Five “Top 10″ Lists for REALTOR® Web Content Writing – Part Two

For everyone that followed along yesterday here is part two of my article on Five Top 10 Lists for REALTOR® Web Content Writing. (if you missed it read Part One!)

Top 10 Things to Know About Foreclosure

1. Foreclosure is a process, not a thing: foreclosure is a series of events not a state of being. Lenders do not foreclose on homeowners they foreclosure on a property
2. The foreclosure process has 4 phases: rights and options vary on the stage of your home and the state you live in. Know what laws apply to you
3. Difficult financial situations do not mean foreclosure: steps to avoid foreclosure
4. Mortgage lenders are not real estate agents: they would rather work with you to keep your home then go through the process to get it on the market
5. You can sell you home quick when foreclosure is knocking: if you keep an aggressive, motivated attitude and keep your home in good condition to sell if can be sold fast (short sale)
6. Missed payments – all is not lost: even if you’ve missed mortgage payments there are ways to stop foreclosure
7. A short sale is better than foreclosure: what’s the difference?
8. Foreclosure has major legal, tax and credit consequences
9. Buying a foreclosure: Crunch the numbers first to make sure you really are getting a deal
10. Understand your mortgage: many homeowners who end up in foreclosure say they were unaware of some crucial pieces of information about their mortgage

Top 10 Projects That Add to Your Homes Value

1. Conquer Clutter: cleaning and de-cluttering is by far the most cost-effective way to add value to your home. Your home will look larger and more livable AND makes a great first impression on homebuyers. Buyers want to see a clean, neutral space where they can envision their own belongings.
2. Add Insulation: energy-efficient upgrades have two advantages, they add value to your home and they save you money in the long run.
3. Build a Fence: adding a fence to your property can enhance its appearance, give you extra privacy. Remember to check your local zoning codes!
4. Finish the Basement: If you’re willing to take on a major remodeling project, finishing your basement.
5. Repair and Clean the Gutters: While they’re certainly not a home’s most exciting feature, gutters should be at the top of your list of exterior updates.
6. Add Outdoor Lighting: If you have a patio or deck that doesn’t get much use, start making it more welcoming by installing outdoor lighting.
7. Tidy your Lawn: When it comes to adding value to your home, curb appeal is key! Reseed any bad areas and, season permitting, plant some colorful flowers.
8. Maximize Storage Space: Real estate professionals agree that ample storage space tops most homebuyers’ wish lists. Closet organization systems can be customized to fit most closets and you can often install them yourself.
9. Update Fixtures: Simply replacing old fixtures and hardware can give an outdated bathroom or kitchen a stylish, contemporary look.
10. Upgrade Appliance: The kitchen is one room where upgrades almost always bring a large return on investment. One way to improve your kitchen is to simply replace your old appliances. Stainless steel is the current standard.

Top 10 Reasons to Live in (your niche community/area)

This one is up to you! Select a local community or area in your niche and create a Top 10 list of reasons people/families should move there. You can also create Top 10 lists of your favorite restaurants, town activities, top 10 local shops — anything you can think of!

I hope you found these posts helpful in jump starting your content writing for 2012. What type of posts or articles have you found to get the most response from your readers?

Five “Top 10″ Lists for REALTOR® Web Content Writing – Part One

REALTORS® constantly approach me asking for tips on content writing — one of the easiest and most entertaining content ideas are Top 10 lists! I’ve written a two part series on five Top 10 lists that benefit REALTORS® across the board; regardless of you niche and market.

Top 10 Tips for First Time Home Buyers

1. Do You NEED to Buy: research pros and cons for renting vs. buying
2. Getting Help: find a REALTOR® that you feel comfortable with
3. Figure Out Where You’re Going:  keep in mind proximity to your job, schools, highways, shopping etc.
4. Create Your Lists: begin a “need vs. want” list for your REALTOR®
5. Get Pre-Approved: not just pre-qualified. Pre-approval is much more thorough and basically states, Lender A will loan you “X” dollars for a house in a specific price range
6. Educate Yourself: talk to your REALTOR®, ask friends or family members questions, do internet research etc.
7. Visit Some Properties: nothing will give you a feel for a home like visiting it in person. Have your REALTOR® set up a few showings and enjoy the process. Typically home buyers visit an average of 10 properties before making an offer.
8. Negotiate the Deal: again talk to your REALTOR® see what they suggest. At one point make an offer contingent on a home inspection (you should know in advance whether you will need to put more time and effort into a ‘fixer-upper’)
9. Insure your Investment: get home title insurance
10. Close and Move In: congrats!

