Creating a Great Website (agents, Realtor, listings, buyers)

[westchester]

The Tips Please Keep Them Coming

[MikeJaquish]

Originally Posted by Brandon Hoffman

How does your organic rank show up with those sites like wordpress? I've tried to improve my SEO as I go along but it's competitive.

I don't have much problem.

It ebbs and flows.
But I don't have a team, just little ol' me, so a couple hundred contacts a year is good enough.

I think I have a pretty good grasp of key words, etc. And Wordpress and composing on Windows Live Writer gives me access to Technorati. Tagging/Technorati brings results.

If anything, the weak link is me, and generating content with disciplined regularity.
Google likes persistence.

I have been interviewed on the phone and quoted in BusinessWeek.com (Most Affordable Suburbs) and Inman News on the interest rate reset freeze. Also had photos printed in another article. None of them found me in the Yellow Pages...

When I was blogging heavy on the local property tax reassessment, all you had to do was google "Wake County Property Taxes" and I may have had 4 or 5 slots on the first page of results, from 4 or 5 diferent sites. It is easy. Time-consuming, but easy.

I think it is very easy to overthink SEO. Content, keywords, and visibility get it done.

[Brandon Hoffman]

Has blogging been the biggest boost to your SEO?

[MikeJaquish]

Originally Posted by Brandon Hoffman

Has blogging been the biggest boost to your SEO?

Well, yes. But also, I have worked hardest at it.
For some time I was #4 in North Carolina in points on Active Rain.
Slacked off.
Busy real estatin', you know?
Fixin' to make a comeback on AR...

[Sandy Nelson]

I use Z57, which is a template site, but gives you the capability to easily customize it to the extreme. The cost, depending on what options you want was approximately $600 for set-up and $80 per month.
This is what I look for in a web site:

• MLS property search capability
• Easy WYSIWYG customization
• Lead capture
• Unlimited pages
• Bonus feeds to Inman News, community reports, or school information
• Automatic listing submission to other Internet sites, such as Trulia, Yahoo, Google Base, etc.
• Extensive web site traffic statistics
• Contact management
• Automated drip-mail campaigns

Hope you'll let us know what venue you eventually go with.

Sandy

[MikeJaquish]

Originally Posted by Sandy Nelson

I use Z57, which is a template site, but gives you the capability to easily customize it to the extreme. The cost, depending on what options you want was approximately $600 for set-up and $80 per month.
This is what I look for in a web site:

• MLS property search capability
• Easy WYSIWYG customization
• Lead capture
• Unlimited pages
• Bonus feeds to Inman News, community reports, or school information
• Automatic listing submission to other Internet sites, such as Trulia, Yahoo, Google Base, etc.
• Extensive web site traffic statistics
• Contact management
• Automated drip-mail campaigns

Hope you'll let us know what venue you eventually go with.

Sandy

Sandy,
Can you host that site under your own domain name, or do you need to redirect from your domain to a Z57 domain?

[giadddsc]

If you want to do it yourself, cheap and basic ...

If you have AOL, go to keyword Easy Designer. It's a great program for designing a website. Very easy to use once you get the hang of it. Then go to somehwere like directnic.com, register a URL for yourself and redirect your AOL page. It costs $15 a year.

[MikeJaquish]

Originally Posted by giadddsc

If you want to do it yourself, cheap and basic ...

If you have AOL, go to keyword Easy Designer. It's a great program for designing a website. Very easy to use once you get the hang of it. Then go to somehwere like directnic.com, register a URL for yourself and redirect your AOL page. It costs $15 a year.

Redirection is crippling to SEO.
The search engines will not find the desired page.
Metatags on the homepage will be invisible.

I have directNic also. They are all right. But there are more robust hosting solutions out there, and IMO worth more investment.

[TampaKaren]

What great timing! I did a thorough cost benefit analysis last February. I looked into the major CMS and also into DIY using open source and canned templates.

I ultimately decided to pay for the CMS and let the experts do the development work so I could sell real estate. In a previous life, I developed websites, so letting go was difficult.

IMO, it's regularly updated content that is most important. My site is ~$400 per year which includes hosting.

Today's "new and exciting" tools are podcasting, vod/vid casting, blogging, and mobile web.

[Obrero]

I have used citymax.com. So very very simple, even I (with my limited skills) could put together a great looking site easy peasy. I liked it best because it was already set up to accept paypal and paypal credit card processing and I have no time or skill to figure it out on my own. It costs $19.99 a month.