7 Lessons learned from site redesign.

Joshua Ferris wrote an interesting article about his experience with his latest site redesign. It details some great guidelines to making a simple intuitive home page design that it tailored to keeping visitors on your site and interested in your business.

Too often, I feel, clients want to overload their visitor with as much information as possible, and lets face it, with only a few short seconds to appeal to each unique visitor to your website, it seems like the most natural course of action to give them as much as you can to try and appeal toward them. Unfortunately, that action couldn’t be further from the reality. Joshua notes:

Keep the homepage clutter free. – This is huge. Cluttering up your homepage with added graphics, widgets and statistics that aren’t relevant to your overall goal (getting a buyer to register or contact you and make a sale) shouldn’t be on your homepage. Visitors are easily distracted and you don’t want them playing with your traffic stats widget or, far worse, not being able to find your real estate search among all the visual mayhem.

Buyers are searching the internet for places to buy real estate, not to know what the weather is like in your area. If you have an extensive inventory of listings on your website (like IDX for example), let potential buyers know by spotlighting it right in the top fold of the website.

In addition to some general tips on site design, Joshua even notes things relating to real estate bloggers who are using blogs such as WordPress.

http://www.geekestateblog.com/7-lessons-i-learned-from-my-real-estate-site-redesign/

REALTOR® Triple Play – Mark the Date

RE/Advantage is pleased to announce that will have a booth at the Triple Play REALTOR® Convention & Trade Expo in Atlantic City, N.J.  The Convention runs from December 8th-10th and we will be at booth 627.  We will be showing off our latest products and website services for Brokers, Agents, MLS’s and Boards.  Stop by for a chance to win an Amercan Express Gift Cheque or a free website.

This years Keynote speaker is Ross Shafer.

Discover the keys to succeeding in a volatile and unpredictable economy with Ross Shafer’s “Are You Relevant?”
Wednesday, December 9, 12:15-1:45 pm

It’s not about customer service anymore – that’s transactional. Customer empathy is the real predictor of loyalty and repeat business. Shafer will show you how to keep your practices fresh with innovation and how to engage clients of all ages, including the youngest generation of homebuyers. You’ll learn how to become a trusted advisor, not just a vendor and how to recession-proof your business to assure your long-term career success. Ross Shafer, a six-time Emmy Award-winning comedian and writer who switched gears from comic to trainer, is now one of the nation’s most sought-after speakers on maintaining market prominence. He has written 14 human resource training films and authored Nobody Moved Your Cheese!, The Customer Shouts Back!, Customer Empathy and Are You Relevant?

The Triple Play REALTOR® Convention & Trade Expo, presented by the New Jersey Association of REALTORS®, New York State Association of REALTORS® and Pennsylvania Association of REALTORS®, is the largest annual convention and trade show of its type in the U.S. – the premier event for the real estate industry in the tri-state area.

Agent Central Max

With many years of marketing experience in the real estate industry, our team has successfully developed many Web sites for brokers, agents, boards and associations.

Our flagship product,  Agent Central Max has been a tremendous marketing tool for all.   It was developed and enhanced by recommendations from consumers and real estate professionals.

As with any Web Site it is important that you consistently update your site with new content and important information. The information contained within your site should target your audience with relevent news and content to the areas you serve.  Our content management system all allows you to easily modify and update your content.   Our product also offers a number of  features such as:

• Advanced Search Technology
• Lead Generation
• Unlimited Agent Profiles
• Advanced IDX Search Solutions
• Auto Responders
• Cell Phone Alerts On Leads
• Support for Virtual Tours
• Complete Listing Maintenance
• Scalable IDX Solutions
• Listing Syndication
• Contact Management
• Backend Productivity tools (IntraNet Calendar, News and Document Management)
• Portfolio Manager – Capture prospects, generate automatic listing alerts, saved searches and favorite listings folders.
• Branded Email
• Custom Designed To Your Specifications
• All Real And Search Engine Friendly Pages
• Calendar
• News
• Blogging
• Office Roster
• Career Capture
• Multi-office Support
• Open House Information
• Mapping Listings

Our team will work closely with you to ensure your online marketing success.   A number of third party Web 2.o applications can easily be integrated to your site as well.

