I’ve spent much of the last month getting ready to launch a new custom designed site on a hosting platform that, while new to me, has been a well-kept secret for too long. I’m so in love with this company that I’ve ended my approved vendor status with Point2Agent so that I can “brag on” it. The company, in Murrells Inlet SC, is Myrsol.

A Feature List to Die For.

Myrsol sites have everything you could wish for, and then some (all for very reasonable fees):

• REAL true, searchable IDX listings integrated right into each site. Great for SEO and with fully customizable layout design and blazing fast load time.
• Custom forms with user defined fields
• Easy to manage custom dropdown menus
• Integration with Top Producer
• Syndication feeds
• SEO friendly custom page URLs
• User defineable sub-directories
• Up-to-date tables-free CSS layout framework, which means site wide style changes can be made quickly and easily
• “Quick Start” templates as well as full custom design
• A cool subdivision or community module that’s great for adding SEO-friendly content to your site
• A fully customizable featured homes module for your home page (or any page) with as many or as few homes as you want
• Unlimited pages
• Unlimited layouts and design alternatives on any site
• Built in blog platform

Great Customer Service.

When you call Myrsol at 843.637.2411, chances are you’ll talk directly to a principal (complete with laid-back Southern accent and charm). Got a wish list?: Myrsol frequently incorporates user-requested features into their system, even though it’s already packed with everything you can think of. Need something special? They’ll be happy to program it into your site at little extra cost.

Why Integrated MLS Listings?

With search engine optimization for real estate agent sites becoming ever more challenging, technically savvy agents in the U.S. realize the importance of offering true integrated MLS listings to their web sites.

MLS listings are programmed into Myrsol sites so that the search engines can read the data in the listings. Conventional real estate sites usually have only framed IDX listings, with data that is invisible to Google and the other search engines. That’s because the listings data in framed IDX search pages actually are hosted on the IDX provider’s server and are only viewed through a “window” on the Web site. With Myrsol’s true integrated listings, your board’s MLS listings become an integral part of your site’s content.

A Myrsol site with true integrated listings can attract a whole new breed of “long tail” search visitors: visitors who’ve searched by keyphrases such as MLS numbers or by the street addresses of homes that are listed for sale. Adding integrated listings to a site can increase visitors to an agent’s site by 2/3s or more.

Because listings integration is so important to my U.S. clients, I’ve ended my status as a Point2Agent approved vendor so that I am free to offer more options for state-of-the-art sites to my clients in the U.S. These new options include full custom-designed sites on the Myrsol platform as well as Wordpress blogs with IDX plug-ins such as dsIDXpress. I will, of course, continue to design Point2Agent sites for clients in Canada and for U.S. clients who are not interested in changing platforms.

Give me a call at 360-666-0881 to find out more about what Myrsol site and my knock-out custom design can do for your real estate business.

What are the main differences between Wordpress blogs and the blogs built into Point2Agent Premium and Professional sites?

For real estate agents, the most important difference is that a self-hosted Wordpress blog can be used with thousands of Wordpress plug-ins and widgets.

That functionality is especially important if you want to take advantage of new plug-ins such as dsIDXpress that enable search engine-friendly listings to be integrated with your blog. With the dsIDXpress plug-in, you can also have widgets such as a search widget, a “newest listings” widget and a featured listings widget. For search engine optimization reasons, this technology is light years beyond the i-framed MLS/IDX search pages typically used on Point2Agent sites.

There are also thousands of other widgets and plug-ins that can be used to add additional bells ‘n whistles to a Wordpress blog. What’s more, there are thousands of both free and paid “premium” templates available for Wordpress that make a Wordpress site’s appearance infinitely customizable. (This site is built on the premium Thesis theme.) Point2Agent’s templates are somewhat customizable, at least for those of us who know CSS and HTML.

However, the Big Kahuna – the really important difference for you real estate agents – is those searchable MLS listings. Once you get them, you’ll be amazed at how many people search for homes using MLS numbers or street addresses as search keyphrases.

