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.

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?

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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.

Here on my blog, I often write about website traffic. You may wonder why I, a website designer and not an SEO vendor, care so much about traffic. The answer is simple: the number of leads a real estate generates is in direct proportion to the number of visitors per day the site receives.

I usually tell my clients or prospective clients that their sites will not get a healthy number of leads until it has upwards of 75-100 visitors/day. When I still worked on sites that lacked integrated listings, I used to say “upwards of 50-75.” Sites with integrated listings seem to need a little more traffic because searches on MLS numbers tend to have a high bounce rate. (The bounce rate is the number of visitors who come to a site, then leave, from a particular page.) That’s not really a problem because sites with integrated IDX tend to get two to three times more traffic than sites with i-framed or off-site listings.

Let’s look at some examples, keeping in mind that today — Saturday — is usually a fairly low traffic day for websites.

BarbaraReevesRealtor.com received an average of 171 visitors/day during the past month, double the amount of traffic it was getting when hosted with i-framed IDX on Point2Agent. It has generated seven leads today. All but one lead appear to have provided their real names and phone numbers and all have left valid email addresses. This site is set to allow 4 property detail views or 3 searches before registration is required. Over 90% of Barbara’s leads come from her websites, primarily from this site. Last year Barbara sold 29 houses to website leads.

MikeMay.com averaged 212 visitors/day last month. This site allows 3 detail views or 2 searches before requiring registration. It has had 5 registered users today, all of whom appear to have left valid contact information.

Now, let’s compare the leads generated by two sites that get lower traffic. The first site is only a few months old and hasn’t had the benefit of off-site SEO work such as back link building. For the past month it has received an average of 41 visitors/day. It is averaging fewer than 1 lead per day.

Another new site has been getting an average of 27 visitors/day and only about 1 lead per week.

As you can see from this data, an agent whose site doesn’t get much traffic is not going to get much business from his or her site. If his or her site is a do-it-yourself Wordpress or other type of site, it may not generate any business at all unless this agent knows how to get sufficient traffic. In short, economizing by using a do-it-yourself site may cost the agent money instead of generating income.

Traffic isn’t the only factor that matters; professional graphic image and differentiating the agent from his or her competitors is also important.

Contact me to learn more about how a custom designed site with fully integrated IDX can help your business.

If you already have a regular website with its own domain name, you’ll probably want to set up your blog’s address so that the search engines will credit your website’s domain name with the content you add to your blog. There are a couple of ways to do this.

First, if your website and blog are hosted on the same hosting account, you can simply put your blog files in their own directory. Then put a slash after your domain, add the name of your blog directory, and you’re done. Here’s an example:

If your website and its domain are on one hosting service, such as Point2Agent, and your blog is hosted on another service, such as Pair.com, setting up an SEO-friendly URL is a little more complex and there’s some confusing terms to learn about.

The company where you registered your domain — perhaps GoDaddy or Network Solutions — is called your “domain registrar.” Then, the company where your website is hosted, if different from the registrar, is called your “domain host.”

To make your blog and website count as one entity for search engine optimization purposes, then your blog will need to have a “subdomain” pointed to it. To do that, get the IP address for your blog from your blog host, then contact your domain host and ask them to point an “A record” to the IP address. Here’s what a subdomain looks like when correctly pointed to a blog:

Keep in mind that when a subdomain will not work if “www” is typed in front of it. The full, correct URL for the blog below would simply be:

http://blog.yourstpaulhome.com

A blog only lends SEO value to an agent’s main site if they both share the same domain or domain and subdomain. In the examples shown below, the agent’s blog is hosted on Blogspot.com, so it has no SEO value at all. Any efforts to do back-linking or other off-site SEO work to this blog will only benefit Blogspot.com. If his blog were hosted on a hosting service such as GoDaddy.com or Pair.com, and it were set up with a subdomain as described above, then the content on his blog would be seen by the search engines as if were actually on his regular website.

Since Jay Thompson blogged about the success of his dsIDXpress-enabled Wordpress site in late 2009 or early 2010, Wordpress as become the BIG HOT NEW THING!!! for Realtors®.

Since word about Wordpress began spreading, I’ve seen a heartbreaking number of Wordpress sites created by Realtors® who seem to have been influenced directly or indirectly by Jay’s blogging about Wordpress. However few seem to understand why Wordpress worked for Jay or what it takes to make a lead-generating Wordpress blog.