With our tools and knowledge of marketing, we can help you obtain the online presence to help build your business. Please call us to learn more at 877-791-4825 or visit us at www.readvantage.com

” Your success is our success”

Just When You Really Started To Hate Windows Vista….In Comes Windows 7

JUST WHEN YOU REALLY STARTED TO HATE WINDOWS VISTA….IN COMES WINDOWS 7

In July, Microsoft finally sent the next evolution of the Windows Operating System, Window 7, to manufacturing. It is expected to be available on October 22. Microsoft has high hopes that Windows 7 sets straight all of the problems that Windows Vista had, while at the same time, adding features and improving usability.

In many ways, Microsoft appears to have hit the mark. Boot and load times have improved, especially on systems with multi-core processors. The Quick Launch toolbar has been replaced with the ability to pin applications to the taskbar for easy access. And Jump Lists, which organizes your most recently used documents with the applications that they belong to. But, oddly enough, while offering so many user interface improvements, Microsoft has chosen to NOT provide a simple email application with Windows 7. Outlook Express began it’s life way back in Windows 95, and has been with us all the way through Windows XP. Windows Vista introduced us to the next incarnation of email from Microsoft — Windows Mail. But, in Windows 7, Microsoft removed email altogether from the operating system. You can, however, still download Windows Mail, along with Windows Movie Maker and Windows Photo Gallery, as part of the free Windows Live Essentials download pack.

As with any new Microsoft Operating System, things always seem to go better on a FRESH install of the operating system, instead of an upgrade. Windows 7 will require you to have at least 1 gigabyte of memory, but realistically, you should have at least 2 gigabytes. Memory is cheap. Microsoft has streamlined the many confusing Vista editions, offering Windows 7 in only three available editions — Home, Professional and Ultimate. Most new computer systems purchased today come with a free upgrade to Windows 7 when it is released.

For more information about Microsoft Windows 7, visit the Microsoft web site at  http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/default.aspx

Some Common Mistakes Writing Good Content

It seems I have written so many articles on what you should be doing when writing content for your website, I thought this time I would write about some things you should not be doing. Content writing for a website differs from print style writing because in print you do not have to worry about SEO considerations.  Over the years I have seen many Agent websites.  One common problem is that the busy REALTOR forgets how important writing effective content can be.  Let’s face it the Internet is here to stay and their is money to be made by the smart Agent that can leverage the technology.

To make things organized and easy to follow I am going to disect the page from top to bottom.

Title (H1) Tag

When writing content remember your focus should be on your keywords. But we also have to contend with actual people reading your web page as well. So tip #1 is do not make your Title boring or too technical. While keeping your keywords in play make your title interesting and think about what people may be searching for. Luxury Bergen County Real Estate is both descriptive and encompasses my keywords if they were luxury real estate in Bergen County.

Body Content

Your main body content should be interesting and inf0rmative.  So tip #2 is keep is lively and do not make a long run on paragraph.  Break your content up into logical paragraph blocks.  I say time and time again “Content is King”.  Keep that in mind.  While we always want our pages SEO optimized, if that are boring you will not keep your visitors on the site long enough to gain a prospect.

Paragraph Headings (H2-H5)

Just as you were taught in school paragraph headings play a vital roles in both SEO and a well written page.  Using the H2-H5 tags break your article into easily readable pieces.  So tip #3 is make sure you do not write long boring body content with no heading tags.

Bulleted Lists

Another great way to organize your content is to make a bulleted or numbered list.  These should be preferably be your keywords.  You can then link these lists to section on your current page or to another page on your website.  So tip #4, use bullets lists when you need to organize a series of related information, don’t just write a long run on sentence.

Bolding

The use of bolding is a another great way to provide emphasis to your keywords.  When you bold the search engines see these bolded words as important words and so to people naturally.  So tip #5 is to make sure you do not over use bolding or bold non-relevant words.

Anchor Text

The use of anchor text (links) is another great tactic to good content writing.  They provide significance to your content and the the bot scanning your content.  Anchoring keywords is a must.  When you relate your pages together via keyword anchored text you are giving the bots a good idea of what is important on your website.  So tip #6 is to avoid using anchor text on non-relevant keywords and do not anchor too many non keywords.

Originality

Tip #7 is do not plagiarize.  Copying content may seem like a easy and efficient way to get lots of content on your website but the search engines employ sophisticated technology to look for this and when they find it they will drop your relevance or even drop the page.

BIG problem is that the busy REALTOR likes to copy content.  It might be enticing to copy that community information but you are only hurting yourself in terms of SEO value.  Google and the engines a like spend millions looking for plagerized content.  Build quality original content.  Take your own buying and selling experience and bring that onto your website.

