My pet peeve about Wordpress is that so few people who are developing Wordpress sites for Realtors, including Realtors themselves, have even the slightest idea what they are doing. Because of their cluelessness, both these developers’ clients and do-it-your Realtors are suffering financially.

A couple of days ago, a client — Client #1— called me to share some insights with me that he had gotten from talking with other Realtors. One of  was  that you shouldn’t have a blog and website combined because if your website host goes out of business, you will not have lost all the content on your blog. Other arguments I’ve heard in favor of Wordpress:  it’s cheap, you “own” it and control it,  etc.

Later the same day, I got a call from a client — Client #2 — who had contracted with me earlier last year for a custom designed site, then put his project on hold because he had run out of money. Though he is a veteran agent who formerly had a good foothold in the San Francisco Bay area luxury home market, Client #2 is really hurting financially right now. Client #2 has a Wordpress site with Diverse Solutions’ IX plug-in that someone else put together for him.

Client #1’s current site was moved to its current host in the October 2010. Since then, it has had some 900 leads in the form of registered users with contact info including phone numbers and verified email addresses. Traffic to his site ranges from 150 to 400 visitors/day. Client #1 has written (or had written) only a handful of the nearly 15,000 posts on his blog. The rest have been generated by the custom integrated IDX hosting system that I use.

Client #2 has reported that he is happy  with the business his site has generated. In an unusual first for me, several of  his competitors have tried unsuccessfully to get his MLS board to shut his site down because it is dominating search results for his market.

Client #2’s Wordpress site appears to be a few months older than Client #1’s current site. Client #2  told me that he has gotten two leads from his Wordpress site. Two leads.

The main difference between the two sites is that the search optimization work done on #2 truly sucks. It is averaging around 18 visitors/day while #1’s site is currently getting around 150 visitors/day.

With only a quick look at the first page of #2’s Wordpress site, I can identify dozens of things that have been done wrong for SEO. The most obvious tip-off for me that the developer doesn’t know SEO is that he has added a long list of keyphrases to the bottom of the home page, many of which include the agent’s name, which is also his domain name. Optimizing a site on-page for the domain name is truly useless and redundant. Meanwhile, the developer  rarely used the primary keyphrase for the site — Bay Area real estate — anywhere on the site, especially in elements that are important for SEO, such as hyperlinks and <h1> tags.

Sadly, when I first saw the site, I gave Client #2  a list of recommended quick fixes to get  his Wordpress site to attract more search traffic while I worked on his new site (that was on hold until this week). His Wordpress developer blew them off.

I can only think of two Wordpress sites that I’ve seen recently that were done well from an SEO perspective. Client #2’s site is just one example of hundreds of Wordpress real estate sites that I’ve seen done amateurishly.  That’s why I see Wordpress as a dangerous diversion for Realtors who don’t know what they are doing.

Wordpress’s popularity for real estate sites came along at the worst possible time.  I’m not joking when I say or write that Wordpress has been a major factor contributing to the real estate economy.

Are you a gifted writer who loves writing? Are people reading and enjoying your blog, commenting and linking to your blog?

If you answered “yes,” then you probably don’t need to read this article.

If, however, you don’t  like to write, don’t feel inspired to write, and if you only post to your blog because you have the vague idea that blogging is somehow a good thing, then keep reading.

I can’t magically turn you into a gifted writer, but I can tell you how to make the most of the time that you devote to your real estate blog by thinking about SEO (search engine optimization).

Chances are good that your website can benefit from having more content optimized for the primary real estate search keyphrase for your market area — the keyphrase most people use to search. That will probably be your city name and possibly your state, combined with either “real estate” or “homes for sale.” Find out more about researching keyphrases…

If, like most Realtors®, your time for blogging is limited, then keep in mind that:

1. Search engines look for websites that are relevant to the keyphrases that people use to search. So, if you live in Sarasota and you want people to find your site when they search “Sarasota real estate,” then blogging about your favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe isn’t going to help. Google won’t see  “chocolate chip cookies” as being related to “Sarasota real estate.”
2. The search engines look for keywords in special places on your blog posts: the title, headline, subheads, and within the text itself. So you need to make sure your keyphrase is used in those places.

