As of this blog post, there are only a couple of SEO training videos available, but several more will be coming soon. In fact, I’ll be filming three more videos this morning and should have them online by tomorrow.

In the first SEO video you’ll learn about the importance of link building for good search engine rankings, and you’ll learn a handful of ways to build links for your real estate website. Like I said, however, these are top-level summaries of real estate SEO topics. If you really want to get into the nuts and bolts of these subjects, you should download a copy of the Top Ten Agent e-book.

Real estate agents have to work harder these days in order to attract website visitors. The reasons why are obvious. These days, there are many more real estate sites online than there were just a few years ago. The number of potential clients, however, has not increased at such a rate. So there are more websites competing for the same sized audience.

But in addition to working harder at it, you have to work smarter as well. You need to take a focused approach to your web marketing strategy. One of the ways you can do this is by expanding your website with high-value informational resources.

How and Why to Add Real Estate Content

Why bother adding new articles and tutorials to your website? It’s hard work and takes a lot of time and energy. What’s the point?

When you expand your website with informational resources (articles, tutorials, FAQs, etc.), you are achieving several things at once. And they all support your ultimate goal of getting more business from the Internet.

The Benefits of Content Expansion

For one thing, you are making your website more useful to the most important audience of all — your prospective clients. This in turn keeps people on your site longer, which is the first step to converting anonymous visitors into viable leads and inquiries.

You also benefit by further positioning yourself as a lead authority in your market area. For example, if you publish original articles about the local real estate scene, neighborhoods, new construction and the like, it shows you really know what’s happening in the area. Good for clients!

In my mind, the first two benefits are the most important. But there’s another good reason to expand your web content with relevant information, and that is search engine visibility. Keyword-rich content is the first step to good rankings in the major search engines. The more relevant content you add to your site, the more ways people have to find you online.

Website Organization is Critical

So I’ve convinced you that adding resources to your website is a worthwhile venture. Now what? Well, you can go about your content expansion in a number of ways really. It all depends on your current site structure, your audience and your goals. But the most important thing is to proceed in an organized fashion.

Disorganization and clutter is a common problem on real estate agent websites — too much information presented all at once, with no thought to organization and logic. This will turn your visitors away and wreck your conversion rates. Consumers have high expectations for websites these days, so why would they stay on a site that’s poorly organized and hard to use?

Here’s a technique I use all the time. Map out your current website structure on a piece of paper. Nothing fancy — just boxes with lines between them, labeled by page name. Then make a list of the new content you want to add. Seeing it all on paper will help you decide what should go where, how it should be cross-linked, how the navigation should reflect the changes, etc.

Brandon Cornett is the publisher of Arming Your Farming, a website that offers marketing tips and tutorials to real estate professionals. Topics include blogging, websites, SEO, designing yard signs and more. Online at http://www.armingyourfarming.com

In truth, I misunderstood the nature of the question when I was interviewed by the FSB journalist who did the piece. I thought the question came from a real estate agent, but it actually came from a real estate advertising company.

At any rate, I thought you might like to check it out. Michael Russer also contributed some good advice to the article.

Read the full article here

Real estate SEO is time-consuming, to be sure, and it does require a lot of patience and persistence. But it is by no means hard to understand. For example, most of the work I do for clients on a daily basis revolves around two things — developing content and acquiring links to the client’s website. Nothing technically advanced there.

5 Simple Changes to Your Real Estate Website

In this article, however, I won’t be focusing on the long-term side of a real estate SEO campaign. Instead, I’ll focus on the short-term website overhaul. More specifically, I’m going to show you five simple tasks you can perform on your real estate website over the next few days to improve your search engine visibility and traffic levels.

1. Validate Your Key Phrases

Let’s start by eliminating the guesswork of real estate SEO. Let’s find out exactly what phrases people are searching to find the kinds of products or services you provide. We will refer to this list of phrases throughout the other steps in this article.

There are several keyword-research tools you can use for this purpose, but for starters you can use the free version of WordTracker (just Google that phrase to find it). It will give you the 100 most commonly searched phrases for every starting word or phrase you enter. For example, if I were to enter “small business finance” into this particular tool, it would show me the 100 most popular searches (variations) of that type of phrase.

