Archive for Sam Chapman
This guest post was contributed by Sam Chapman.
Sam specializes in homes in Austin, TX
A QR, or Quick Response, Code is a bit like the bar code you find on merchandise at stores. It can be scanned with a code scanner on a cell phone and doing that immediately transfers information to the phone. I just added a QR Code to several websites and it took very little time.
If you have an iPhone or an Android, look for a QR Code Scanner app or a barcode scanner app that also scans QR Codes. I downloaded one simply called Barcode Scanner for my Android and it works great.
Scan this code with your mobile phone scanner
to capture Sam’s contact information.
The QR Code above contains my name, title, phone number, email and website. I have it on my website below my contact information. I’ve tested my phone’s scanner and it picks the information up off the website very easily. After scanning, the information shows up on the phone and there are buttons I can click to share it via email or text message.
In addition to being on a website, a QR Code can be added to print ads, signs, flyers and business cards. It can also be added to the signature of your email. You can even put a QR Code on a T-shirt or on the side of a vehicle. For listings I can see having a QR Code on the sign in the yard. It could be as simple as printing the QR Code on a sheet of paper, laminating it and attaching it to the sign.
QR Codes can also be used for listings. What I am thinking is making a separate page on my website just for a listing and having a QR Code go directly there. Scanning this would be a lot simpler for someone, compared to typing a long web address into a mobile web browser.
Something we can all do to help educate people about our use of QR Codes is to send a brief letter to our sphere of influence showing them how tech savvy we are. The letter would briefly explain QR Codes, tell people how to download a mobile phone app and it can contain a QR Code going directly to a listing’s page. What I recommend is having a sample listing page rather than an active one. This page could be a permanent page on the agent’s website.
A lot of people do not know what QR Codes are, but more people are learning about them all the time. If you add a QR Code to a website, email signature, yard sign or whatever else, place some explanation below it like I did in the example above.
To generate a QR Code, visit http://qrcode.kaywa.com/. You can make a QR Code for a URL, for text like I did in the QR Code above, for a phone number or for an SMS.
Happy coding!
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This guest post was contributed by Sam Chapman.
Sam specializes in homes in Austin, TX.
STEP ONE: Learn How to Tell if the Search Engines Know about a Web Page
Before a search engine can think about ranking a page from your website, it must first know that the page exists. “Indexing” a web page is the way search engines let you know that they’re aware of a page on your real estate website.
When a page is indexed, that means that the search engine has crawled (or read) the page and has stored it in its index. You can find out whether a page from your website is indexed on Google, for example. Do a search on Google like this one: info:www.buildrealestatewebsites.com/Portfolio/page_2042018.html
If the page is indexed, the result of the search will show a link to the page, along with other information such as related pages.
STEP TWO: Build Neighborhood Pages
Ranking higher in web searches is a product of many things. One is content – a lot of content. Think of your real estate website as if it was a bookstore. The more books it has, the more customers shop there. So how do you continue to add more books (web pages) and how do you let people and search engines know they exist?
Over time I have been adding neighborhood pages to my Austin real estate website in order to add content. Each page has a good title, unique text describing the neighborhood followed by framed listings in the neighborhood. Each page is 2 clicks from my home page and I think this is why many took a while to get indexed by Google.
STEP THREE: Blog Where It Counts
Google and other search engines appear to crawl Active Rain almost constantly because of the amazing amount of fresh content put on it every day. With all this crawling, Active Rain posts get indexed very quickly – sometimes within just a few minutes. Armed with this knowledge, I did an experiment using my ActiveRain blog.
I started posting about working with buyers and what neighborhoods they looked in and where they ended up buying. These posts were ideal places to insert links with appropriate anchor text pointing to my newest neighborhood pages. I have found some neighborhood pages to be indexed within hours of a post on ActiveRain. Over a 48 hour period of adding pages and posting to ActiveRain, I had an additional 12 or so pages indexed.
If you want to add neighborhood pages, make sure your content is unique to your site. I found one of my neighborhoods, West Cave Estates, not getting indexed for days after posting a link. When I studied it and other websites with similar pages I found that my content was similar to other pages even though I wrote it myself.
Where do you get content? Research each neighborhood online. You will probably find other real estate sites with neighborhood pages. You will also probably find a number of HOA pages and blogs as well as posts in forums like city-data. Take what you learn and put it in your own words just as you did with research papers back in school.