So, next time you write a blog post, think like an SEO expert: add your keyphrase to your blog title, headline, subheads and text. For example, if you’re a Sarasota real estate agent who is…:

…writing about staging your home to sell, don’t just call your article, “Staging Your Home to Sell.” Instead, write, “Staging  Sarasota Homes for Sale.”

…writing about the housing market, instead of writing, “Has the Housing Market Hit Bottom?,” write “Has the Sarasota Real Estate Market Hit Bottom?”

Next, go through your entire article, looking for places where you can insert one of your keyphrases LOGICALLY within your text. Try to insert a keyphrase at least once in every paragraph. For example, a sentence such as “Light, bright, and airy still seems to be the best rule of thumb when preparing to sell a home” could be rewritten as, “Light, bright, and airy still seems to be the best rule of thumb when preparing a Sarasota home for sale.”

With practice, eventually you’ll find yourself effortlessly optimizing every post you write, and you can congratulate yourself for having mastered a key aspect of search engine optimization.

If you want to learn more, here’s good tutorial on how to optimize a page. This page is optimized for the keyphrase “chocolate donuts,” so you’ll need to imaging substituting your real estate keyphrase.

Hang out where Realtors® congregate online and you’re sure to eventually read questions like, “Which website is better? Z57, Point2Agent, Advanced Access or…” (And, of course, Wordpress.) Then you’ll read answers like, “I had a [insert brand here] website and it was terrible. I never got any leads from it.”

Here’s the truth that few Realtors ever realize: no website is ever any better than the off-page search engine optimization (SEO) done for the site. The key word is “off-page.”

To quote a little pdf I downloaded from HubSpot this morning, Website “Must Haves”:

“Off-page search engine optimization (SEO) is the most important factor to increasing your ranking results… Off-Page SEO is about building inbound links, essentially getting other quality websites to link back to you. Search engines call this authority or ‘link juice.’ The more inbound links you have, the more important your site must be, thus the higher you’ll rank.”

HubSpot’s description is a bit over-simplified, but in essence it is dead-on. I would simply add that the diversity and quality of in-bound links is also very important. For example, 5 links from 5 different highly ranked real-estate-related websites are likely to do more for your site’s ranking than 500 links from ActiveRain.

So, if you are deciding between real estate website providers or contemplating going the do-it-yourself route, keep in mind that where off-page SEO is concerned, all real estate site providers are created equal. No real estate website will rank well in Google straight “out of the box.” It MUST have good ranking for at least a few high-volume keyphrases and the only way to get good ranking is with off-page SEO. To get good traffic, it must rank high on page 1 of Google search results for at least a few good high volume keyphrases like, “your city real estate” or “your city state real estate” and/or for lots of less competitive keyphrases.

I can’t think of a single real estate website provider that will provide off-page SEO as part of a site package. Some offer it as an additional service, but I haven’t heard good things about many of them. I know, from having been closely involved with Point2Agent for several years that no one on their staff knows much about SEO. Some of my clients have been quite literally “ripped off” by other website providers who charged them for SEO but never did anything. The only real estate site provider that I can think of at the moment that does good off-site SEO work is Real Estate Webmasters, and they charge dearly (several $thousand/month) for SEO.

Inbound link-building isn’t rocket science. I have one client who has done his own for years. His highly ranked site gets over 500 visitors/day and has in-bound links from over 3000 domains. The important fact you must remember and budget for when choosing your website platform is, “Who is going to do the off-page SEO — in-bound link-building?”

Someone found my blog today by Googling, “what is off-page SEO.” Good question.

Though the term may be meaningless to you, off-page SEO is possibly the most important type of search engine optimization. Google gives extra merit to sites that appear to be authoritative. It measures a site’s authority not by what’s on the site itself, but by the buzz that your site is creating out in the Internet ethers: how many people are writing about your site, referring to it, or linking to it.

