click it and will be taken directly to a page on your site, maybe your properties page, maybe your homepage, maybe your MLS. That’s cost you $3.00. So your account is now down to $27 for the day and you’ve got maybe about 9 more clicks to go.
A couple of things to note at this point:

• If someone outbids your maximum bid, you slide down to #2 at your lowest bid for as long as your lowest bid is still higher than the guy in #3 (your lowest bid was $3.00 and the guy in #3’s highest bid was $2.50). If the guy in #1 has depleted his budget for the day, then he drops off the face of Google and you’re back in #1, if you’ve still got some cash left in your daily budget. You can also raise your bid if you still want to be #1 though in certain cases this is overkill.
• What happens, you ask – if your competitor is a douchebag and basically clicks on your site, goes back to Google, searches the same key term and clicks on your site again just to kick you out? Well, the eggheads at Google have thought about that too and have basically made sure that if someone from the same IP address clicks on the same sponsored link in the same day – then it won’t count as double. Further simplified – you only get charged once for that click despite it being clicked on multiply times from the same computer from the same IP address.

So the day goes on and about 9 other people click onto your site and your remaining $27.00 is done. Your budget is depleted for the day and you sir, are no longer on the sponsored links for that day. The person who was next in the bidding war takes your place. Hopefully the 10 unique people (or IP addresses) that have clicked onto your site have found what they were looking for and hopefully, have generated you some business.
That’s the basic idea – but now multiply that over the multiple keywords that you’ve got and you get a full-blown PPC campaign. The control panels for managing campaigns like this typically allow you to set your daily budget across the board for the entire campaign. They also allow you to globally monitor the status of each key word in terms of positioning, which allows you to determine which key term you’d like higher than the other.
All in all, while PPC may seem to be a costly and quite laborious endeavor to undertake in order to gain traffic and rankings – it is quite effective if managed and utilized to its potential. I like to compare it to maybe using drugs, minus any of the negative effects other than cost in that – the effects are near-instantaneous and continue as long as you are using the ‘drug’.
One thing I forgot to mention as well is that the control panels for these campaigns provide you with a host of statistics in order to gage how effective your campaign is going. Usually you’ll be looking at the number of impressions you’ve gotten (again, an impression is when your site has come up in a search as a sponsored link). If you find that you’re getting a lot of impressions but not enough visitors to your site, it’s possible that you’re either not being descriptive enough for your keyword or link, or that you might be bidding on the wrong keyword.

Below are some really helpful tips for efficiently and effectively managing a PPC campaign:

1. Keyword Selection. Choose less competitive keywords by going geo-specific. General terms like “mortgage” are going to be incredibly expensive (I’ve seen that term go for as high as $13/CPC and even higher). By going more specific (i.e. ‘reno mortgage loans’ or ‘calabasas home loan’ are going to be less expensive than just ‘mortgage’ or ‘home loan’) you are effectively narrowing the list of competitors for your key terms. Essentially you are bidding against your competitors in the industry and unless you’re a big corporate machine with the budget to spare – you’re going to need to pick your battles.

2. Proper Positioning. It isn’t always worth it to be #1. I can tell you honestly that, as a user of search engines, I only find that the top sponsored link is what I’m looking for about 40% of the time. 60% of the time I find what I’m looking for in positions #2-6 on sponsored and on natural (natural is everything that I didn’t mark in RED in the screenshot above. Choose your battles. Pick your most relevant key terms and determine what position you’d need to place them in. This will be based on the cost-per-click of these terms as well as your established daily budget.

3. Do Thy Research. When establishing a budget for your PPC marketing, take into consideration the business you’re in and determine whether your campaign needs to run 4,5 or 7 days a week. Someone who sells office supplies will most likely need to advertise only during work hours as I would think it to be rare for someone to look for great office deals on a weekend. I could be wrong though for this example, but you get the idea. Figure out how much money you have to dedicate to PPC based on the cost of the keywords you’ve selected. Managing a PPC campaign effectively is a balancing act of selecting the right keywords (in some cases, the more the merrier but in others, having a focused set of keywords placed up top is more than enough), positioning them correctly, and ultimately being able to convert the traffic you’re sending yourself.

4. Every Trip needs a Destination. When you setup a link from your PPC campaign – where are you driving the traffic? Are you sending people to your homepage with the 10 second flash intro? Are you sending them directly to your property listings? Are you sending them directly into your MLS where they can do a search and then not call you? One really effective means to maximize traffic I’ve learned in my previous job is to send people to a page on your site that provides relevant information to what they’ve searched for and then providing a means for them to give you their information (lead capture). With PPC, assuming you’ve done steps 1-3 correctly, in a perfect world – the only people who should be finding your site are the people who are looking exactly for what you’ve got to offer. By directing traffic to a page that whets enough of their appetite and then asks them for their information, you’ve converted your traffic into a lead which is the overall goal.