Create a spreadsheet of the search phrases that are most important to your business. These phrases / topics should have three things in common: They should be related to your products or services. People should be searching them on a regular basis. And you should be capable of writing content to support them.

Related: Marketers and Consumers Speak Differently 

2. Include Keywords in Your Title Elements

Armed with your spreadsheet full of key phrases, you are now ready to venture into the actual website to make some real estate SEO enhancements. Let’s start with the title element.

The title element (sometimes referred to as the “title tag”) is found within the HTML code that makes up each of your web pages. To view the title element, just right-click on any web page and select “View Source.” This will show you the HTML code that makes up the web page. The title element will be near the top, between two tags labeled with “title.”

You can also see the title element in the blue bar (with Internet Explorer) or the gray bar (with Firefox) at the top of your web browser, up above the navigation buttons and the address bar. When your website shows up on a search engine results page, the title will also be prominent above the listing.

Here’s the secret to writing effective title elements for your web pages. Be sure to include your key phrase at the beginning of your title. If you put it at the end of the title, it will greatly reduce your search engine visibility for that phrase.

So for this step in the real estate SEO overhaul, go page by page through your website and make sure that (A) each page has a unique title that is relevant to the information on that page; (B) the titles include keywords from your spreadsheet; and (C) the keywords are at the beginning of the title element, wherever possible.

Related: Title Elements on Older Websites 

3. Add Five Pages of Website Content

I’m willing to bet that, after doing your key phrase research, you’ll find some topics / phrases that are important to your business but are not currently covered on your website. So for this step of the overhaul, you will simply broaden your content by adding (at least) five pages of new website content, targeting those neglected phrases.

Glossaries and articles are both great ways to expand the content of your website in a logical way, and you can continue to expand them over time. For example, there is no limit to how many pages an article center might provide … or how many key phrases it might encompass … or how much search traffic it may bring!

Related: Creating Dual-Purpose Web Content 

4. Freshen Up Your Existing Pages

With your key phrase spreadsheet close by, review your existing web pages and make sure they include those phrases. If they don’t, you can correct this fairly easily. For starters, add an introductory paragraph to the top of each page, as well as a concluding paragraph at the bottom. Integrate your key phrase(s) within each of these paragraphs.

Next, go through the main body content on each page and spread your key phrase naturally throughout. Often, you can do this simply by converting generic pronouns into descriptive phrases. For example, a sentence that says “They can help your business” can be made more descriptive and keyword-rich by rewriting it as “Our accounting software solutions can help your business.”

5. Improve the “Findability” of Your Web Pages

A search engine cannot begin to evaluate and rank your web pages if it cannot find your web pages. So in this step of the real estate SEO overhaul, you are going to make sure your web pages are easy to find — for people and search engines alike.

Start by creating a sitemap. Actually, you should create two types of sitemaps. The first one is an XML sitemap that will help search engines find all of the pages of your site. Do a Google search for ” xml sitemap creator” and you’ll find some helpful tools to help you complete this step.

The other type of sitemap is the one for people. This would be a neat and organized listing of all the key areas of your website. The goal here is to help people find things on your website. But it will also help the search engines crawl through your site because you’ll have plenty of text hyperlinks to the key pages.

Do you have a fancy menu at the top of your website? Maybe one built with lots of JavaScript? If so, you can help search engines navigate the site by also including a basic text menu in the footer section of your website. Heavily Javascripted menus can impede search engine crawlers and prevent them from reaching your entire website. An XML sitemap and a clean (text-only) footer menu can alleviate these problems.

You’ve got your work cut out for you now! Good luck with your real estate search engine optimization campaign.

In truth, there are much better ways to obtain links to your real estate website. Better still, the link-building techniques below do not run the risk of incurring a Google penalty, which is often the case with over-aggressive link exchange programs.

[By the way, if you’re not sure why anyone would trade real estate links in the first place, see item #6 on the SEO 12-step program.]

