Archive for Real Estate Website Tips
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What have you done with videos lately? Do you know you need to get more involved with providing videos, but you just haven’t found an approach that you will stick with? I’m trying to help!
A big problem for a lot of folks is the idea of filming themselves. To film yourself, you need:
- a video camera
- a good location for filming (quiet with a good-looking background)
- a script or at least an outline so you sound like you know what you’re doing
- to look good so you look like you know what you’re doing
The camera isn’t a big problem. I’ve heard lots of great feedback about the Flip camera; it seems to do videos quite easily. It’s the other three things that slow people down.
If you have a problem with numbers 2-4 above, relax. There are a variety of ways you can make videos without putting yourself on the web.
Create Videos without Putting Yourself on the Web
Recently, I wrote a blog post about Screenr.com, a website where you can create real estate videos using your computer as the “star”.
This post discusses Animoto.com, a website where you can easily create videos from photos and videos you already own. It’s easy to do and the result looks professional, at least to my eye. There’s an example of an Animoto video shown below.
This solution isn’t free, but it’s not overly expensive, either. There is a free version that you can use, but it has a severe limit on the length of the video: 30 seconds. I used that version to make the 30 second video below. I wouldn’t suggest that the video below is a good informational or marketing tool, but it went together quickly and it gives you the idea.
The next level, as of this writing, gives you the ability to make full length videos and costs $30/year. If you want more capability, such as having your videos unbranded, the cost is $249/year.
There are a number of ways you can use Animoto to interact with your social media sites. You can export the video to You Tube. You can post it on your Facebook wall, share it on MySpace, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Posterous, and the list goes on for quite a while.
Don’t be hesitant to make the most of videos for your business, there are tools out there that make it easy to create real estate videos!
Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.
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Since I’m always on the lookout for great real estate blog post approaches, I decided to stop in to Active Rain and see what Lenn Harley is doing on her blog.
Some of you may know Lenn from RealTalk or Active Rain. For those of you who don’t know her, Lenn is a successful broker in Maryland and Virginia. She has years of experience, a lot of good ideas, and she speaks her mind.
The blog posts I want to point out are the ones Lenn writes about homes for sale or sold homes in her area. To me, it looks like when Lenn is writing about a new construction neighborhood, she posts homes that are currently available, like this one for Chantilly Town Homes.
You’ll notice that the first line of that post promotes the 2% home buyer rebate that Lenn is offering. Interesting, eh? If you were a serious buyer and you happened on this post, or on a compelling proposition for this rebate on Lenn’s website, would you be likely to complete a form or make a phone call?
Next, Lenn added a chart of the new homes for sale, with an indication of the Rebate she offers. By now, a serious buyer should be drooling. She continues with what look like professional photos of the models.
The call to action is clear, and she paints a small picture for the buyer: “I’ll meet you at Brookfield Homes…” She reemphasizes her special offer of the rebate and describes the eligibility requirements. Below that, she has listed a number of links to other places where she may have another chance at turning the visitor into a lead. And, by the way, those links do great things for her SEO. You’ll notice all the links are done with keyword search phrases.
On another post, Lenn is providing real estate market statistics for a larger geographic area, the city of Leesburg. After a brief introduction, you’ll find another chart. This one shows a Leesburg list to sold report for the month of August.
I love the fact that the next thing is the post is a photo of homes representative of moderate, average and luxury prices. Nothing like giving the visitor something concrete to relate to.
And the post is closed with another call to action, another significant offer of a 1% rebate, and more links related to Loudon County real estate.
Nothing amazingly fancy, nothing that any agent/broker couldn’t do, probably didn’t take hours to put together, but how effective do you think these posts are??
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If you’re not a member of Active Rain, you may not be able to access the post(s) mentioned above. So sign up for Active Rain now. If you’re not a member of Active Rain, you should be anyway. 
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Everyone knows that videos are good for websites. People like videos. Search engines like videos. And, if you have the time and equipment to make videos, I encourage you to do that.
But, what if you don’t have time, or can’t find the Flip camera, or you’re having a bad hair day… or, what if you want to illustrate something on a computer, not a flipchart?
In any of those situations, a screencast may be just the alternative you’re looking for. Here’s an example of one now:
The screencast above was done using the free service at Screenr.com. And, there are some great features incorporated into this screencast recording service.
- The first great feature, of course, is that the service is free right now.
- The screencasts can be viewed on iPads and smart phones like the iPhone.
- You can download the .mp4 file if you know what to do with it
- You can publish your screencast to YouTube.
- You can embed the screencast on your website or blog.
Why Would You Want to Make A Screencast?
Since your Internet presence is so critical, I can see several reasons why you’d want to use a screencast. For example:
- You’ve got a killer MLS search on your website. But, to get the most benefit from it, there are a few things you want people to know about how to use it. How about making a screencast? Put it on a separate page on your website and have it open in a pop up window.
- You’ve got a lot of great information on your website, but you’re noticing that some of your key pages aren’t getting much traffic. Make a screencast introducing visitors to the best pages on your site.