I knew that Mike May had bought cookies to give to his clients as a promotion. Today I was shocked to receive a large box in the mail from Mike. Not just a box of Girl Scout Thin Mints. 12 boxes — a carton!!! I feel like Sally Field. Thin? Not for long. Appreciated? Yes. Thanks Mike.

I’ve recently begun creating Wordpress blogs for some of my clients, using the dsIDXpress plug-in from Diverse Solutions This plug-in feeds MLS listings to the blog that the search engine can read, unlike listings shown in an iframed IDX MLS search page.

The first of my new projects to be indexed by Google and begin showing results is a blog for Phoenix REALTOR® Joe Janus.

Here’s a screen capture of Joe’s page in Google Analytics. You may need to click the image to make it appear full size.

Joe has kindly given me permission to share information about his blog’s performance with you. Our expectations for it were tempered by our knowledge that Jay Thompson’s Phoenix Real Estate Guy blog has long dominated the search engines in results for Phoenix real estate searches. Nonetheless, we have been wonderfully surprised by the traffic from searches on home addresses that the blog has attracted.

Google began sending a few visitors to Joe’s blog March 1, 2010. Since then, the numbers have steadily increased, with a total of 143 visits to the blog between March 1 and March 20. Currently the blog is getting around 20 visits per day. Eighteen visits resulted from searches on Joe’s name, with 125 visits resulting from searches on keywords. At least one good lead has come in from a person who contacted Joe to let him know of his interest in buying a home in Phoenix’s historic district.

Joe’s web site at JoeJanus.com gets from 150-200 visitors per day from searches on traditional “short tail” keyphrases such as “Phoenix AZ homes for sale”. The new traffic resulting from “long tail” searches on home addresses has added some 20 visitors per day to his traffic, and I presume the numbers will continue to rise as Google indexes more and more of the listing on Joe’s site. 20 visitors per day is more than many REALTORs®’ sites get from any source!

I’m very excited about the search engine optimization benefits that dsIDXpress plug-in and other similar plug-ins bring to agents by enabling display of listing that can be read by the search engines. This is very different from i-framed IDX pages that cannot be read by search engines like Google. These technological developments allow agents an affordable way to compete with those agents who’ve invested in expensive web sites with integrated IDX listings.

Some of my clients have had trouble figuring out how to write short codes to use in their Wordpress sites to set up dsIDXpress listings pages. With a little help from Joe Janus (blog.joejanus.com), here’s how to do it.

Go to your Diverse Solutions control panel, log-in, then go to dsSearchAgent>Links.

Next, create custom links just as if you were creating custom search links for your web site. Start by clicking the “new link” graphic on the upper right side of the page. It’s very small and difficult to find:

You can set up links any way you want: by school district, by city, by price range… whatever you want. Don’t worry about the map too much, as it won’t display on your blog pages. However, you may want to confine search results to some limited portion of the map if the custom link displays listings outside the area you want to cover. You can save your link, the preview it to see which listings are displayed. If you’re satisfied, then look at the 5 digit number in the link URL: that’s the number you need to create a short code.

Write your short code using the syntax below, substituting your own Link ID number in place of “69369″.

[idx-listings linkid="69369"]

Next, create a new blog post, give it a title, paste in the short code, and you’re good to go.

Last night I had a call from a pair of REALTORs® in Brooklyn NY. Our conversation impressed upon me once  how poorly many REALTORs® understand the important role text content plays in attracting search visitors to a site.

Point2Agent sites come with a lot of “boilerplate” text pages, pages which can deceive site owners into believing that they’ve done all they need to do to get traffic to their sites. In actuality, site owners would be better advised to delete all or most of the boilerplate pages and replace them with original text content.

The couple with whom I talked last night had recently been involved in a long, very unpleasant tussle with a well-known search engine optimization company. They contacted me because they had convinced themselves that the company had maliciously installed “malware” of some kind on their site to prevent it from getting traffic.

I logged into their site and quickly determined that 1) there is nothing wrong with it and 2) it’s getting just exactly the amount and kind of search traffic that I would have expected after scanning the contents of their site. They are averaging about 7.5 visitors per day — better than some sites but not enough to support a real estate business.