Tip #8 is something I hope everyone realizes.  Don’t try to keyword stuff, use white text to keyword spam, cloaking or any other means to fool the search engines.  They spend millions and millions of dollars to track this and the consequence if you are caught is being banned.  It is not worth the risk.

Use good judgement and write quality content and you’ll be rewarded.

7 Days to Better Your SEO | Day 7: Website Submission

7 Days to Better Your SEO
(Search Engine Optimization)

Day 7: Website Submission

I am going to end my 7 part series to a better SEO with site submission.  It a simple concept, yes, but one that is often overlooked.  While some companies out there offer a free submission service to hundreds of sites I prefer to at least manually submit to the major search engines myself.  Also the other 100 or so they speak about comprise of less than 2%-5% of the total searches and are not worth your time.  Focus on the ones that count.

Website Submission

Submitting your website to search engines is very important for obvious reasons but sometimes is not as easy as it looks.   As a REALTOR you need to consider 2 types of search engines.

Mainstream such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing

Portal sites such as the Real Estate Library and REALTOR.com

Submitting to the major engines is not always as simple as it seems and finding the other smaller focused engines might even be more challenging. 

Here are some instructions to submitting to the Major Search Engines:

Google- Google is pretty straight forward.  Just navigate to this page and then choose what you are submitting; website, sitemap, or local business information

Bing- Bing is Microsoft’s newest search engine.  If you want to submit your site here you first need a Microsoft LiveID.  If you do not  have one you will be asked to create one.  To begin go to the submission page.  In order to complete the submission process Bing requires authentication to ensure that only the rightful owners are provided with information about their websites.

There are two ways to prepare your website for authentication, both of which rely on your adding an authentication code on your website.

 

1:  Bing provides a custom XML file containing your authentication code that you can save to the root folder of your website.

2: Meta tag authentication – They provide you <meta> tag containing the authentication code that you add to the <head> section of your default webpage.

Yahoo- To submit your website to Yahoo go to this page.  You will also need a Site ExplorerID which you can sign -up for when you submit your site.

Here are some real estate portal sites you might also consider.  I do not endorse any but they are a good way to get a relevant link.  Some of these sites charge a fee for inclusion.

Real Estate Specific Sites

The Real Estate Library - Contains all the tools that real estate professionals and clients need. We currently have more than 100,000 resources essential to building your career and keeping it on track.

Zillow- Zillow.com is an online real estate service dedicated to helping you get an edge in real estate by providing you with valuable tools and information.

Trulia - Trulia is a real estate search engine that helps you find homes for sale and provides real estate information at the local level to help you make better decisions in the process.  They also now have a Agent directory.

REALTOR.com- Of course everyone knows this one.  All REALTORS who are NAR members are already included in directory but they do have ways to enhance your presence.

Linking

Before I close this series I also want to emphasize the importance of linking.  Getting quality inbound or reciprocal links is also a very important aspect of any good SEO campaign.  Probably the most overlooked aspect when you are trying to do your own SEO optimization.  Quality links can be as important in terms of SEO value as content sometimes.

Try searching for other websites and blogs that would be associated with your keywords by preforming searches on the major engines listed above.  These websites are already indexed by the search engines so by linking your website to some of these can give you some important relevance rankings. Also it can serve as an alternate path for the search engine bots to find you if your site is new.

Linking to other websites

If you find a really nice site that is using your keywords or perhaps is in your industry, make contact and ask for a link.  Inbound links are the best but most of the time you need to settle for a reciprocal link.  Maybe a builders website in your market would be a target for a reciprocal link.  Perhaps an inbound link from a mortgage company you work is also another idea.  However you do it, links are important.  Google says so very clearly.  The more relevant inbound links you have the more relevant Google will consider you.

Blogging

Be a contributor on related blogs.  When you make comments you can also enter your website address.  Now you might have heard a lot of blogs have a no-follow attribute when you enter your website.  This is true, but not all do and the worst case scenario is that you are getting your name out there and adding to your sphere of influence and building creditability.

Article Writing

If you have the time Article Writing can be a very rewarding experience.  There are many sites that allow you to submit articles for inclusion on their site.  These articles then have a section about you where you can add an inbound link to your site.  These articles are then used in other sites giving you the credit and link back.  Some examples of article sites are;  EzineArticles,  GetMyArticles, Go Articles, and The Real Estate Article Directory.

So give some a try and see what results you get.  The important thing to remember is that this is an ongoing process and you should always be working on your SEO.

I hope you enjoyed this 7 part post and check back as I will continue to bring you other tips on website development and optimization.