So, a savvy SEO consultant will probably spend more time working off your site than on it. Your SEO guru may:

• Write and submit articles to promote your site and create one-way links.
• Submit your site to other sites to get one-way links
• Post social networking posts with links to your site
• Comment on real estate blogs, using a link to your site in signatures

If this sounds time-consuming and expensive, it is. But, if you want top of Google page 1 placement for your site, this necessary evil is a good investment.

Perhaps the most pervasive and destructive myth popular among real estate agents is the idea that Wordpress is good for search engine optimization (SEO), aka “Google juice.”

Wordpress is so misunderstood that sometimes I suspect that poorly SEO’d Wordpress real estate sites may have played a role in the current real estate recession by not delivering traffic to agents’ sites, traffic that results in leads. An agent who isn’t getting leads may think the market sucks, when the unvarnished truth is simply that his Wordpress site sucks.

You need to understand that while Wordpress does remove some barriers to SEO, WORDPRESS WILL NOT DO SEO FOR YOU! A poorly SEO’d Wordpress site is as useless a marketing tool as any other kind of poorly SEO’d site.

The most noticeable difference between a Wordpress site and a non-blog-based site is that when you publish an article on your blog, it will “ping” the search engines to tell them that new content has been published. That means that your article may show up in Google’s search results very quickly instead of sometime in the next few weeks when Google next indexes your site. That often fools agents into thinking that Wordpress offers some kind of mysterious Google juice magic.

I’ve looked at a lot of real estate agents’ Wordpress blogs, and I can count on the fingers of one hand those that I’ve seen that are properly SEO’d. Instead, do-it-yourself Wordpress blogs typically show that their owners know zip about SEO. Among the evidence:

1. Poorly SEO’d title tags, headlines, internal links and content.
2. Poor or non-existent keyphrase research and keyphrase optimization strategy.
3. Lack of backlinks (links from other sites to your site) with sufficient numbers, quality and diversity to impact site ranking (probably the single most important determinant of site ranking).

Problems with content SEO are the easiest to detect. Realtors® don’t usually understand the direct relationship between the words on their pages and how Google ranks their site for specific keyphrases. For example, a good (though highly competitive) keyphrase for one broker’s geographic area is “Palm Springs real estate.” If you were Google, would you “see” the following post as being relevant to “Palm Springs real estate” — do you see the words “Palm Springs real estate” anywhere in this article? How will this article help people who are searching for Palm Springs real estate find this blog post?

Five Tips to Better Position Your Home For Sale
Five tips to better position your home for sale, buyers don’t tend to buy when prices are dropping: When they drop, they tend to wait to see if prices will decline even further. The uptick in buyers occurs when home prices start rising, as buyers then sense the bottom of the market has already happend [...]

Optimizing text content is only part of the SEO process, but it’s  the easiest to do correctly. The agent who wrote the above post probably felt really virtuous about writing it,  and indeed, Googling the title of his article will show it  #1 in search results. But the truth is that it was a waste of his valuable time because this article did nothing to improve his site’s ranking for “Palm Springs real estate.” And that’s ignoring the fact that a savvy SEO expert probably wouldn’t even attempt to get a new site to rank for “Palm Springs real estate” and would instead optimize for several dozen less competitive keyphrases and hundreds or thousands of longtail keyphrases.

The truth about Wordpress is that you’ve either got to learn SEO and do it right yourself, or you’ve got to hire someone to do it for you. Figuring out how to install and set up a Wordpress site is only a small piece of the puzzle. Getting traffic to — and leads from — a Wordpress site is a different story altogether.

If it isn’t correctly SEO’d, your low-cost Wordpress site isn’t saving you money. It’s costing you money by not generating leads.

In Google’s search results, as in real estate, it’s all about LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION. And for Google, the hot location is the number one spot in organic search results.

