Tip of the Day 3 - Real Estate Marketing

Holidays are always a double edged sword - its great to see friends and family, celebrate, and make merry, but it also seems to be alot of work and is very exhausting. But, regardless the memories are made, and the moments are enjoyed.

While observing the holiday rituals, it got me thinking about the next tip I should write about. Every holiday has specific order of events that occur, linking the moments together into a larger picture of the entire day. That nearly exactly like a site map - a layout, an order if you will, of where to go to on your site. If the map is followed, the result is a very happy "spider" that leaves with the knowledge of how your site is layout, what relevance it has, and how the page relate to each other.

The best site map is one that spiders understand, XML. To many people, this is seems like a foreign language, but it is fact a very straight forward language. Basically, XML describes data. This allows other programs to know they are getting data, what kind of data, and the data itself. Your site map should an XML component to make it very useful to spiders and especially if you use google analytics.

Don't fret, you don't have to go out and purchase books on writing XML. I'm going to provide a link to a free service I use to generate my XML site maps.


http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/details-destinrealestatemasterminds.com.html


This site is easy to use, and provides all the code and XML that you need to have a correct site map.

While no one thing is going to provide the boost to get you to the top, a lot of little things will help. So, by implementing my three tips, you will definately start getting noticed by search engine more. There are lot more "little" things to do, so keep checking back as I continue these tips of the day.

To see a sample of the what the site map look like that is generated by the site mentioned above, go to:

http://www.destinrealestatemasterminds.com/

And scroll to the bottom. The site map link is there. Remember, spiders are not looking at the "beauty" of the page, just the readability and relavance of the page.

Happy Holidays

Tip of the Day 2 - Real Estate Marketing

Continuing on my series of Real Estate Marketing focusing on what agents need to do make their site work for them, I have a tip about your page names. When it comes to knowing how search engines qualify a website for ranking, one general consensus is that the name of your page matters.

There are two aspect to the name of your page. The actual file name and the title tag.

The first has to do with the actual name of the file, whether it is a .html, .htm, .asp, or so on. The name of the file should relate to the relavent information on the page. So, for example if you have a page that focuses on beaches, where they are out, tips on how to enjoy them, what the beach flags mean, and any thing else regarding beach, the name of the page should have something to do with beaches - like beaches.html, or funatthebeach.html. Another pointer is avoid using the underscore ( _ ) when naming files. If you need to break up the file name use dashes ( - ). For example: fun-at-the-beach.html. My investigation and interviews with SEO companies have revealed that search engines prefer to use the dash naming method as oppose to the underscore.


The second aspect is the Title tag. This is very important to search engines because it is basically an indicator of what that page is about. Using our example of the beach page above, your title tag should have a similar feel, like Beaches of Destin, Map to the beaches, Best Beaches on the Emerald Coast. Feel free to add some additional key words to go with the original title - like "Best Beaches On The Emerald Coast, Destin FL Beaches". Adding a few additional key words, and even a repetitive key word won't hurt. What will hurt is having nothing, having something that is unrelated to the page, or key word loading (like "Destin Beaches, Destin Beaches, Destin Beaches, Destin Beaches").


Please bear in mind that these methods are probablly not going to shoot you to the top of the page ranking pyramid, that process is complex and made of a bunch of tiny things, like the page name and title techniques. But anything you can do to make your page "likable" by the search engine, is just one step closer to getting a first page ranking.

If you are serious about looking into a first page ranking with SEO, I have worked with several companies in the past. One of them I have had great success with, and their professionalism and reliability was at the top of their profession. Not to mention the cost for the service is worth while.

Check out the SEO company SubmitPlus.com, the can definately help your site out, giving you a great evaluation, first page ranking in search engines, and help get yoru site the prominance it needs in today's online real esetate climate.

Tip of the Day - Real Estate Marketing

I am starting a "Tip of the Day" that focuses on Real Estate Marketing. The first several tips will focus on what real estate agents need to do to get their websites marketing for them. Any agent with a website has spent some money (or time), getting their site online. Many agents have outsourced this tool, due its innate complexities, while other are lucky enough have assistance or the knowledge themselves to build their site.

Regardless of how it gets up online, here is the tip of the day to make sure that you start getting the most out of site:

All listings need to have a "detail page"

This page needs to contain only information about the one property. Other promotional marketing is optional. The reason for this is that other than the knowledge an agent brings to a real estate transaction, their other large marketing assett is their listings. I suspect that most agents lose valuable traffic to their site because they do not have specific detail pages for each listing. Many of the search search sites and real estate aggregators need to have one page associated with each listing.

Many third party marketers host these pages themselve, therefore getting all of the traffic to their site (see any of the major franchise real estate publications). Where ever you market online, insure that traffic is pushed back to your site, and to your listings.

Exquisite Homes is one of those publications that wants to see real estate agents succeed in the competitive world of online marketing and traffic. All listings that appear in our publication are pushed back to the detail pages on the agent's site. We provide statistics on this traffic, helping agents get more "bang" for their real estate marketing dollars.