Top 10 Staging Transformations

1. Hide and Seek Bedroom: so you have a “toy/exercise/office” room…GREAT! You can re-purpose that room into a spare bedroom. Create purpose in the buyers eyes.
2. Update your Bathroom(s): Painting is one of the most cost-effective ways to update your home. You can also repaint or restain old cabinets and add stylish pulls for a modernized look.
3. Staging your Bedrooms: The best approach to staging is often working with what you already have. If your furniture is in good shape, experiment with various configurations to find one that makes the most of your space.
4. Update your Patio/Deck: An inviting “outdoor room” with furniture, lighting and accessories adds more useful space to a home, which equals a higher selling price!
5. Focal Point Faux Pas: Arranging furniture to sell a home takes a different approach than arranging furniture to live in a home. When you first moved in, you most likely positioned your furniture for comfort and convenience. Think of your furniture as a tool for highlighting your home’s best features. (great window, fireplace or other architectural detail)
6. Cluttered Dining/Living Rooms: De-cluttering and depersonalizing are cardinal rules of home staging. If your home is full of family items and collectibles – home buyers won’t be able to see themselves living there.
7. Update you Kitchen: This does not mean you need to start gutting your entire kitchen tonight but small updates like new hardware, a new backsplash or even a thorough cleaning can make a world of a difference.
8. Too…Much…Beige: While neutral colors typically rule when it comes to home staging, don’t be afraid to use small splashes of color to liven up a boring room. (throw pillows, artwork or vases of fresh flowers)
9. Update your Foyer: The first room buyers see when they walk into your home should be at the top of your staging to-do list. The entryway sets the tone for the entire home.
10. Reclaim your Yard: You have to keep in mind that curb appeal is an important piece of the home staging process. Remove debris, add colorful plants (season permitting), update light fixtures and/or add a fresh coat of paint to your front door and shutters.

Please follow our blog as I will be posting Part 2 tomorrow!

On Page SEO Talk

Any Agent or Office planning on developing a website should always consider On Page SEO.  Simply put it is what you should be doing when creating your web pages.  You probably also should be thinking the same thing when tweaking existing pages as well.

On Page techniques predominantly consists of keyword considerations and optimizing your page to take better advantage of the major search engines.

The following suggestions are meant as a guide and the actual weight they carry in your over all rankings in hard to determine. Google and the other search engines use complex algorithms.

Keyword(s) In Title Tags - The title tag is the line of clickable text which appears in the SERPs for each ranking page. This is also the text which appears at the top of your browser’s window in naming or identifying the page which you are currently browsing. It’s important to work your best (most relevant, highest searched, lowest competition) keywords into your title tags as search engines will consider this over most factors when indexing and ranking your page and in general in determining what it’s about

Keywords In Meta Title Tags: By writing a good title you not only help search engines better understand what your page is about but also lets the people reading your SERP what your page is about. Leaving this blank will force the search engine to write it and that could have disastrous results.

Keywords in Your Heading Tags:  Heading tags let both the search engines and the people reading your page see what information is the most important to you.  People read from left to right and top to bottom, so a good H1 heading tag will be the first text they will see and having your message clear here is vital.

As your write the rest of your page, effective use of the H2 and H3 tags are used to note the less important information but the information you still deem important.

Keywords In the Body: My resounding message for all our clients is their is no substitute for good content, and in SEO a large part of good content is effectively including keywords where applicable. Now we don’t want to do any keyword spamming and run the risk of getting filtered and many people argue over how much is needed buy my advice is write good content that uses your keywords properly.  If you are looking for a number I would not repeat them more than 10 times in 500 words and no more than 13 on the entire page.  Remember if your page is getting north of 600 words better to break it up into multiple pages

Keyword In Domain Name:  Search engines do give consideration for what is in your domain name.  So www.markmenzella.com is not as good as www.bergenountyluxuryhomes.com.  The latter more closely defines what your website is about.

Taking this s bit further if you decide to use sub-domains for pages, for example; alpine.bergencountyluxuryhomes.com, this also will help the search engines better understand what your page is about.  On your sub-domains you should be as detailed as possible. While keywords in the sub-domains don’t carry quite as much weight as the top level of the domain, they’re nonetheless important and helpful to Google in identifying what your site is about.

When designing or editing your pages every little bit helps.  Using some of these things I wrote about today will give your pages more visibility to the search engines and also make the reading of the page by your buyers and sellers more interesting.