Those are only a couple of applications. I’m sure you can think of many more. If you’re using screencasts yourself, let us know how!!
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This guest post was written by Adam Vradenburg,
an Internet marketing guru
In Part III of this series on backlink strategies, the question was asked: What If Your Link Building Doesn’t Work as Well as You Think It Should? Here are the rest of the suggestions on what to do to improve the ranking of your real estate website.
Publish or Perish
This idiom from academia is applicable to your website as well. While the situation is perhaps not as dire as the phrase would imply, if you publish new content on a regular basis, you’ll often find yourself ahead of other sites.
Make a point of writing new content consistently. It doesn’t have to be every day, but make a point of writing a few articles a week, and updating existing content.
In addition to being a plus for users, it also lets Google know that your site is relevant and up to date. This can take an hour a week – if you can write a real estate blog post in 20 minutes, you can use the rest of the time to freshen up content and do some surfing yourself.
If you need inspiration as to what to write about, be topical, write commentary on events happening in your real estate market or on national real estate issues, and you’ll pick up higher search volume. It’s easier to jump in at a higher ranking for news than it is for “established” search queries. For example, I wrote early about a topic I knew would be trending in the future (in my case an annual event), and search finally became my biggest traffic source.
Just Keep on Linking
If you’ve been acquiring backlinks like mad and your rankings don’t seem to budge, don’t despair. Fresh links will score you points in Google’s algorithm in the same way that fresh content will.
If you can, get links to new articles on your website or blog. This practice is called “deep linking”. It is helpful if you can avoid having all of your incoming links point to your home page. Deep linking shows a more natural linking process. Stick to your strategy and it will pay off in the end.
Google puts a lot of emphasis on age – the age of your website is taken into consideration, and so is the age of your links. Let the links you’ve acquired ripen, and in the meantime go out and get new ones. Time is on your side.
Besides, link building is an ongoing process, it’s not a task that you check off once as completed. Rather it’s continuous, and even once you’ve reached your goals and you rank for your search terms, that’s no reason to sit back.
Get Creative
If you think you’ve exhausted all possible sources of links, it’s time to start thinking outside of the box.
- Explore offline alternatives to find linking opportunities: business associates, friends and your entire sphere of influence. Even if a site isn’t related to yours, get a link.
- Join the local chamber of commerce; get a link from the local REALTOR® organization. Sponsor a pinball machine for the youth center and get a link from their site. The point is: Think outside the box and get creative.
Most importantly make sure your site is linkworthy. In other words your site should be pleasing to the eye, look professional and have great content so that links can come naturally and so that potential partners will be willing to link to you.
Keep a Record
It’s important to keep a record to know what works, and what doesn’t. In order to build links effectively, you need to stay organized, and keep a record of who you’ve written to, where you have links, and a list of where you’d like get links from.
In addition to that, when you get a confirmation, or change something on your site, keep a note of it. It’s best to track your positions on dates when links are placed or something else of note happens – mark it and see if it influences your rankings down the line.
Don’t change too many things at once, because you’ll never know exactly which action helped or hurt.
And, finally. . . be patient and remember: ranking changes are part of the algorithm!
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At the start of May, the BRER Blog published two articles of mine covering real estate backlink strategies to dominate Google. It’s almost been three months since then, so if you’ve been working on your link profile you should see your efforts start to bear fruit, right? Well, that depends.
This article is a follow-up, but it will also help anyone who has been frustrated in their attempts to grow their link profile or anyone who hasn’t had as much success as they’d hoped to.
What If Your Link Building Doesn’t Work
as Well as You Think It Should?
You may be thinking: “I’ve followed all the steps, I invested a great deal of time and went out and got links from sites ranking for my search term, and I picked up the freebies you mentioned, and I’m still kicking around on page three of the Google search engine results page.”
There could be any number of reasons why you can’t crack the top 10, if you have a strong link profile and still aren’t getting anywhere it’s time to think outside of links and take a look at how your site stacks up against the competition. If you’ve done everything right so far you may have underestimated them.
Do a Competitive Analysis
While backlinks are an important factor in determining the relevance of your site to a specific key phrase, it isn’t the only criterion. Take a good hard look at the sites performing well to see if there are any points where you are lacking.
- It could be that other sites are stronger in that they are larger and have more pages indexed.
- Look for usability issues on your real estate site. Look at your analytics data and see how many visitors bounce (leave without visiting any other pages on your site). You can also check the internal searches on your site to see what they are looking for.
- Look at your competitors’ link profile, specifically the quantity and quality of links they have containing your keywords and see how you compare. At this point you might need a more powerful SEO Tool like Open Site Explorer – we’ll all have to find an alternative, since Yahoo! is shutting down Site Explorer at the end of this year.
If none of the above applies then it could be that your competitor’s site is older and has had good links for a longer period of time. A long track record with Google is often an indicator of trustworthiness.
So if your competition’s site is old and established, and you have a shiny new domain – game over, right? Wrong!
There are a number of things you can do to gain an advantage over old “evergreen” content. Stay tuned for Part IV!!
