SEO Strategies for your Real Estate website?

Are you looking to dominate your online marketplace?

Well getting links to your website is one of the best ways to do this. I have many real estate websites that are ranked high in google and the easiest way to get them ranked is by having other websites pointing to your website.

Here are a couple "Authority" sites that will improve your ranking with the major search engines if you get a link from them...

www.activerain.com ( set up an outside blog. This will allow "do-follow" links that google can pick up )
www.ezinearticles.com ( write a real estate article with 1 link to your site )
www.zillow.com ( sign up for an account and put your website on it )
www.trulia.com ( same as above )
www.abcrealestatedirectory.com ( sign up to get put into their directory )

This is a few simple steps towards getting ranked high in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Skylar Lewis
Keller Williams
Carpet Cleaners Murrieta - Friends

Squatters moving into Upscale Neighborhoods

Don't let the Squatters get you!

Squatters have recently been moving into upscale neighborhoods and overstaying their welcome.

Most recently has the been the example of Randy Quaid. He was caught living in a home that was vacant, probably waiting for someone to find out about it. He claims that the home was his but he was not on title and had no documentation.

If you own rental properties, it's important to always watch out for people that might randomly move into your home.  This is known as "Squatting". It is very difficult to evict someone that has been living in your home for months and they can prove it. Our legal system is about 90% geared towards tenants as opposed to the landlords. This has also been happening in Hemet Homes also. They tend to be a little cheaper and they stay vacant longer.

Just FYI. Be careful!

Skylar Lewis

Lewis Realty
Here are some of my other real estate Blogs:
Temecula Real Estate
Temecula Restoration - Our Friends
Water Damage Temecula

How is the foreclosure crises affecting our neighborhoods?

It is a well known that fact that as the amount of foreclosures rise, so does crime and vandalism. Why is this, and is it happening to us?

Well Temecula and Murrieta have always been very clean cities. Low crime, high grades. This could possibly change in the future if foreclosures in our community keep hitting all time highs. We are a part of Riverside County and Riverside has the 5th highest rate for foreclosures in the country.  Temecula Foreclosures are on the rise.  Are these foreclosures going to affect our cities in a very negative way?

Foreclosure rates rising in a city means that there will be more vacant houses, which could lead to more vandalism. As soon as these cheap foreclosures are sold at auctions, investors typically buy them. When investors buy these foreclosures they usually rent them out. What we are noticing in the Temecula Valley is that investors from all over the country are buying up our houses and renting them out. We are going from a community of owner-occupied homes to tenant-occupied homes. This will only negatively effect our communities are renters typically do not treat the homes as owner's would.

What can we do about this trend?
Try and get it over with as quickly as possible. We need to get housing inventory moving and out of the way. Price have to start recovering and we need to push investors out of the Temecula-Murrieta market place.  Houses in Temecula that are for sale need to decrease and we as consumers, need to focus on keeping up our community and working together.

Temecula Valley is and will stay one of the nicest places to live in Southern California.

Skylar Lewis

Keller Williams - Lewis Realty Group

Vista Homes
Carpet Cleaning Temecula

Zillow.com Advertising. Is it worth it?

As you all know, Zillow.com has become a very popular tool for real estate agents, buyers, sellers, and everyone else!

Zillow did a great job by putting together all the information everyone would need about the community, property, agents, etc. It is all in one place and that is what attracts buyers.

The question is, can you convert buyers from Zillow into actual revenue? How long will it take?
Zillow states that the conversion ratio for leads is about 30% in any specific market. So that means if you get an email saying you received a lead, you have a 30% chance that they are an interested buyer. It DOES NOT mean that you have a 30% chance of closing a real estate transaction. You need to watch out for any company who quotes ratios, and check to see where the ratios are coming from.

Zillow.com is actually a good tool. Their main advertising method is showing your picture to the right of the screen when someone is looking at a home, so they think your the listing agent. You have to pay about $500+ a month just for this. We use zillow for Houses in Temecula.They have other advertising that cost $1,000+ a month, but you can start off with the smaller package, if you have that kind of money.

We feel Zillow is a good advertising method if you have the money to pay into it. It will take about 3 months to get your campaign going, but after that you should be getting leads every week.

We have worked with Zillow, Trulia, Redfin, Realtor, and many other Real Estate advertising websites. Zillow is probably one of the most dominant sites, but it costs an arm and a leg.

Skylar Lewis, Realtor
Murrieta Homes
Temecula Houses
Corona Homes

Publishing Several Websites

The advantage of publishing more than one website is that you can have these websites link to each other, to help build up "inbound links".

