alamode Agent Blog

Did you know? You can post XSite listings to Facebook

2012-05-22T16:07:28+00:00

Since Facebook connects nearly 1 billion people world-wide, it makes sense to use Facebook to speak to your circle of influence. And while you may not have a billion friends, connecting the ones you do have in a format they LIKE, helps build relationship for past and potential clients. And, you can post listings to Facebook from within your XSite. And we'll show you how in less than two minutes -- click here to watch the video.

Posting to Facebook isn't just "bells and whistles." It adds to the power of your XSite that already pushes listings to the most powerful real estate sites.

Every home has a story

2012-04-10T21:02:36+00:00

When I was reading the news this morning, two things stuck out: 1) a family built and moved into a 168 sq. foot home and 2) PGA Masters newly crowned champ Bubba Watson's home is for sale.

Almost every home has a "story" these days. Whether it's the size, location, features, or who lived there, every home (and listing) has a story that engages buyers beyond simple curb appeal. Your listings don't have to come with a green jacket or a small footprint, but every listing does have a story...what's yours?

Getting hyperlocal in less than 10 minutes

2012-03-29T16:52:54+00:00

We're all strapped for time these days, so I'll keep it short. Check out this video on how to get hyperlocal content quickly (so you can move on to the rest of your to-do list). Enjoy!

Luck o’ the XSite Stats

2012-03-13T17:45:52+00:00

Did you know there are about 30 million Google searches for real estate each month? And the rainbow to that pot o’ gold is right in your XSite stats. To see how your site traffic measures up, just check out your Stats page in the Wizard. Here's how:

Log into your XSite and click on the "XSite" icon in the navigation bar. Then click "Stats" in the second row. There, you'll see how many people visit your XSite, what they're looking at, and where they're coming from.

Want to boost your stats? Check out our training for easy ways to rank highly in search engine results.

Last, but not least

2012-03-05T21:02:31+00:00

Throughout this series, we've covered everything from not limiting your use of keywords to using headlines, lists, and hyperlinks to get noticed, and everything in between. Today, we're going to top of the series by making sure you’re keeping up with your competition and doing more than just "enough to get by". If you really want to leave your competition in the dust you might consider the following:

Write an article for a large website or news organization “pro bono” (for free) that gives that news site some valuable contents from an expert while also giving you some free promotion. For example, Realty Times has “Market Condition Reports” which you can write online and submit directly to their website. Does a report already exist for your area? Even if one does, see if you can “update” it or talk about an angle that might not have been covered before. You might do the same for a local newspaper or website. If they don’t have to pay you for the contents then they’ll love the free article, plus getting a reputable website to promote yours will give your SEO rank a bigger boost than if those contents were just on one of your own pages.
Start up a blog, either on your website (like our built-in blogging tools) or on another platform where you already have some friends. ActiveRain is a great real estate specific platform for having something to say and having colleagues chime in. Part of the reason search engines have been making all of these changes lately is because they hope to stumble upon something similar to a blog that might have great, passionate content but may not be “properly optimized” because it was written by an amateur internet user who started a blog because they had a subject that mattered to them. They don’t want to forget about that internet newbie because those sites often have the most honest and relevant content written for a real reader and not just for self-promotion.
Become one of those well-connected, local social media gurus (even if you really aren’t). I predict that very soon there will come a day when if you aren’t on Facebook or numerous other social media websites then you’ll be left in the dust (like you would be today if you went without a website). Most search engines these days will check in with the bigger social media sites to see if a profile exists that seems like a good match, so being on these sites will make sure you’re on their radar. Sites like FaceBook are quite powerful at keeping in touch with past clients (over a third of shoppers chose an agent because of past relationships, so make sure yours do, too) and you can also seek out new friends on the grounds of shared interests. But don’t just talk to yourself – follow your followers back and stay engaged. Make sure your online fans keep hearing from you. This is a task that will take up time but won’t feel like a “chore” if done properly because you’ll be networking and engaging socially, which is what real estate agents used to have to do to meet new clients in the days before the internet. Consider it mingling like one used to at the golf courses and social gatherings of years past – but now it’s all online.
Consider leveraging video contents on your site (ideally using your own videos so you aren’t promoting others and are seen as the expert). Visitors love videos because they don’t have to read. They can just click play, sit back, and let the information come to them. Search engines love videos because visitors love them, and also because sites like YouTube are actually owned and operated by Google (meaning you’re creating contents right in front of them). It’s much easier than it used to be, and you don’t even need any special software or know-how to do this for your website. All you’d need at minimum is a smart phone that includes a video camera (it’s actually hard to find one these days that doesn’t have this as a feature anymore) and then a free YouTube account. Shoot a video with your phone, send a copy of the video to yourself (if it’s too big to e-mail to yourself then hook your phone up to your computer to grab the file, or check with your phone’s support staff for exact steps), and then upload it into your free account. You can have as many videos as you’d like, as long as no single video is longer than 10 minutes (otherwise you’d need to get an upgraded account to have longer video files). Shoot videos about any of the stuff we’ve mentioned (area info, listings, market conditions, buyer or seller advice, create video blog posts), then add it to your website (instructions here). Your site will stand out, and the search engines will also feel more like recommending it to others.