Another great idea is to combine PPC with a service that some IDX providers are able to offer which allows a user to do a search on the MLS, displays the results, but… prior to clicking into t he details of the property, asks the user to provide information to the site administrator. You’ll find that people, in general, will dance with you once you’ve earned their trust – and what better way to do that than by offering them the right amount of information. Quid pro quo, as they say.

5. Leads Need Love. Now, just because you’ve got traffic and great leads, it doesn’t mean that you’ve actually sold something and have made money. You’ve got to continue to build off of the trust you’ve just earned by constantly following-up and providing information to your lead.

So, in closing… is PPC the right thing for you? Maybe, maybe not. But let me tell you that it works if you do it correctly. Also, let me say that it is a lot easier than how I may have made it appear to be. Once you see the control panel and the tools, you’ll get a better feel for it. Services like Google’s AdWords provide a LOT of tutorials and guides on how to use their tools. And we’re also here to answer any of your questions as well.

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PPC, Real Estate Web Sites

I will say it again, …you need inbound links!

Inbound links are links TO YOUR WEBPAGE or WEBSITE, from other websites. These links tell search engines that your website is worth going to as well as provide that door for the occasional visitor. The text contained in the actual link (anchor text) is equally important. For example, “Oregon Real Estate” with a link to your website or page is a well executed inbound link, because it describes the link. On the other hand, “click here” or “view this link” tells the search engines nothing about where the link is taking them. Be sure to provide good anchor text with your inbound links.
Search engines, especially Google, rank your sites with a very complex algorithm that puts a great deal of emphasis on your sites popularity. The stronger the website that executes your link, the more powerful the link. A link from realtor.com is much more valuable than a link from your Aunts website, www.fluffythewondercat.biz. Basically, it’s like a popularity contest, the more relevant the vote cast in your favor, the better the outcome. The cooler the kids rooting for you, the more famous you are. Being king of the nerds doesn’t do too much.
There are a lot of companies out there that sell ‘link building’ services. Be wary of these as some of them make use of so-called “Link Farms”. These are sites that allow anyone to add a link and are viewed as spam by search engines. A truly effective link building campaign involves much time, research, know-how, know-where and Okay, now the hard part, how do you get links?

1. Forum, Community and Social Sites. Get involved with online communities and social sites. www.activerain.com is an excellent example of a site that will allow you to create a profile and link to your website, as is www.Linkedin.com. I would steer clear of www.myspace.com for professional reasons.

2. Write Good Content. Just like it sounds, write something that people think is interesting and you might get some links. This works best if you have a blog. Add information to your site at least once every 2 weeks. Make sure the information is relevant. Remember that the popular kid is the interesting one.

3. News Feeds and Blogs. Create a blog, write good content, become an authority on your neighborhood, link to other blogs. Provide information and articles that your audience can identify with, such as local real estate trends, or best local burger.

4. Partnerships. Form business partnerships as well as internet partnerships. Seek out people with complementing businesses to yours and and refer each other business and traffic both in person and in cyberspace.

5. Directory Submission. There are many free and paid directories that will provide linking opportunities. Best-web-directories.com is an excellent resource. Make sure the directories are relevant to your website.

6. Ask for it? Find relevant sites that might give you or charge you a small fee for a link. Local newspapers or chamber of commerce sites are a good example. Another example, Seattle Real Estate!

7. Blog Comments. Comment on blogs with a link back to your site as part of your signature. Make sure the comments add to the post. “Good Post, Bro”, does not qualify.

8. Article Submission. Submit articles to sites and if it gets picked up, the traffic and links can be potentially huge. www.realestatevoices.com is a new real estate themed site similar to Digg.

9. PR. Do something remarkable, write a press release and submit to prweb.com or any online press release site. They will release your article to the press and you may get picked up by some noteworthy sources.

10. Charity Events. Get involved with charities, they typically list people that are associated with their organization.

Remember that your website is your online business card so you’ve got to give it out as much as you possibly can. Make sure that you’re getting your name out there, and most importantly, providing a means for them to find you and know more about what you do.

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Real Estate Web Sites, SEO

[tags]Word Press, Technorati, SimpleTags[/tags]

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Real Estate Web Sites