One last tip about using Active Rain for links: don’t overdo it. Include no more than 3 links back to your site in any post. Make sure the post is something that a person will actually read. As for neighborhood pages, these are just examples for this post. You can write about all sorts of things and link to other new pages as well.
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This guest post was contributed by Sam Chapman.
Sam specializes in Lake Travis waterfront homes.
Commenting on Blog Posts to Build Incoming Links
A significant part of getting your real estate website found through search engine optimization (SEO) is link building. Getting inbound links from good websites should be an ongoing process.
You can get links by writing articles and posting them on article sites, you can ask webmasters to add a link to your site, you can get a link at a chamber of commerce site if you join the chamber, and there are a lot more ways to get links.
One method that became popular a couple of years ago is commenting on blog posts. That method does work, but you need to understand when a link is working for SEO and when it isn’t.
How to Tell if a Link in a Blog Comment is a Valuable Link
A valuable link is one that search engines will follow, and that allows keywords in anchor text.
Keywords in the anchor text is important. This is the text that your website url is embedded in – your key words. For example, if you click on the Rough Hollow homes link, it takes you to the Rough Hollow homes page on my website. BUT, how do you know if a link is a valuable link?
The issue of do follow vs nofollow is another criteria to use for evaluation. Many blogs will install a bit of nofollow software. When a link is coded nofollow, search engines ignore it and this makes the link useless for SEO.
If you are confused about anchor text, think of a door that leads into a room and the name of the room is on the door. The door is the link and the words are your anchor text. It accurately tells you where it will lead you. If you are confused about dofollow and nofollow think of a dofollow link as a door that can be opened to let you go somewhere and a nofollow link as a door that never opens.
How can you tell if a comment link is nofollow? You can view the source code for the page, which can be a headache, or you can install the Firefox NoDoFollow add-on.
After installing the add-on, click on Tools and select DoNoFollow. Any link on the page you are viewing will be highlighted in blue if is a dofollow link, a link of value, or it will be highlighted in red if it is a nofollow link. Then go to a real estate related blog you want to comment on, find a post that has comments and see if there links are highlighted in blue. If they are, you’re in luck. While using Firefox, click to get the NoDoFollow add-on (notice the great anchor text).
Let’s get back to key words for a moment. How can you tell if a blog allows commenters to use key words? This is pretty simple. Find a blog post with comments and look at the links. If you see words like Portland real estate, Austin homes, etc. as links, key words are OK.
Another couple of things to look for in WordPress blogs are Lucia’s Linky Love, KeywordLuv and CommentLuv. WordPress blog comments have the nofollow attribute unless the author installs one of these add-ons.
Lucia’s Linky Love makes blog post comments dofollow. However, to prevent spammers, the author of the blog can require a certain number of comments before a link becomes dofollow.
CommentLuv will allow you to enter your blog url and when you post your comment it will display your blog’s most recent post.
KeywordLuv allows you to enter your name, the @ symbol and then your keywords. When you do this, your anchor text has your url in it and it is a dofollow comment. So if I enter Sam@Marble Falls Homes, the comment will show Sam from Marble Falls Homes.
You will know if a WordPress blog has one of these when you look below the comment box. There will be a logo, text or both stating that the add-on has been installed.
Having said all this, do not go to real estate blogs only to get links. When you make a comment, make it appropriate. Spammers will add comments like “nice post,” or “you provide valuable information” or some other garbage. Make sure you read the post and add something of value.
If you can’t leave a good comment, move on to another blog!
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Note from Kathleen: I do want to support your SEO efforts. As we describe on the About this Blog page, comments on this blog are a dofollow for the name you enter with the associated domain name, and nofollow for links in the body of the comment itself. We set it up that way to discourage spammers because there’s no benefit for them in packing a comment with loads of links.
We don’t mind if you use keywords as your name, but please sign the post. That means if you put Atlanta Real Estate as your name, along with your domain name, that link showing your keyword phrase will be followed by the search engines. But, since it’s tough to respond to Atlanta Real Estate, please put your real name at the end of your comment!
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This guest post was contributed by Sam Chapman.
Sam specializes in Lake Travis waterfront homes.
I have worked hundreds of open houses and most have produced up no clients. Then I heard from a very experienced agent the trick to picking up buyers from open houses.