I ran across an example today.  On the surface and to the uninitiated, it looks fine. Neat, clean, simple design. I don’t know why this Realtor® set up his Wordpress blog, but I assume that it’s because he wanted to generate leads. and build his business.

A quick look at the source code, however, reveals a big problem: the domain name is forwarded to a blog on Wordpress.com with a URL that’s a subdomain of Wordpress.com. It’s easy to set up a blog on Wordpress.com, but there are several problems with doing it this way.

First, to the search engines, this site’s domain name will always be Wordpress.com. Regardless of how much of the important off-site SEO work this agent does to get his own domain name to rank well, it won’t work because the site’s actual domain name is Wordpress.com. The search engines will simply see this agent’s domain has having duplicate content to some pages on Wordpress.com. So, for example, if he were to pay a SEO back-link builder $5 per link, he’ll actually be paying someone to do SEO work on Wordpress.com, which hardly needs it.

If you read my post about the correct way to point a domain, you’ll remember my suggesting that you look “under the hood” at the source code. Here’s the source code for the site in question. The <frameset> tags are the tip-off for an incorrectly pointed domain:

However, I first noticed the problem when I saw a link from this agent’s Google+ profile that spelled out the agent’s  subdomain, XXXX.NetYouTeam.com.  Clicking that link took me his site that looks like this:

There’s nothing wrong with putting a site on Wordpress.com unless your income as a real estate agent depends upon it. Then the problem becomes that Wordpress.com does not allow the use of plugins, so you can’t use any of the IDX plugins like dsIDXpress or IDXbroker’s product to get longtail search traffic to your site. On this particular site, it looks as if the site owner has pasted in Postlets content for a few listings, but they don’t fit within his page layout. Moreover, a few listings is no substitute for an IDX plugin that might display hundreds of listings.

To use an IDX plugin, you have to download the Wordpress software from Wordpress.org, then upload it to your own account on an Internet hosting service. (Or, use a hosting service that will automatically install Wordpress for you.) This is somewhat more work than setting up a site on Wordpress.com, but it’s truly the only way to get the most out of a Wordpress real estate site.

There are some other problems with SEO for this site.  For example, this site will not rank for searches for “Tampa real estate” because there are no posts with those words in their titles. And  it uses “Pasco County homes for sale” on one page even though few people search by county name. However, the site’s content SEO problems  are secondary to its hosting and domain name problems.

With the growing popularity of Wordpress blogs for Realtors®, the idea  that regular blogging is some kind of magic bullet for search engine optimization has also spread. Are  you spending a lot of time blogging while not seeing much improvement in your website’s search engine ranking or traffic? If so, you’re not alone.

Most Realtors® could benefit from a few pointers on writing posts effectively for search engine optimization (SEO). Instead of writing when they could be selling real estate, they would be much better off paying an SEO copywriter or a VA with SEO skills to write their blog posts.

For those of you who prefer to do it yourself, here are some tips.

First, understand that there’s a direct relationship between the content in your blog and how it brings search visitors to your site. So, if you write a post about your county fair, it’s not going to help bring visitors who are searching for real estate information for your city to your site. It might bring people who are searching for information about your county fair, but they are not necessarily going to be prospective home buyers. From an SEO perspective, writing that blog post about the county fair isn’t a productive use of your time.

The first step towards writing your blog should be determining the keyphrases you’ll be using to optimize your blog. Without going into how to choose keyphrases, which could consume several articles, let’s assume that  you’ll be using your city name, state abbreviation + “real estate.” Or, if your city’s name is so unique that it works without adding your state, then one of your keyphrases would be “city real estate.” For brevity’s sake, I’m simplifying this process and omitting lots of other keyphrases that might be as good or better than this one.

The key to thinking like an SEO copywriter is to constantly look for opportunities to use one or more of your keyphrases in your blog title and text.

Here’s a list of blog titles or blog post headlines from an actual Realtor’s blog. It’s also a list of missed SEO opportunities, especially since a post’s title is especially significant to the search engines:

• “I can’t stress this enough! Buy now!”
• “The New Housing (Demand) Bubble”
• “Rules to Negotiate Your Next Purchase”
• “Question: Am I Automatically Approved for the Loan When I Get Pre-qualified?”

If you were a search engine, would you know what city this Realtor® serves?

