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?”

Have you ever run across an “about me” page that’s written entirely in the third person? Didn’t it make you feel a little  weird and creepy?

If you’ve ever tried to avoid the use of first person because you’ve heard that it’s not good to write about yourself, please don’t make the mistake of thinking that the solution is to pretend like you’re somebody else who’s writing about you. That can sound as strange as talking about somebody as if the person isn’t in the room. If you can’t think of a better way to write about yourself than writing in the third person, just go ahead and write in first person. It’s no less effective than third person and doesn’t sound half as strange.

Here’s a brief excerpt from a Realtor’s profile, with some names changed to protect the guilty:

“Joe specializes in providing a first-class service to his clients in a luxury real estate market. Being the grandson to [city] real estate icon, Jack, Joe has chosen to follow a family tradition of a career in real estate sales. Jack has always been Joe’s mentor and taught Joe the importance of the needs of his clients. This attitude and understanding is the reason his clients keep coming back!”

Now seriously, folks! Does this copy make you want to call this guy up and hire him to be your Realtor? Does it make you want to suggest that he remove the stick that he’s sitting on? Can you imagine driving around in a car with someone who speaks about himself this way?

Please, avoid the third person trap. If you’re going to write about yourself, don’t pretend to be an outside observer. Instead, feel free to write like a natural, normal human being. When speaking face to face, you would NEVER introduce yourself in person, would you?

The only time it’s appropriate to write about yourself in the third person is when you’re writing an article or profile for publication somewhere other than on your own website. When you’re writing for your own website, go ahead and be yourself. Don’t be creepy.

There’s been a lot of interest in my post about avoiding the use of  “I” or  the first person plural pronoun, “We.” It seems to be a problem for many Realtors.®

Copywriter Kay Steele Faulk, who writes copy for many of my clients’ websites, is great at using “I” or “We” only in very measured and purposeful ways. Typically, Kay will switch to first person briefly while she is introducing the Realtor to the site visitor. She likes to include a friendly introduction that is reminiscent of the way you might stand up, say “hello,” introduce yourself, and shake hands when a visitor enters your office. When she switches back to first person again, she usually does so within the context of describing a benefit that a client would enjoy from working with our client Realtor.

Another strategy that I like for Kay to use is is to play off the excitement and perhaps apprehension that a person might feel about moving to a new city or a new home. (People don’t get all worked up and enthusiastic about hiring a Realtor, but you can connect with people better if you understand what they are really excited about.)

Here are a couple of sites that Kay has written for my clients. If you study them, you may find inspiration and ways you can avoid overusing the deadly “I” word.

http://www.brucetobias.com/
http://www.keyrealtygroupinc.com/

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.

Whether you’re emailing, Tweeting, posting to Facebook or Google Plus, or preparing any type of written marketing materials, the most dangerous word you can use is “I.” That’s it, “I” — the first person singular pronoun.

Why? Because people don’t want to read about you.

What do they want? They want to know what’s in it for them. How will a relationship with you benefit them?

A Realtor’s® post on Google+ today contained seven sentences. The first sentence started with, “I am currently gearing up my Marketing Campaign…”  Who cares what you’re doing with your marketing campaign? (Not to mention, why the heck did you capitalize “marketing campaign”?) Then four of the remaining six sentences started with that deadly word, “I.”

That’s a sure turn-off to potential prospects.

When you’re writing, keep in mind that readers (or listeners) want to know how they will benefit from a relationship with you. If you can only talk about yourself, they are going to turn a deaf ear (or blind eye) towards your efforts to communicate with them.

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.