You may have a website and it may show up in Google somewhere, but if it’s not coming up at or near the very top of page one of Google’s search results for the best keyphrases for real estate in your geographic area, you’re missing out on a lot of potential leads.

A recent study by Optify reported that websites ranked number one receive an average click-through rate of 36.4%  and sites ranked number two had an average click-through rate of 12.5 percent. That means that almost half of all traffic from Google goes to the first two sites listed on page one of Google’s search results. Add the traffic from third listing and the total is 58.4 percent, or close to two thirds of all click-throughs.

View a chart showing percentage of click-throughs for all ten spots on Google page 1.

NAR’s Field Guide to Quick Real Estate Statistics reports that the percentage of business generated by Realtors® personal website (all Realtors®) is:

Zero: 37%
Over 25%: 10%

That doesn’t surprise me at all, because I see so few real estate websites that appear to have had any professional calibre SEO work done. A site lacking good SEO and good search rankings, is unlikely to generate leads.

What’s more, just getting on page one of Google search results for a keyphrase isn’t all that matters. Intelligent keyphrase research is extremely important and is a step that many DIY real estate site owners skip or do wrong. Getting to number one for a keyphrase that almost no one searches for is easy, but it’s also fairly useless.

In fact, poor keyword research can be outright harmful: Recently I stopped recommending a well-known SEO company after their inept keyphrase strategy resulted in traffic to three of my clients’ site going down (after each client paid the company some $6k for SEO work).

You might wonder why I obsess so about SEO even though I do only a limited amount of search engine optimization (SEO) myself, focused on on-site SEO. My obsession is fueled by years of experience watching beautiful real estate web sites languish because their owners haven’t heeded my recommendation to have additional off-site SEO work done.

Good SEO is essential to  the success of your online marketing efforts. Please don’t skimp on this important work by trying to do it yourself without a ton of study.

Thanks everyone who helped with my experimentation with the effect of Google +1 clicks on MikeMay.com.

Mike’s site was just indexed by Google today, August 13, 2001, and it has moved up from #2 to #1 in Google searches for ‘Petersburg VA real estate.’ TA-DA!

It has not moved up in searches for its over primary keyphrases. Buy hey, I’ll take what I can get!

The new version of Google Analytics now includes metrics for social media, which today reports 25 +1 clicks. Here’s an image showing the full screen.

Since there’s other SEO work being done on this site by Rich Blessing at DomainDrivers.com, I can’t say for sure that the +1 clicks are 100% responsible for the site’s improved ranking, but I doubt that it hurt.

I often see real estate websites with source code that reveals keyword meta tags with long lists of keywords. I don’t like to see this because I suspect many of the agents who own these sites may think that they are useful for SEO (search engine optimization). The truth is that they are almost completely useless.

The example shown here (click to view a screen capture of the entire  list of keywords) is one of the most extreme I’ve ever seen. (If the very kind gentleman who owns this site is reading this, I hope you won’t take my criticism personally.) Sadly, it’s from an iHouse site that was created in 2002, by which date all of the major search engines were ignoring keyword meta tags. And “spammy” metatags like this are the very reason the search engines stopped reading them.

At one time spammy keyword metatags might have gotten some websites blacklisted by the search engines. But the main danger now is that they may give the site owner the false sense that they have fulfilled the need to add content to the site for SEO purposes.

There may be some minor search engines that still read keyword metatags, but they are mostly ignored.  In 2009, a Yahoo! manager announced that Yahoo! no longer uses keyword metatags. Bing and Google, the Big Daddy of search engines, have never supported keta keywords.

While  meta keywords are no longer useful for SEO, actual visible on-page content remains important. However, it’s important to understand that Google actually gives more importance to off-site factors that indicate your site’s popularity. Rand Fishkin has written an excellent summary of on-page SEO, How Do I Build the Perfectly Optimized Page?

My issue is not with Realtors® who, as in the example I’ve provided in this article, over use meta keywords.  My beef is with the big real estate  website providers such as iHouse and Point2Agent. It is irresponsible for companies such as these to provide useless options while not educating their members about correct SEO techniques.