Agent Website Solutions | Office website Solutions | SEO Solutions

Happy New Year – 2012

Happy New Year!

“Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors and let each new year find you a better man.” – Benjamin Franklin

Top 10 Most Influential Moments of 2011*

• January 8, 2011 — 10:10am Gunman Fires at Congresswoman Giffords
• March 1, 2011 — Charlie Sheen is ‘Winning’
• March 11, 2011 — Earthquake with a 8.9 Magnitude hits Japan
• April 29, 2011 — The Royal Wedding (Kate Middleton and Price William)
• May 1, 2011 — Osama bin Laden is killed
• May 25, 2011 — Oprah Winfrey’s Last Show
• August 2, 2011 –National debt hits 14.3 trillion. Unemployment reached 9.2%
• September 11, 2011 — Marks 10th year anniversary since 9/11
• September 17, 2011 –20,000 ‘Occupy Wall Street’ and flood lower Manhattan
• October 5, 2011 — Steve Jobs passes away. Apple most valuable company in world capping $347 billion

*as per AOL

Top 5 New Releases for RE/Advantage for 2012

• Office Spotlight – VERY economic way of display featured listings, open houses etc. from your office storefront window.
• Mobile Websites – whether you are just looking to get a branded IDX search or complete mobile website this is a great project to boost your business in 2012.
• Blogs – if you are looking for training classes or a customized blog with integrated IDX this solution is for you.
• New Portfolio – we’ve updated our portfolio with ALL NEW website layouts. Get an online presence face lift for 2012
• IDX for Agents and Offices – we’ve launched new 2012 updates to an already great IDX solution. Check out some of our examples and features.

Happy New Year!!

Google Releases Some Changes – How Does This Affect the Real Estate Agent?

Google recently released a list of improvements to their ever popular search engine.  I am going to highlight some of the improvements that might affect your real estate website.  Google roughly releases 500 improvements per year and I will attempt as they are released to post some of the more relevant ones that might affect your real estate business.

• Related query results refinements: Sometimes Google fetches results for queries that are similar to the actual search term you typed. This change makes it less likely that these results will rank highly if the original query had a rare word that was dropped in the alternate query. For example, if you are searching for [Blue Mountain Condos], you might not be as interested in a page that only mentions “condos.”
• More comprehensive indexing: This change makes more long-tail documents available in the Google index, so they are more likely to rank for relevant queries. Great news for you Agents that are creating long tail keyword pages.  I wrote an post titled “Long Tail Keywords Power Hyper Local Content” which explains the importance of long tail keywords and how you can use them in your real estate business.
• Fresher and more complete blog search results: Google made a change to its blog search index to get coverage that is both fresher and more comprehensive.  As I mentioned in previous posts blogs are great for the real estate agents and now you will be getting even more attention. Megan at our office wrote a great post “I’ve Set Up My Real Estate Blog…Now What?” which she explains how to use a blog in your real estate business and another good post; “Tips for Writing a Market Leading Blog.”
• Original content: Google added new signals to help them make better predictions about which of two similar web pages is the original one.  Remember I always said, original content is very important and that it is important to always write good fresh content that is enticing and interesting. “Some Common Mistakes Writing Good Content” explains how to avoid some of the common mistakes when writing quality content.
• Top result selection code rewrite: This code handles extra processing on the top set of results. For example, it ensures that Google doesn’t show too many results from one site (“host crowding”). They rewrote the code to make it easier to understand, simpler to maintain and more flexible for future extensions.  This I think it great news for the smaller sites (i.e., agent sites vs. the bigger franchise sites) because the larger sites may loose some SERP’s in light of this update.
• New “parked domain” classifier: This is a new algorithm for automatically detecting parked domains. Parked domains are placeholder sites that are seldom useful and often filled with ads. They typically don’t have valuable content for users, so in most cases Google will prefer not to show them.

Google is always tweaking its search engine algorithms to make for a better user experience.  If you follow my updates regularly and try to leverage some of these improvements by either making changes to your pages or changing your marketing plans to make better use of the changes you can not only gain better visibility but also keep exiting pages from falling off of Google’s SERP’s.

Happy Holidays

Happy Holidays to ALL!  We at RE/Advantage would like to wish everyone a safe and happy holiday as well as a prosperous New Year!

 

Providing Website, IDX, Mobile Solutions, Social Media, and Training to the Real Estate Industry for over 20 years.