Archive for Real Estate Blogs
Would you like to add 6 figures to your bottom line next year?
According to Cindy Jones who markets Northern Virginia Real Estate, there is a way to do that in less than one hour per day.
Interested yet? Use the link above to read Cindy’s Active Rain post. Think her approach might work for you?
By the way, the post is restricted to members only. If you’re not a member of ActiveRain yet, it’s time to sign up! There’s a wealth of information and blogging opportunities to be had.
7 Tips to Make Your Blog SEO-Friendly
· Comments
A client recently asked how he could use his blog to pump up his website’s SEO. Blogs can have a very positive impact on your website’s SEO if you plan carefully.
7 Tips to Make Your Blog SEO-Friendly
1. Blog Frequently - Blog as often as you can.
2. Optimize Your Blog - Use On-Page Optimization for your blog pages. On your blog, you can put keyword phrases in your blog’s title, post titles, post content, category names, tag names and the ALT text of photos or images that you use in your posts.
3. Maintain a Focus – You can blog about anything you want. But, especially when you’re first starting up a blog, make the majority of your posts about real estate and your keywords. That focus will help the search engines understand the theme of your blog.
Too often you’ll see blogs with a wide range of categories, none of which contain any discernable keyword phrases. If you were marketing in Atlanta, for example, your categories should include things like Atlanta Real Estate, Recent Atlanta Homes for Sale, Atlanta Real Estate Market Updates, etc.
4. Link to Your Website – Use your blog as a way to get quality incoming links to the pages of your website. This is a great way to get deep links to the interior pages of your site. You can write about a variety of topics and link to your community pages, MLS search page, market condition page, etc. and it would make perfect sense within the post. Use good anchor text in your links to get the most from them.
5. Link to Outside Resources – You don’t want to put too many outgoing links in your posts, but 2 or 3 links to quality outside websites that can be helpful to your readers is a good idea. You may get a link in return, and the search engines will notice your choice of outgoing links, too.
6. Submit Your Blog to Blog Directories – One way to jump start your blog is to submit it to blog directories to help the search engines find it. Just do a search for real estate blog directory, and you’ll find quite a number of directories that focus on real estate blogs.
7. Advertise Your Posts – Set your blog up to “ping” Update Services. If you’re not familiar with pinging or Update Services, take a look at this explanation on the Wordpress site.
Typically, you can also increase the traffic to your blog by being active on other blogs. If you read and leave comments on other related blogs, that may bring visitors on that blog to yours. And, if you leave comments, very often other blog masters will return the favor.
Help Me Help You
· Comments
In an effort to make this blog as relevant to your needs as possible,
I’d like to know what’s on your mind.
In the right column, you’ll see this image:
And, below that, there’s a link to ask a question or suggest a topic for a future blog post. You can choose to have your name and a link to your website in the “answer post”, or you can remain anonymous.
So, what’s driving you crazy these days?
Drop me a line and I’ll let you know when a post concerning the issue you raise is being published!
I came across an interesting post over at Active Rain. It was written by John Novak - Las Vegas and Henderson NV Real Estate. He describes a new feature of Google search that I’ve never noticed.
Take a look at John’s post and you’ll find three ways to “drill down”, or look at a search in a way you may not have thought of on your own.
As John points out, the new Google features will help you to see what others are searching for that relate to your market - and you may find new things to blog about at the same time!
Whimsical Wednesday: WordPress 2.7 Rocks!
· CommentsI’d probably have more to talk about if I hadn’t spent such a large portion of last weekend getting this website updated.
I don’t really enjoy updating to a new version of Wordpress. I do it so infrequently that I never remember how it goes, and of course, writing things down would be too easy.
This time, I was upgrading from WordPress 2.3.2 to 2.7. Yes, I’d put it off until the big update came out, then waited until everyone else figured out whether it really worked or not. But, I’m glad I did do the upgrade. The 2.7 version is a huge improvement from a “back office” perspective.
I’d read posts from people who were having difficulty finding things, and it’s true that things are in different places. But I think everything works so much more easily, so I don’t mind poking around until I figure out how to do something.
The other thing I had to deal with was the fact that the theme I had been using for quite a while wasn’t compatible with 2.7. That, coupled with the anniversary thing, prompted me to completely redo the site.
I went over to WordPress.org to look for a new template. I don’t enjoy doing that, either. And, customizing a WordPress theme isn’t at the top of my list of skills. So, I decided to look for a “premium WordPress theme”. In the lingo, premium means that you have to pay for it.
After researching the alternatives, I decided to purchase a Flexx theme from iThemes.com. I’m really in love with this theme, so if you’re running a WordPress blog, you might want to check it out.
Once you install the theme, at least on 2.7, you end up with a menu of theme options incorporated right into the WP menu. You can easily change the layout of the blog, meaning that you can select where to put sidebars, headers, widget areas, etc. And, all you have to do is click on the sketch of the layout you want - just my speed!
The theme has a built in flash-like set up for the header, so all you have to do is upload a .JPG or two, and the rotation is done automatically. There’s also a “billboard” section where you could easily display advertisements for blog sponsors. iThemes has a number of themes, some of which lend are set up magazine style and others that lend themselves to integrated website/blogs.
Why didn’t I just combine BuildRealEstateResults.com and this blog? Yup, you got it. The ranking I’ve got on BuildRealEstateResults.com might have fallen apart if I transferred it to a site with such a different structure. And, I wasn’t willing to take that chance.
The best thing about this purchase, though, is the support. Yes! Actual support for a WordPress theme! There’s a support forum that has the most helpful group of company and user folks that you could want. Needless to say, I had a few issues getting things together. And, the worst ribbing I got was one person who agreed with me when I said I knew enough about this stuff to be dangerous!
They were all operator errors, but I got quick resolutions on the forum. Over the weekend. Amazing.
