SEO by the Numbers for a Realtor® Who Serves Metro Area Suburbs

07.30.2011

Optimizing a real estate site for a Realtor® whose service area covers some suburbs near a large city can be especially challenging. With this article, I’ll share some insights on how I or Rich Blessing, the SEO consultant with whom many of my clients work, go about  a selecting a keyphrase strategy for our clients’ [...]

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How Integrated MLS Listings Can Help A Real Estate Site That Doesn’t Rank Well in the Search Engines

07.29.2011

Even a site that hasn’t had the benefit of a lot of off-site SEO work (back-link-building, etc.) or that has other kinds of search ranking problems can benefit from having integrated MLS listings programmed directly into it.
In the example I’m going to talk about today, my Sedona AZ Realtor® client had forwarded his domain to [...]

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How to Make the Most of Your Blogging Time

07.29.2011

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 [...]

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Is Your Domain Pointed to Your Real Estate Site Correctly?

07.29.2011

There’s an easy way to tell whether your domain is set up correctly. Go to your website in a browser, then do View > Source. Or if you’re using Chrome, do View > Developer > View Source.
You should now be “under the hood” of your site and looking at the source code that’s actually read [...]

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Thinking of Using “MLS” in Your Real Estate Domain Name? Think Again.

07.28.2011

If you’re thinking of using a domain name such as MyCityMLS.com, stop right there. For several years, NAR has been forcing people to stop the practice, causing serious problems for Realtors® who had long-established, high-traffic websites with “MLS” in their domain names.
I personally feel NAR’s policy is a little on the silly side. Supposedly their [...]

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What’s the Difference Between Custom Real Estate Site Design and SEO or Search Engine Optimization?

07.28.2011

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 [...]

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Choosing a Domain Name for Your Real Estate Website

07.26.2011

Recently I wrote about how NOT to choose a domain name, so today I will tell you about the approach I recommend.
Currently, for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes, the best domain name is one that is a close match to keyphrases often used to search for real estate in your area. This will probably change [...]

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When Is Wordpress a Good Choice for a Realtor’s® Website?

07.25.2011

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 [...]

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Did You Drink the “Wordpress Is Google-Friendly” Koolaid?

07.23.2011

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, [...]

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What Are True Integrated MLS Listings?

07.22.2011

Why would you want true integrated IDX for MLS listings in your site? Why not have i-framed listings or listings hosted on a subdomain of your IDX provider’s domain? Here’s why:
Google and the other search engines don’t “read” your pages the same way you do. Instead, they read a page’s source code, which you can [...]

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