Five Steps that Make Open Houses Pay for Themselves!
1. Choose a great house at a great price in a high traffic location. It helps also if it is advertised. Select an agent you enjoy working with to work the open house with you. Learn everything about the house.
2. Select 4 other homes for sale within 10 minutes by car or in the same neighborhood. Pick one that is at a lower price, one at a higher price and 2 that are similar. Make sure the homes are vacant and not shown only by appointment. Print out the MLS information and have it with you.
3. Start with business as usual. When buyers walk into the open house, take turns with your partner greeting them. Do your usual open house script and let them wander.
4. A call to action! When your visitors are about to leave, ask what they thought about the house and what they are looking for. When they tell you AND if they are not already working with an agent, select one of the 4 vacant homes and tell the buyers that you know of a great home close by that might work for them. Ask if they would like to see it and get them in your car.
5. Develop a Relationship. Then you will have the opportunity to develop a relationship and learn about their needs. I worked an open house with a friend just west of downtown Austin and got a lady in my car. I ended up showing her million dollar Lake Travis waterfront homes.
As you alternate with your open house partner talking with prospective buyers, one of you may get buyers in your car. If your partner ends up with people in his or her car, no big deal. You continue to work the open house. If you end up with buyers, your partner continues with the open house.
If you do this every other weekend for a couple of months, you will most likely end up with one or more buyers. Try it – it works!
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This guest post was contributed by Sam Chapman, Austin Texas
Over the last year I have built many Austin neighborhood pages. I did this to create more content for the site, and also to break listings down by neighborhood. I really had no idea what kind of traffic they would get, but after just going over some stats, I think I will be adding more.
Setting Up Neighborhood Pages
Many people searching for Austin homes do so from outside of the city or the state of Texas. As such, my thinking was that many of them will not search neighborhood pages because they didn’t know their way around neighborhoods. I really thought the neighborhood pages would be used by locals to check out activity in their neighborhoods. Was I wrong?
I have an Austin Homes by Neighborhood link as one of the tabs that is seen when any page is open. That takes people to a page with a short description of what the page is about, an area MLS map and then blocks breaking down the Austin area into sections.
Within each section is a description of the area, and then there are links to neighborhoods and the MLS areas they are in. Most of the neighborhoods go to pages on my website that have a description of the neighborhood followed by framed listings.
For an example of a neighborhood page added yesterday, take a look at my Round Rock Ranch page. As you will see, there isn’t much of a description, but it is enough to get the page indexed. Some of my other neighborhood pages have more of a description simply because they are huge and are loaded with amenities.
Neighborhood Pages Work!
Looking at my statistics today I found that the Austin Homes by Neighborhood page is the 5th most highly trafficked page on the entire website. Over the past 7 days, which have been relatively quiet in terms of visitors, the page has had just 4% of the total page views, a 35% bounce rate and an exit rate of just 21%. Visitors average less than a minute on the page and most click through to neighborhood pages.
The amazing thing to me is that the clickthroughs to neighborhood pages amount to 20% of total page views on the site. Another thing that amazes me is how many of my neighborhood pages rank very highly on page 1 when the subdivision name is searched.
How Neighborhood Pages Benefit Me
So what are the benefits to me? More content, which Google loves, and more visitors. I also research the neighborhoods before creating pages and that helps me understand that particular segment of the Austin real estate market.
So if you’ve got a website and some time, dig in and create neighborhood pages.
Notes from Kathleen
I just had to jump in here! Another benefit to consider is that neighborhood pages are an outstanding way to present yourself as an area expert. If you take a look at Sam’s Austin Homes by Neighborhood page, you’ll notice that he writes in the first person. For example: “When I think of central Austin, I tend to think of neighborhoods close to downtown and the University of Texas.“
It sounds just like he’s talking to his visitors, and that is so much more effective than writing something like: “When one thinks of central Austin, one tends to think of neighborhoods…”
And, Sam provides REAL insider insight on the areas. He notes that some neighborhoods are special because they are located at the edge of Hill Country and have great views. And, he includes market information, pointing out an area that is a strong seller’s market and advising buyers to act quickly if they find a home they like.
That type of information isn’t easily found on the Internet. It makes Sam’s site very welcoming, personal and informative. It also motivates visitors to want to stay longer and come back often!