Also, check out this portion of my class “7 Steps to Success” which discusses some of the tips above visually (which will also hopefully show you why video contents can be more powerful than written contents).

This concludes my series on “SEO the easy way, building a better website”. I hope it gave you some ideas to improve your website and your presence online. Feel free to check out some detailed classes and videos on these topics on our training page here, and especially note the video chat sessions held every weekday at 3PM CST that anyone can join. Also, leave some comments and let me know if these worked for you, or tell me what you thought or what you’d like to see in future blog posts.

You mean I have to “market” my website?

2012-02-27T20:58:34+00:00

Yes. That's exactly what I mean. Off-site marketing and promotion is the single biggest thing that can help your site’s rank and traffic. It has mattered since the beginning (and is how the “big guys” got the way they did), but matters even more these days even for a self-built, small website. Since the search engines are focusing less and less on the technical things that used to go into search engine optimization they are using your “online reputation” to figure out who is actually worthy of attention rather than whose site has had the most “tricks” done to it. If they keep hearing about you from other reputable sources, if it looks like you are already networking and have popularity online with specific circles, then the search engines want to keep up with this as well and will increase your presence in search result pages.

So, what does that mean? How do you build an “online reputation”? There are a few different ways to do it, but the gist of it is that you need other websites to link to yours. Not all links are created equal, though. The sites have to be related to yours in some way.

Having colleagues link to your site helps, particularly if you are in related fields (like having a home inspector link to an agent). It shows you’ve got a “circle of business trust” built up. Promote local businesses and have them do the same. You’ll be helping each other’s rank by doing so.
Getting your site linked on professional directories like LinkedIn, Yellow Pages, Google Places, local and state lists of agents, the chamber of commerce, and other websites will also benefit you because you are then showing up where other agents are expected to show up. You’re in the right crowd and doing what they’d expect you to do based on what your competition is already doing. Here’s a good list of possible sites to join with instructions on how to sign up with each of them – mostly focus on the local search engines, internet yellow pages, and social networking sections that may apply to you.
You should also show up where other real estate agents show up, such as on Trulia, Zillow, Craigslist and other listings syndication partners or real estate groups. It’s not just about getting your listings exposure – your website benefits as well since the search engines keep seeing your company name, your name, contact info and website address on websites that are already seen as great real estate resources that visitors look at before anything else.

Check back next week if you want tips to get beyond the "bare minimum"....and I promise it's not hard.

The thing about search engines….

2012-02-20T20:54:39+00:00

is that they’ve been all over the ‘net and are smart enough to know that they have been fed a particular bit of contents before. If you’re relying too heavily on pre-written content pages then your site won’t rank well because they don’t feel you bring enough new contents to the table. If most of your site’s contents are already available elsewhere then why should they promote your version of it? You have to have mostly unique contents or you won’t stand out. Use should always use pre-written content as what they're intended for....a starting point.

The same thing goes for uniqueness, as even if you were to sit down and build a “textbook perfect” website (if such a thing existed) if you never changed anything on it after launch then eventually its ranking would start to slip. If they come back to your site periodically and nothing ever changes then after awhile they’ll start to wonder about how relevant your contents are. Is it stale? Is your competition’s site more recent and therefore more likely to be current info? If enough time passes then your ranking could drop completely, as they may just consider your site “abandoned”. You definitely don’t want it to get that bad.