In fact, ten years after keyword meta tags lost their importance, in its page about search engine information Point2Agent’s online user manual still says:

“Meta Keywords: Use this textbox to create a list of terms and phrases which search engines will use to find and rank your site. The keywords you choose should accurately describe your services, features, products, and location (e.g., real estate for sale, listings for sale in [coverage area], mortgage services). Your site will appear in the results list of searches for those terms/phrases.”

This information is SO wrong and misleading! However, I know from my long former association with Point2Agent that few, if any, of their staff members have any knowledge of SEO whatsoever. SEO is best learned by experience — experience which people who market inexpensive real estate websites usually lack. If you are a real estate agent and manage your own website, it is critically important that you learn modern, accurate SEO.

Over the years I’ve talked with a number of Realtors® who had paid hefty sums of money to SEO companies but who couldn’t tell whether the company was earning its keep. A surprising percentage of the time, the company may NOT be doing its job, but it’s easy for you to detect when that is occurring.

Because I’ve seen bad SEO work done on so many Realtors®’ sites, I recommend protecting yourself by not paying $thousands in advance and paying by credit card. Then, if you eventually determine that your SEO company isn’t helping your site’s rankings, then you may have a prayer of getting some of your money back.

You don’t have to understand or to be able to see what’s being done to — or for — your site. What’s more, a lot of activity may be done external to your site. That’s because factors such as the number of links from other sites to yours are actually somewhat more important than the SEO work done directly on pages of your site.

Instead of worrying over exactly what your SEO company is doing, focus on the end goal, which I assume is getting increased leads from your real estate site. Assuming that your site is suitably professional in appearance and easy to use, here’s the formula that will help you reach that goal:

Improved Ranking = Improved Traffic = More Leads

First, ask your company to provide  a list of the keyphrases for which it is optimizing your site. If they are not going to try to optimize your site for “head” keyphrases — those more competitive, higher yield keyphrases such as “city state real estate” — then they may be planning to optimize for less competitive “longtail” keyphrases such as neighborhood names. If the focus is on longtail keyphrases, then the list of keyphrases will need to be longer because high rankings on any single longtail keyphrase won’t yield as much traffic as a high ranking on a head keyphrase.

Be extremely wary if the company only gives you a short list of perhaps  two or three longtail keyphrases. That should signal, in essence, that the company is not willing to invest much effort into optimizing your site.

For simplicity,  the example I’m using today will only address some of the more competitive real estate keyphrases for Branson, Missouri. Here are those keyphrases as shown in the Google Adwords Tool with Match Type set to Exact.

Next, you will need a record of your site’s rankings for these keywords before SEO work begins to use as a benchmark against which to measure future rankings. To save time, use Rank Checker. This article describes how to download Rank Checker and how to use it. Note that the rankings it displays may be different from those you get when you actually look for your site in search results. That’s not important to go into now, but I want you to use Rank Checker so that you’ll have a quick and easy way to check your site in the future.

Record the date and results you get in Rank Checker in a simple list, perhaps in Word or Notepad, something like my list shown below. My example shows the rankings for a Branson site before I redesigned it and moved it to a hosting company with integrated IDX.

My primary focus is on design and content, which have minimal effect on SEO. However, because I’m a perfectionist, I do a lot of on-page SEO work as I  put a newly redesigned site together.

My list shows that my client’s original Branson site was on Google page 7 for “Branson real estate,” somewhere beyond page 20 for “Branson homes for sale,” page 11 for “Branson MO real estate” and page 11 for “Branson MO homes for sale.”

Six months later, the site is now on page 5 for the same list of keyphrases, so I know that my work has been effective.  I would eventually like to see the site in #1 position for some of these keyphrases. The site still needs more SEO work, especially back-link creation, and so its rankings may not  improve a lot until that work is done.