They had added  3 pages of original text to their site, one describing each of 3 neighborhoods within their city: Marine Park, Sheepshead Bay and Ocean Parkway. I asked them to look closely at Ultrastats>Referrers>Search terms (see below). It was immediately apparent that virtually all the search traffic to their site is attracted to it by those three page of original text. Out of 20 search terms used by search visitors who visited their site in the last week over half the search terms used  included the name of one of the three neighborhoods that they had written about. So, there’s basically nothing at all wrong with their site. They’ve made a great start by adding 3 pages of original content, but their site just doesn’t have enough text content to generate a lot of traffic.

I would be willing to bet that every time they add a few more pages, they’ll see a nice little increase in their traffic. And, once they’ve added perhaps 15-20 pages, they’ll be getting enough daily visitors for their site to be bringing them nice leads.

Stay tuned for a follow up to this story!

One of the best things about what I do (besides working at home in my p.j.’s with my 3 Shetland Sheepdogs for company and keeping really strange hours) is the fun feedback that I get from my clients.

This morning I got a strange email with the subject header, “I_Luv_My_Web_Designer,” with from “mw_romeo@yahoo.com”  in the header and the content below. It  was sent as a form submission from his “Magic Box” page by a client who, because of confidentiality agreements, shall remain unnamed. It was sent from his blog at blog.MikeMay.com.

To: Webmaster

From:
I_Luv_My_Web_Designer
mw_romeo@yahoo.com

Your Street Address:
123 MovingNextDoor2Suz

City, State, Zip:
BigHugz, WA 22122

Phone:
BR549

Message:
I am glad you are on the west coast… I do not think it would be good
for us to be to close to each other… You are the BEST!!!!

Sent from (ip address): 24.127.57.136
(c-24-127-57-136.hsd1.va.comcast.net)
Date/Time: 26 February 2010 5:43 pm
Coming from (referer): http://blog.mikemay.com/mikes-magic-box

I’m happy to brag that my new custom-designed blogs for my Pint2Agent real estate site design clients Joe Janus and Mike May are featured in the Thesis Gallery. The gallery showcases blogs created using the premium Thesis theme by DIY Themes for Wordpress as a starting point for customization. Joe’s blog will make extensive use of the newly released dsIDXpress Wordpress plug-in that will feed “live” real estate listings to his blog.

The short answer is “no”. The long answer is, “well, sort of.”
Point2Agent site subscriptions come with a built-in blog based on the Community Server blog platform, which isn’t Wordpress. Not by a long shot.

The good news about Point2Agent blogs is that they are on your own domain name, so posts to and visits to your blog count for “Google brownie points”.

The bad news about Point2Agent blogs? They’re not Wordpress blogs.

Can a Point2Agent site have a Wordpress blog? Yes. There’s a little extra expense involved, and a lot of work, but it can be done.

Since the recent release of Diverse Solutions’ dsIDXpress plug-in, I have been scrambling to learn to customize Wordpress sites. This site is the “sandbox” where I’m learning, and that’s why it may look a little odd. But Diverse Solutions’ new technology is too important for me to not be able to offer it to my design clients.

I’ll be rolling out my first two custom Wordpress sites for my Point2Agent design clients here soon. Watch this space…

I was surprised this morning to see traffic to my client Stephen Sexauer’s Tampa FL homes for sale site had suddenly doubled. With a little Sherlock Holmes work, I determined that over half of the traffic to the site is coming directly from Point2 syndicated listings from Google Maps. Apparently Point2Agent began a new syndication venue in December 2009.

Since this is fairly a new site and I’ve just barely begun search engine optimization work on it, every little bit of extra traffic helps — and a single referring site that doubles the traffic to a site is really amazing! Jennifer Anderson, my friend at Point2Agent who manages Point2’s syndication program (and who originally recruited me to do custom design for Point2Agent members) reported to me that Point2Agent had tweaked their Google feed in December. Congratulations Jennifer for great work and results!