3 Alternatives to Trading Real Estate Links

1. Publish articles online. I’ve been using this technique for nearly five years now, and I certainly wouldn’t spend that much time on it if it didn’t produce results. By publishing articles online (and on a regular basis), you can steadily increase the number of websites that link to your real estate website — thus improving your search engine visibility.
2. Create high-value web content. A better alternative to trading real estate links is to obtain links without the need for trading. You can do this by creating website content that is valuable, unique and useful. Why do you think I spend so much time blogging and create free e-books and articles? People link to these things!
3. Hire us for our SEO services! One way we provide value to our real estate SEO clients is by leveraging our network of real estate websites and small-business websites. I use these sites to increase the link popularity of my clients’ websites, which in turn helps to boost their search engine ranking. Learn more here

Here’s the bottom line. Trading real estate links is not an effective way to boost your search engine ranking. It may work in the short term, but there’s a good chance your website will be penalized for “artificially” inflating your rankings through link swaps.

Related article: Going Overboard With Reciprocal Links 

I’ve recently begun to revamp a website of mine that, up until now, had just been “hanging out” online with no real purpose. In its new form, the site has plenty of purpose. It will be an online encyclopedia of U.S. cities, from a real estate and lifestyle angle.

You can see the groundwork here

And, because all of the City Pages can be sponsored by real estate agents, it’s also a new way to approach real estate marketing online (for additional exposure, web traffic, etc.).

Here’s the gist of the program, and how you can use it for real estate marketing online. Each City Page will be designed for good rankings in the major search engines such as Google. But even more importantly, the pages will be very informative and useful for people researching the city from a real estate angle.

By following a “one agent per city” type of rule, the website will offer premium placement for the real estate agent who chooses to sponsor a particular City Page. Thus, it’s a nice addition to any online real estate marketing program.

Also, because we are spending more than 40% of site revenue on additional site promotion, it’s a marketing investment with increasing returns year after year. (The City Pages will enjoy increased visibility and traffic levels over time.)

This will all make a lot more sense if you see it for yourself:

• Here’s an example of a sponsored City Page for Georgetown, Texas.
• Here’s an example of an available (not sponsored) City Page for Nashville, Tennessee.

Here’s some additional information on the benefits of the program.

Note: We are adding new cities / pages at a rate of two per day. If you are interested in sponsoring a City Page, please let me know and I will put your city at the top of the production list. This will give you “first dibs” to lock down your City Page for a year … or longer!

For a long time, I’ve talked about the perils of using real estate website templates to create an agent website for marketing purposes. Specifically, the target of my warning came from a search engine optimization perspective.

Many template websites come with content “built in,” which is one of primary problems with these products. Stock content is bad for two reasons. First of all, it couldn’t possibly speak to your target audience — because it is, after all, stock content.

Secondly, stock content will kill your chances for top search engine ranking someday. Search engines demote the value of websites with unoriginal content found elsewhere on the Web. And stock content, by its very definition, is normally found on multiple websites.

A lot of real estate website templates are just plain horrible for search engine optimization purposes. Many of the companies who peddle these things use frames to simplify their own maintenance, but these frames also ruin the SEO potential of the website.

So while frames might help the company who sells the templates websites, they certainly don’t help the agent’s marketing program.

Here’s the real truth about real estate template websites … and this comes from nearly a decade in web development and over five years as an SEO consultant:

It’s not the website templates themselves that are bad for SEO purposes … it’s the way the templates are used.

A template is simply a pre-built website that you can customize with your own content, logo, color preferences, etc. So when they are used that way, templates make no difference from an SEO standpoint (as compared to a custom-built website).

Let me stress that point again. A custom-built website and a properly used template website are exactly equal in terms of search engine ranking / SEO potential. It’s what you do with your website once it’s online that matters.

Note the difference:

• If you start with a real estate website template and customize it with original content, and then you pursue the SEO techniques outlined in my real estate SEO book … then there’s no limit to what you can accomplish in terms of search engine ranking.
• However, if you start with a real estate template website and use stock content from some kind of content “library” … or if your website uses frames to bring in content from other websites … then you have severely limited yourself in terms of search engine ranking, visibility and search-driven web traffic.

My Choice for Website Templates

Here’s a final tip for you regarding the use of templates. Don’t limit yourself to the so-called real estate website templates I talked about previously. Many of these products use frames, stock content, and other things that we just declared as being bad from an SEO standpoint.

The key is to start with a well-built template that is also search engine “friendly,” and then customize it with your own content, logo, colors, etc. In this way, you could have a professional real estate website up and running in less time, for less cost, and with just as much search engine potential as a so-called “custom” website.

