Posts Tagged ‘google real estate’

Want more love for your wordpress blog? One way to get your lovely posts more eyeballs is to make sure you are notifying as many ‘services’ that your blog has been updated.

It’s true that your wordpress blog already pings search engines when you post, but it doesnt hurt to make sure, and to ping more.

WordPress SEO

Click Settings from the left menu, and then click, Writing:

In the Writing page, scroll down to Update Services, you’ll notice that pingomatic is already there. However you can notify way more than the pingomatic services.

Click the Update Services link.

This will bring you to a WordPress.org page:

Scroll down to the bottom of this page where you will see a list titled: XML-RPC Ping Services

Highlight and copy that list. The paste it into your Update Services list on your Writing page, in Settings.

Click Save Changes to and you are all set.

**Check out our NEW  Wordpress Real Estate theme here!**

limeyboy.com helps real estate agents get more from the web! How can we help you?

Still not blogging? Well, we’re not going to rest until you are. Are you blogging, but not really sure why?

Here’s yet another reason why it is such a good thing. It might get a little geeky here, but we’ll insulate you from the worst of it.

Ok, on a fundamental level websites and blogs are typically constructed using different frameworks. This is essentially because historically speaking they have been built of different purposes.

The Typical Website Model

Generally speaking websites, at worst, are rather like pretty fleshed out yellow pages ads. A series of pages who’s content seldom changes, (disclaimer: this is not the approach we approve of ), how many times does a Contact Us, or About Us page really have to change. So whenever a page changes or new pages are added, its wise to update your sitemap.

In short, a sitemap is a file that features all the links to pages on your website. When you have an updated site map, you notify the search engines that it’s updated and at some point they’ll pop over to take a look.

There is often a delay, of days if not weeks for search engines to come by and check out the changes. Frustratingly there’s not much that can be done to encourage them to by any sooner.

The Blog Model

Blogs are about being current, what’s happening now, or what’s just happened. Their MO is to get news out there.

The whole point of news is that it’s…that’s right, NEW.

When you write a new blog post and hit ‘publish’ something amazing (you might have to be a geek to use ‘amazing’ in this context) happens. Hitting publish, not only publishes your content to your blog but, importantly it sends out a ‘ping’ to the search engines to notify them that some news has just been reported.

Newness is what search engines crave.

By writing content on your blog you are giving search engines what they are looking for. Is it starting to become clear?

The Difference is Remarkable

Whereas it can be days if not weeks for search engines to find your new page on your website, you can get them to see (or index) your new blog post in minutes, which is frankly, astounding. Simply give search engines what they want and be rewarded.

See For Yourself

The blog post you are reading was published to the web at 9.15am this morning. It’s now 9.25am and google has already indexed or seen the post and this can only help our relevance in search results… That took 7 minutes.

Most Realtors call us to complain that they can’t be found at search engines. I think we both know what you can do to change that.

We can help you design and configure your real estate blog and coach you in your blog-craft.

As we trawl the ever expanding sea of real estate marketing information we often see statements such as the title above.

We think this is to misunderstand marketing on a number of levels.

Firstly this statement is simply too adversarial. As if it’s binary, either, or.

Once you have your real estate website, and it has arrived at the first page of a search engine for key words it was designed for, (you did remember to do that bit right?), it can be easy for agents to think that they simply need to sit back and wait for the leads to come in. Hopefully that will happen.

However, these leads will only come in from those people who THINK to go to a search engine to look for this type of information online. We all know people who would not think of doing this as the informational-gathering-starting point. If you visit a home and they still have yellow-pages lying around, that may tell you something about where they look for information.

For those ‘offline people’, (hello  mum), they require offline marketing to tell them that this resource exists. Don’t ignore them.

Vanessa Fox, formerly of google and Zillow says that perhaps as much as 67% of all search comes from offline channels. That means the hard copy you are sending out.

The best results we see are when both offline and online marketing are engaged in an innovative, harmonious and collaborative way. I think if the question is rephrased to:

Traditional offline and online marketing

VS

Innovative offline and online marketing

I think the distinction is clearer.

So what is, Innovative Offline Real Estate Marketing? Our friend Josh Wilton, Manager of Weichert Princeton, is really leading the charge in helping his agents re-imagine what offline marketing should be.

The age of the ‘static’ one dimensional direct mail piece is dead and never to return. By the time your ‘Just Listed’ card or ‘Just Sold’ card hits the neighborhood it is old news. The customer has already received 10 different auto-emails from competing agents and your card is an antique. Instead think of your direct mail as a commercial for your website. If you sending a ‘Just Listed’ card, have your website promoted more heavily than the house itself. For example one 1000 piece mailing that promoted a website generated 4100 ‘requests’ on that website within 10 days! You basically double the impact of your direct mail campaign. Josh Wilton, Weichert Princeton.

We couldn’t agree more.

The “Just Listed” is useful to two people, the agent, who is promoting themselves, and the seller who sees a glossy picture of their home, and doesn’t realize the agent is promoting themselves.

The problem is for other 998 recipients, they could care less about either. They are interested in

1. what’s currently for sale in their town
2. what sold
3. their home’s value,

If your mailing doesn’t address what your audience wants to read you might be better off not simply going through the motions.

Much like home ownership and the seemingly never ending list of projects, websites as well, are never really finished. There’s always another room to paint, something to tweak, or an addition to ponder.

Sure, at some point the initial build out of a website is completed but really that can just be the end of the beginning. Why, well search results are living, moving organism. There are always new sites coming along nipping at your toes.

This also makes your real estate website’s relative position within those results contextual.

What on earth does that mean? We’ll, the relevance of your website’s when matched against keywords typed into search engines is only part of the picture. Search engines also look at the other sites, and their respective contents to see where you site appears among them.

This means that things can change. Hopefully the changes are in the upward direction! Our feeling at limeyboy is to try and keep our agents ahead of these changes, rather than trying to respond to them after the fact.

One example of working with content to create improvement would be on Victor Dedvukaj’s site for Rye NY real estate. We were spending sometime doing our rounds of SEO, and saw that there was a trend of searches for waterfront homes.

We suggested to Victor that we cater for this demand on his website and now his site is on the first page of google for this niche market.

Use Google Maps to find houses and apartments currently on the market.

Search for nearby schools, restaurants and public transport, explore the neighborhood in Street View or simply get directions from the property to your favourite places – all from a single map!

Make sure your listings are on googlebase!