An inbound link is a link from another website pointing to yours.

So, if you have four websites, you can have three of them linking to your bread-n-butter website.

Ideally, what you want is a hierarchy where the lesser websites link to your main website, but the main website does not link back to the lesser websites.

It's ok if the lesser websites link to each other, just don't have your main website linking back to the lesser websites.

Link Farming

A lot has been written about link farming. This is where you have a bunch of websites that interlink with each other, for the purpose of raising each website's SEO value. The idea is that Google penalizes the websites taking part in a link farming scheme.

But I believe this is largely myth these days.

This is because if you examine some of the top listed websites in a particular genre, you'll find that many of them interlink with other sites, and yet they still get listed at the top of Google.

Most blogs, for example, have blogrolls, where they link to other blogs in the same genre. And these blogs are linking back and forth to each other. That's effectively a link farm. Yet, these blogs still enjoy high rankings on Google for their priority keywords.

To me, that proves link farming is mostly a myth.

I say "mostly" because the link farming penalty will still come into play if these sites are junk sites. That is, if these sites are rarely updated, or have very little content, then Google will downgrade the PR value of these websites.

So, if you want to set up several websites that link towards your main website, just make sure each of those have plenty of content, and are updated on a reasonable basis. You'll avoid any kind of link farming penalty.

Read my other articles on linking.

Ideas for Websites

So what other websites can you create that link to your main website?

• A separate blog where you post tips on homeselling and homebuying.


• A personal blog where you post personal stuff (recipes, vacation photos)


• A real estate market report blog, where you post your thoughts on the local market once a month.


• Homes sold blog, where you post a photo and a recap each time you sell a house

Notice I suggest blogs. That's because they're easy to set up on Blogger or Wordpress, and easy to maintain, and because Google still seems to love blogs.

Origin 3 Website Site Design Closed

There's news that a website design company called, "Origin 3" had to shut itself down for reasons that are not very clear...

http://www.sltrib.com/ci_7972938

But in any case, what amazes me is that this company (as well as many others) could charge business owners $6,000 for what appears to be simple websites. I say simple because they appear to be within my range of capability, and I'm not a very sophisticated web design guy.

Are business people that gullible, or are some web design companies that greedy?

Some of the website designers that I've met personally charge only $50 to $100 for a simple, but still decent looking, website. They charge separately for web hosting, and then set up a retainer for updates.

I suppose I could get into the business of selling $6,000 websites that are effectively simple HTML and CSS. But I haven't because I have this thing called a "CONSCIENCE".

If you're looking to get a real estate website built, just know that a simple, clean looking design shouldn't cost you more than $100.00 to build professionally. Web hosting fees should't cost you more than $10.00 a month. If built effectively, you'd hardly need to update it.

Making Links Look Like Links

Surprisingly, there are still people who have difficultly recognizing a hyperlink when they see one. The problem occurs particularly with links embedded within articles. While it's a great way reference external sources, hyperlinks within an article are often confused for emphasized text.

For example...


While many of us are experienced enough to know that the underlined text in the example above is a link, many more still don't realize they can click on that text.

I know this for a fact, because I get phone calls about this everyday.

I publish many other blogs besides this one, and many of those blogs are "product blogs", where I write reviews of products, or announce new products. Every article I write has a link to the manufacturer's website, or a link to a retailer. Someone will conduct a Google search for that product, and often times they find my blog.

Then, they'll call me on the phone asking me how they can purchase this product, or if I'm still selling it. The conversation goes something like this...

Caller: "Hi, I'm wondering if you're still selling the one gallon size of Soft Paws?"

Me: "Well, we don't sell products, we just write articles about products"

Caller: "Well, where can I buy it?".

Me: "In the article you read, there is a link to the manufacturer's website."

Caller: "I didn't see any link in the article".

Me: "It's there. Look for some words that are underlined, and then move your mouse pointer over it."

Caller: "Oh, I see it now! Thank you."

This conversation happens with greater severity during the Christmas season. In fact, I just received such a call this morning, around 6:30am Pacific time, while I was still sleeping.

Albeit as a real estate agent, you're not selling products. But if such a person needed your services, and they visited your website, they might also not realize that the underlined text are links.

Jakob Neilsen, who is perhaps the most respected authority on website usability, wrote a book entitled, Coordinating User Interfaces for Consistency, where he said, "One of the most important aspects of usability is consistency in user interfaces." What he means is that today everyone's website works differently from one another, and this causes people to become confused in how to use a website. There are just as many websites that removed the underline on their hyperlinks, as there are websites that use them.