I’ll go a step further and recommend a template product that I’ve been using for some time, and with complete satisfaction. I use a company called 4Templates.com because they have nice-looking website templates that are:

• Easy to customize (for somebody with basic HTML skills)
• Built with modern web coding techniques
• Professional in appearance
• Search engine “friendly” in terms of structure, coding, etc.
• Clearly worth the price

I’ve also written a more thorough review of these website templates if you’re interested.

So let’s sum up…

• Not all templates are created equal
• Some are terrible for SEO purposes, others are just fine
• You should avoid stock content and the use of frames
• Using website templates properly can save time, money and energy
• You can’t go wrong with the professional templates offered by 4Templates.com

Real estate search engine optimization / SEO and writing skills are a match made in Internet heaven. Obviously, this is good news for real estate agents who enjoy writing. But where should you begin? How can you get the best return on your writing investment?

Here’s a list of web-writing tasks you can focus on right away. The items on this list have two things in common: (1) they all require writing skills, and (2) they can all lead to considerable gains in the real estate SEO department.

So without further commentary, here are five ways you can write your way to better search engine rankings and — ultimately — increased web traffic.

1. Revisit Your Titles Elements

The title element is simply a line of HTML / web code on a web page that describes the content of that page. At least, that’s what title elements are supposed to be. But a lot of the time, I see real estate agents use non-descriptive titles, copy and paste the same title element across the whole website, or forget to use title elements altogether.

These are harmful mistakes both from a real estate SEO standpoint and a website usability standpoint.

So before you spend time or energy with any other search engine optimization task, make sure that your title elements are optimized for people and search engines alike — on every page of your real estate website. Put your key phrases in your title elements (”stacking” the title with the key phrase right up front). Use a different title on every page, and make sure it reflects the content of that page.

The benefits of doing this are two-fold. For one thing, you’re making your real estate website more helpful for people. For another thing, you’re making each page of your website more relevant to the topics discussed on those pages, and thus more likely to appear in search engine results.

2. Submit a Real Estate Press Release Online

You can also put your writing talent to good use (for SEO purposes) by writing, optimizing and distributing press releases online. This can help bring in direct traffic, but it’s also a useful technique for real estate search engine optimization … as we will see.

Using a service like PRWeb.com, you can publish a real estate press release online with keyword-rich hyperlinks back to your website. Inbound links can help your real estate SEO program because they are one of the ways that search engines rank websites.

You can also optimize your press release for certain key phrases related to your business. This gives you yet another benefit. Now you are creating a new source for direct traffic, in addition to helping your own website’s SEO program. People can find your press release by searching those relevant phrases, and they follow the links to your website.

This SEO strategy is outlined for you in the SEO book available on this website.

3. Publish Real Estate Articles Online

Here’s another technique for real estate search engine optimization that will really help you get the most from your writing talents. If you create a high-quality article on some aspect of real estate, and that article gets republished on reputable websites, it can help build your credibility.

That’s one benefit to publishing real estate articles online. But we’re talking about real estate SEO here, so let’s look at how those same articles can help with your search engine visibility campaign.

It’s common practice to include a brief author’s note or bio when publishing articles online. And it’s also common to include a link to your website within the author’s bio. You can probably see where I’m going with this, because it’s similar to the press release strategy mentioned above.

The more places your article gets published, the more links you will earn to your website (from those other sites that publish the article). Depending on the popularity of the website who publishes your piece, this can bring direct traffic in addition to real estate SEO benefits.

This strategy is spelled out in much greater detail in the Top Ten Agent book.

4. Add Content to Your Real Estate Website

Are you getting writer’s cramp yet? I hope not, because I have more ways to use your writing talents for real estate SEO purposes! And one of them is the simple (but often overlooked) strategy of expanding your website’s content.

Writing new content for your website can help you improve your search engine ranking steadily over time. Thus, content development is a crucial part of your real estate search engine optimization program.

Think of all the different phrases — and variations of phrases — that somebody might enter into a search engine when looking for real estate services in your area. You can eventually get your website to come up in search engines for all of those phrases, but you have to start by building content around the key phrases. So the more content you have … the more ways people can find you online.