When an SEO company is working on your site, use Rank Checker to check the status of your site before they begin work, and perhaps once a month each month after. If you don’t see some slow, incremental improvement in ranking over time, something is wrong and you need to discuss the situation with the company.

The other way to check your SEO company’s work is to track the number of visitors the site gets on an average day. Make note of that data as well as your site’s rankings. You’ll need to have an analytics program such as Google Analytics installed before SEO work begins. With effective SEO work, your site traffic should improve gradually over time.

Here are a few things to keep in mind while tracking your SEO work:

• Be sure you are logged out of Google if you’re checking your ranking manually. If you’re logged in, search results will be skewed.
• When your SEO company is doing back link creation, there may be an initial flurry of traffic. This indicates that webmasters of sites external to yours are checking out your site and doesn’t really mean anything with regards to “real” traffic.
• Also, during back-linking, your site may do the “Google dance,” bouncing around in rankings — page 1 one day, page 3 the next, page 10 another.
• Once your site has achieved good rankings, you’ll need to sustain it with repeated SEO work. That’s because once you get in that coveted #1 spot in Google search results, lots of other webmasters and SEO people will be trying to bump your site out of the way so that their sites can rank better.
• SEO work is a long term process; it may take several years to get a site to #1 in Google for a very competitive head keyphrase. But if your SEO work is being done correctly, you should see incremental progress if you track it as I’ve described here.

When I need to talk with a client or prospective client about the search status of his or her real estate site, I often use a handy,  free search engine optimization (SEO) tool called Rank Checker. An extension for the Firefox browser, Rank Checker is available as a free download from SEOBook.com. It gives me some quick insights to how a site is doing in the search engines, even if I don’t have access to analytics for the site in question.

I also encourage Realtors® who are working with an SEO company to use Rank Checker to do quick periodic checks on the effectiveness of the SEO company’s efforts. Get the company to provide you with a list of the keyphrases for which it is optimizing your site, then use Rank Checker to check the status of your site before they begin work, and perhaps once a month after. If you don’t see some slow, incremental improvement in ranking over time, something is wrong and you need to discuss the situation with the company.

To get a quick sense of how a real estate website is working to generate leads for its owner, I first want to estimate how much traffic it is getting. So, I’ll open the site in a browser and look at the title tags, which are the words that appear at the very top edge of the browser’s chrome. Whether on purpose or by accident, the words that appear there will represent the keyphrases for which the site is most likely to rank in Google. In the example I’m using today, the title tag reads, “Mooresville, Davidson, Cornelius, Huntersville, and Troutman, Real Estate – [agent's name]“:

I know from experience that searches on an agent’s name won’t deliver much traffic, so I’m going to ignore that part of her title tag (which is chopped off the right end of the graphic above). I also know from experience that people rarely search more than one “city+real estate”  keyphrase at a time, so I’ll use individual cities or towns, plus “real estate” to test this site’s rankings.

So, I’ll start by entering the site’s domain name in the first text entry field. Next, I’ll enter each town, followed by “real estate,” in the “Keyword” field, clicking “Add” after each entry. Or, if I have a long list of keyphrases to enter, I’ll click “Add Multiple Keywords” to enter several at once. After I’ve entered all the keyphrases, I’ll click the “Start” button in the lower left corner (not shown in this screen capture).

After a few moments, Rank Checker will display the average ranking across multiple Google data centers for each of the keyphrases. (It will also show me Bing and Yahoo rankings, but for the sake of brevity, I’m ignoring them in this article.) Neither is as challenging for SEO as Google, so  I focus my efforts on optimizing a site for Google.

There are 10 sites listed on each page of Google’s search results. So I can quickly see that this site is in the #5 position on page 16 of Google’s search results for “Mooresville real estate,” the top of page 14 for “Davidson real estate” and so on…

Again, from experience I know that with rankings this low and with no Page 1 rankings for important keyphrases, this site is probably getting very, very little search traffic. It seriously needs help.

You have to know where you are now to know where you need to go, but  knowing how to get there is a story for another time.