Here are some tips you can employ that might help your web-challenged visitors navigate better...

1. All links should be underlined. If you set the text-decoration parameter to "none" in your CSS, then turn it back on (remove the parameter altogether). I realize that links without underlines might look cool, but your visitors don't really care about the aesthetic appearance of your links.



2. Or, instead of underlines, use dashes or dots. More websites these days are doing this instead because it still gives the appearance of an underlined link, but the dashes or dots set it apart from emphasized text. For example, check out CSSPortal's examples on this: http://www.cssportal.com/hyperlinks/
   
   
3. Try also placing parentheses around the (hyperlinked text).
   
   
4. Use italics for emphasized text. This will create some additional differentiation from hyperlinked text.



5. Use call-to-action-words, like, "Click here". My favorite way to do this is to present a call-to-action statement, and then display the URL as a hyperlink. For example...




6. Linked text should consist of no more than three words as a general rule. The more words you string together in a single link, the more it starts to look like emphasized text.

Tradewinds Realty - Website Review

This is a paid review.

Tradewinds Realty provides specializes in Nova Scotia real estate.

They currently sit at #1 on the Google SERPs for "nova scotia real estate", and #4 for "halifax nova scotia real estate", and #1 for "nova scotia canada real estate", which are 1, 2, and 3 on the list of popular search terms for these keywords.

But Nova Scotia is a big place, and I'm guessing potential home buyers conduct their searches more locally. So I left out the words "nova scotia" and just Googled stuff like, "halifax real estate" or "lunenburg real estate" or "yarmouth real estate".

I found that Tradewinds' website did not appear for the "halifax" or "yarmouth" searches, but it did show up at #1 for the "lunenburg" search. Then I noticed that Tradewinds' homepage has the word "lunenburg" on it. That may explain why it appears on Google for that search.

Tradewinds does indeed have dedicated pages for these community-oriented searches, but those pages are two clicks away from the homepage (clicking on the "Our Properties" link). I'd recommend adding links for 10 of its most popular community pages to its homepage, to help boost their appearance on Google. These links can be indented below the Our Properties link.

Their individual community pages can be enhanced as well. For example, take a look at their Halifax real estate page.

The TITLE tag should say, "Halifax Real Estate Listings", instead it just says, "Properties by Area: Halifax". Adding the words, "real estate" to the TITLE tag should help it rank better on Google for local searches.

Tradewinds can help its community pages even more by adding the words "real estate" to the query string in the URL. In the case the URL of their Halifax page is as follows...

http://www.tradewindsrealty.com/cgi-bin/listings.cgi?area=Halifax%20&%20Area

I'd recommend renaming "Halifax & Area" in the query string to "Halifax Area Real Estate". Add "Real Estate" to the query string to all community pages. This will help it rank higher on Google for these specific searches.

While the META keywords and description tag is present on the homepage, it's missing from the community pages. Adding unique META tags for each community page, will help those pages rank higher on Google.

Each property featured on Tradewinds' website has its own dedicated URL. This is good. But each page is not well optimized. For example, here is a home for sale named, "Simply Enchanting".

If someone were searching Google for the phrase, "simply enchanting halifax" this property shows up at #2. But who in heck searches for that?

I recommend using more relevant keywords to name each property page. Instead of "Simply Enchanting", call it "South Halifax Home for Sale". If you have two or more homes in South Halifax, variate the names: "South Halifax House for Sale", or "South Halifax Charming Property", etc.

On a usability standpoint, Tradewinds' website removed the underline on their links. I recommend keeping the underlines on links. People tend to click on links more often when they see the underlines.

Another usability tip is that right now the homepage has the following welcome message, "Welcome to SeaNovaScotia.com". This is confusing on a real estate website. It should instead say, "Welcome to Tradewinds Realty, Inc.", with a sub-phrase of "Nova Scotia Real Estate Services". That will encourage potential clients to stay on the website.

Another thing on the homepage, use photos of homes. Right now, the homepage randomly displays images of Nova Scotia's landscape, making it feel more like a vacation and travel website.

Tradewind's "Nova Scotia Real Estate Blog" is hosted on the same domain name, which is a great way to host a blog. It helps disperse PageRank to the whole website. But the blog is poorly updated. The last article is from a year ago. To make a blog work for you, it has to be kept current. Post a minimum of three new articles per week.

On the blog itself, Tradewinds' should have links on the sidebar to its key real estate pages, such as its community pages (Halifax Properties, Lunenburg Properties, etc.). Doing this will disperse more PageRank value into those pages.