Just avoid falling into the trap of writing solely for search engines. You should write for people first, while realizing your efforts will also help with search engine visibility.

Here’s the key to developing great content for your real estate website. Try to create authority documents that others in your field would link to and recommend to others. Here’s an example of such a document I created on the subject of real estate blog marketing.

In addition to being good for your readers, this kind of useful content will make other webmasters more inclined to link to your article. This adds to your link “popularity” and can further improve your search engine rankings.

You see how it all ties together? If you have good writing skills, and you’re willing to put in the time and effort, there’s nothing stopping you from achieving such success.

5. Blog Regularly

We’re almost done, so hang in there. I just have one more tip for using your writing skills for real estate search engine optimization purposes … and it’s the blog.
A real estate blog is an ideal tool for a writer, because it gives you an easy way to publish content onto your website. The more you blog, the more content you have. The more website content you have, the more likely you’ll be to come up in search results for a wide range of search phrases.

But the SEO values of blogging are just one of the many benefits a real estate blog can bring. A blog can also help you acquire inbound links, build your reputation, inform your readers, reinforce your brand … the list goes on.

Get Started Today

Now that you have some direction, you’re ready to launch your “writing for SEO” program. Take what I’ve given you and build on it. Create a content plan for yourself, incorporating the items listed above. Make it part of your daily schedule and stick to it. You’ll increase your website’s visibility and traffic in no time — I promise you that.

Dozens More Real Estate SEO Tips

If you found this article helpful, you really should download a copy of my “Top Ten Agent” e-book. In the book, I outline in step-by-step fashion the process I go through to drive real estate websites up the search engine rankings (for more traffic, more leads and more success). Download your copy today.

Good luck with your real estate search engine optimization program, and with your business in general. I hope you’ve found this article helpful.

-Brandon

Don’t get me wrong … real estate SEO is a great tool with long-lasting benefits. If it wasn’t, I would not have written several e-books and hundreds of articles on real estate search engine optimization topics.

But SEO should be one of several marketing channels you use to attract new clients and grow your business. Search engine optimization should never be your only marketing strategy. It can take months to develop good search engine ranking for your real estate website, so you’ll need some other marketing techniques to go along with real estate SEO.

So I thought I would create a brief summary of the other real estate marketing channels that can help you grow your business.

Marketing Channels for Real Estate Agents

• Real Estate Direct Mail – I used to work for a direct mail postcard company that catered mostly to real estate agents. In that role, I saw enough real estate postcards to realize something. Most real estate agents are missing a lot of potential business by sending postcards with weak messages, no offers, etc. But postcards can be a great real estate marketing tool, if used properly. Here’s a book that teaches you the right way to use postcard marketing techniques.
• Home Buying Seminars — Can you imagine the business-building potential of having 20 or more home buyers in a room ready to learn about the home buying process … from you? That’s what you can achieve through home buying seminars. But like any other real estate marketing technique, mediocrity need not apply. Here’s an article and PowerPoint kit to help you create a winning seminar presentation.
• Real Estate Blogs – Let me start off by saying that real estate blogs are not some kind of magical tool for instant Internet success. But they are extremely easy to use, and that’s the primary value they provide for real estate agents. Because blogs are easy to publish, you can create a useful, content-rich blog without much effort at all, and the buyers and sellers in your market area will respond to it favorably. Here’s a free book to help you get the most from real estate blogging.

Real Estate Marketing - Diversified

These are just a few of the ways you can attract new clients and grow your real estate business. Real estate search engine optimization can be highly effective for this purpose too. That’s why I’ve written a book about it, and why I offer SEO services to real estate agents. But SEO should not be your only marketing channel.

Mix it up. Diversify your marketing like you would diversify an investment portfolio. You’ll be better off for it in the long run. Trust me on this one.

Both of these things are desirable — easy website management and good search engine visibility. But can you have them both at the same time. The answer is … sometimes.

Content management systems have come a long way, both in terms of capability and SEO friendly aspects. Today, various CMS programs are available that can help you manage the content on your website while also maintaining the search engine / SEO friendly nature of the site.

Here are a couple of articles and a forum thread to help you learn more about the subject:

• An SEO Choice for Content Management System
• SEO CMS - Search Engine Friendly Content Management
• Choosing an SEO Friendly CMS