I’m going to re-write these post titles to give the search engines more important information:

• “I can’t stress this enough! Buy Philadelphia real estate now!”
• “Will Philadelphia Real Estate Experience the New Housing (Demand) Bubble?”
• “Rules to Negotiate Your Next Philadelphia Real Estate Purchase”
• “Question: Am I Automatically Approved for the Loan When I Get Pre-Qualified to for a Philadelphia Real Estate Mortgage?”

There. Wasn’t that easy? All I did was “rethink” each headline to see how I could include my keyphrase.

It would also be good to repeat your keyphrase occasionally in the text area of your post, but not so often that your text is unreadable or sounds “spammy.”

If you’re not approaching your blog writing from an SEO perspective, you are probably wasting your time writing it if  you are writing in hopes of improving your search ranking. You would be well advised to hire someone with SEO expertise to write your blog. Even one SEO’d blog post a month would be better than none, or one SEO’d post mixed with your own non-SEO’d post.

Search engine optimization isn’t rocket science. You can learn to write and think like an SEO person, but this style of writing does require some thought and discipline.

Lots of people ask me about the difference between what I do — custom real estate website design — and search engine optimization. It’s actually quite simple: search engine optimization (SEO) is about getting people to your site, while design is about keeping them there and converting them to leads. It should be obvious that the most gorgeous website in the world isn’t going to generate leads if no one sees it, right?

If you’re setting up a new site or having an existing low-traffic site redesigned, it’s important to understand that a simple redesign will do nothing to attract additional traffic to your site. A new design might make your site more visually appealing and professional looking to a site visitor, but it won’t get more visitors to your site. Without search engine optimization and SEO’d text content, your beautiful new design will not yield a good ROI.

Through many years of designing real estate websites, I’ve learned that most Realtors® don’t understand the difference between SEO and design, or the importance of SEO towards the success of a website. Consequently they may feel that they wasted money having a custom site designed.

I’ve also observed that most Realtors® don’t want to do much — if any — work on their sites themselves. I can count on one hand my clients who have continued to add content to their sites or blogs. Usually by the time a Realtor® can afford to contract out design, he or she is too busy to have any hands-on involvement with the website. The exceptions are often teams in which one member of the team assumes responsibility for online marketing while the other focuses on selling real estate.

Because I’m emotionally invested in creating real estate websites that generate leads, I include a lot more site set-up, content creation and on-page SEO work in my design package than another designer might include. I don’t include any off-page SEO work, such as creating links from other sites to my client’s sites, because this time-consuming and important work needs a dedicated professional’s touch.

I do, however, understand how all the different aspects of design, content creation and SEO work to make a website successful. And I fully understand the pros and cons of integrated IDX vs iframed IDX vs IDX plug-ins for Wordpress sites. of I am happy to share that information with my clients and direct them to vendors who can provide the off-page SEO services they may also need.

In fact, according to what one of my associates  tells his hosting clients, my ability to explain how all the different pieces fit together is one of the most valuable aspects of working with me.

So, if you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the bits of information you’ve heard, get in touch. I can help sort it all out for you.

Wordpress is a great solution for Realtors who can’t get true integrated listings because  their MLS boards limit feed access to only Broker/Owners or who can’t get a feed for some other reason. An example would be ARMLS in Phoenix AZ area. However, I would only recommend use of a self-managed Wordpress site and IDX plugin if:

1) The owner knows search engine optimization and is capable of getting sufficient traffic to his or her blog to generate sufficient leads.

For an individual agent whose site has i-framed IDX, that typically means at least  50-75 visitors per day. For a Realtor® with integrated MLS listings, more  are needed, perhaps 100+ visitors per day. That’s because the bounce rate from searches on MLS numbers is often 100%.  (If you don’ t know what “bounce rate” means, then you probably shouldn’t be doing your own search engine optimization.)

A Realtor® who manages his or her own Wordpress website but who does not know search engine optimization is NOT saving money. A DIY real estate website that gets little traffic will cost you lost income.

2) Or the Realtor® is such a good writer that his or her site draws a huge following and can get good search ranking purely on the basis of the Realtor’s® great writing. While there may be others, the only Realtor® whom I’ve known to do this is Jay Thompson (PhoenixRealEstateGuy.com). But Jay also knows SEO, so it’s hard to know how much his SEO skills contributed to his blog’s success vs his great writing.

3)  A  property search with full MLS database access is used in addition to the plugin so that the visitor will get more than the very limited display of a few hundred search results allowed by some plugins. That can get expensive, especially when  products like Diverse Solutions dsIDXpress and dsSearch agent are used in combination.(The FlexMLS plug-in allows full MLS database access but in my opinion has a terribly clunky user interface.) Many of my clients are having me move their sites to Myrsol because Myrsol’s hosting with full MLS integration is actually cheaper than using dsIDXpress and dsSearchAgent together.

Or:

4) Your website is intended only for use by your existing SOI and is not important to expanding your business.

Over the past couple of years, numerous Realtors® have told me — or have written somewhere — that Wordpress is good for search engine optimization (SEO). I’ve heard variations of that theme, as well, such as the Thesis theme is best for SEO. The overall theme is that Wordpress is God’s gift to SEO.

OK, sure, Wordpress removes some obstacles to SEO.

But let’s be realistic. If it’s so great, why do I keep hearing from real estate agents who have set up their own Wordpress blogs and are getting only a few visitors per day?

It’s because Wordpress is only a tool. It’s is simply a “CMS” (content management system) that allows people to post on the Web without knowing HTML and other techie stuff. Wordpress is not an SEO expert and it won’t turn you into an SEO expert.

Let me repeat that: Wordpress is NOT an SEO expert. It cannot replace the knowledge a human being can gain from years of working on SEO for real estate websites.

Wordpress is only as SEO-savvy as the person who is using it. Most real estate agents, however, only have a vague notion that if they blog a lot, their sites will shoot up in the search engines.

Trust me, they won’t.

SEO-friendliness isn’t the only reason Realtors® are interested in Wordpress. They are swayed by the fact that it is cheap. Indeed, it’s free. And many like the feeling that they own and control their own sites.

There has also been an influx of real estate website development hucksters who may not have known how to create a website prior to Wordpress, but are charging $thousands to set up sites for Realtors®. Many of these folks lack either SEO skills and/or the ability to create a site that conveys the professional graphic image necessary to convert visitors to leads.

I’m not totally against Wordpress, in fact my blog is a Wordpress blog. I am against, however, your losing $thousands in income by either trying to do a Wordpress site yourself or trusting it to someone who doesn’t know what he or she is doing.

I only design real estate websites, and my only goal in my professional life is to create websites that will generate lots of income for my clients. Wordpress is only one tool that I have at my disposal, and I am smart enough to know that my designs won’t work for my clients unless they are combined with great content creation and SEO work.

If you’ve already made a Wordpress site for yourself or are thinking about it, keep in mind that the money you save with the DIY approach might actually end up being income lost.

A comparison of Wordpress sites using IDXBroker’s plugin with sites using true, fully integrated IDX reveals significant differences between the two types of IDX, as well as between two different Wordpress sites using IDXbroker.

First, let’s look at search results for a Wordpress Myrtle Beach SC site: only 100 search results are shown.

Next, here are search results for a Myrtle Beach real estate site with Myrsol’s true integrated IDX. 1704 search results are shown.

I also compared sites displaying MLS feeds from California’s Sandicor MLS. First, a Wordpress site with IDXBroker’s plug. Compare the 100 search results returned by the IDXBroker plugin for Myrtle Beach (above) — with the 250 search results for Sandicor.

Why is there a difference? I don’t know and I couldn’t find any information on IDXBroker’s website to explain the difference.

Finally, compare IDXBroker’s 250 search results for Sandicor with the 3495 search results shown in a Myrsol site.

As you can see from these screen captures, there’s a significant difference between the number of search results shown for a Wordpress site with the IDXbroker plugin and the results shown by a Myrsol site with true integrated listings. (Similar discrepancies also occur when comparing IDXbroker sites with Real Estate Webmaster sites, which also have true integrated listings.) There’s also a difference between the number of listings displayed by IDXbroker in one MLS vs another MLS.

When deciding on an IDX solution for your website, be sure to talk to the vendors. Ask lots of questions so that you will fully understand the differences between their products.

If you decide to use a Wordpress site and plugin, understand that your site visitors will only be shown a small fraction of the listings in your MLS database. Consider these issues:

• Will that be enough to convert site visitors to leads?
• Will the cost savings of a Wordpress site outweigh the benefits offered by a site with true integrated IDX such as Myrsol’s inexpensive sites or Real Estate Webmaster more expensive sites?
• Will your site visitors find the home they want and convert to leads when they can only see a small percentage of the listings available in your MLS?

If it’s all you can afford right now, a Wordpress site with an IDX plugin may be a good starter site. In the long run, a site with true integrated listings may be the best route to becoming a top producing Realtor®.