Luckily, on both counts, you’ve got two things working in your favor:

1. A little bit of work goes a long way. Not every nook and cranny of your site has to be unique. Things like real estate glossaries, checklists, calculators, or other general info pages are probably fine to leave as-is. Those are there as visitor “tools” and not really “search engine fodder” on their own. However, any pages that you feel are your “highlights” that are important to you and want to make sure are being ranked well should be as custom as possible. 60% or more uniqueness is a figure I hear thrown around a lot these days, so make sure if you have 20 buttons that at least 12 have been customized and that those pages have been tweaked enough to where most of it is worded differently from what was there by default.

Freshness is the same way. Not every page needs to see updates, and most search engines understand that some things you’re just going to get right the first time and then never touch again. However, having a few pages that change every now and then (or maintaining a blog regularly, such as twice a month) is enough to keep them checking back in for the latest contents and making sure your ranking never dips.

2. We’ve specifically designed a feature of our XSites to take care of this for you to some degree. We call it “GhostWriter” (check out this video or guide), and it is designed to take our default, pre-written content pages and “mix them up” a bit to make them unique so you don’t have to. It works about the same way you might if you were trying to rephrase something: it substitutes a word here and there, uses a different phrase that means the same thing, moves bullet points or sentence fragments around, and just generally plays around with the contents so it reads the same way but is worded uniquely.

We’ve “trained” our GhostWriter program on a per page basis to make sure it actually understands the topic at hand (so it doesn’t start mixing in seller focus on a buyer-oriented page, for example), and as long as you like what we have to say on a page then flipping the switch to let Ghostwriter take over that page will take a lot of word-tweaking off of your plate and give you one more page tipping the scale in your favor with both uniqueness and freshness. Also, we run GhostWriter once for every new website to make sure you start with unique contents on those pages, so they’re “safe” to use right out of the gate without any manual tweaking necessary.

Focus….Focus…Focus

2012-02-13T20:47:29+00:00

Yes, I'll say it again....focus. In marketing terms we call this “Niche Marketing” (you've probably also heard the term hyperlocal) and I have an entire class on this topic here. The gist of it, though, is that if you’re trying to hit too many targets at once then you’re going to be spreading yourself too thin to really gain much ground. You’re trying to compete in too many areas, and it’s a lot of work to go after everything (especially if you ever decide to do any paid marketing). You’re going to end up diluting your message by being a “jack of all trades” when most shoppers are really looking for an “ace” in their specific situation.

The best websites are simple, and should feel like “home” to the visitor. They should feel like they’re in exactly the right place for what they needed. If you have 80 buttons, lots of contents that have nothing to do with them, and work in several fields that don’t immediately appear to be closely related then you aren’t going to feel like the right choice. So just pick a few things to go after – what type of transactions do you want more of, what type of person, type of property, part of town, etc. Anything you can do to get more specific.

Specificity is the key there. The more specific and simple your site is then the more “loud and clear” it will be to both visitors and the search engines that you’re not just “a choice”, you’re “the choice”. It’s not limiting yourself if it’s a way to get your foot in the door with some valuable leads while also not having to fight a war on several fronts to get to the top in your Google rank. Next week we'll dive into even more details about the value behind having a unique site.

Summing it up with page titles

2012-02-06T16:17:07+00:00

Happy Monday everyone! It may seem obvious to summarize your page in the title, but you may not know why it's so important. And that's why I'm here...

A “page title” shows in your browser’s title bar when your site is open, which is where you’ve most likely encountered the page title. However, it’s more than that. The page title is also what search engines turn into the clickable link to your website when you come up as a search result. So before anyone even pulls up your site the title of the page sets a first impression as they read it before seeing any of your site’s other contents. If you title the page as a brief summary of what is on the page then it gives the visitor a better idea of if they should check out that link or not.

For example, here’s a page title that covers a few basic things you may have on your own website: “Oklahoma City real estate – find OKC homes for sale, property search, advice selling your home, or apartments for rent”. There I cover both “Oklahoma City” and “OKC”, “real estate” and “homes for sale”, key phrases like “property search”, “selling”, “for rent” and so forth. That brief phrase covers a lot of ground for possible keyword matches.

Don’t worry about putting everything into a page title, though, because this is actually set on a per page basis. This works to your advantage because if you have a few unrelated areas of your website then you can ensure the page titles for each page are super-specific. So, I might use that long summary on my homepage (to make sure it summarizes a lot of my business overall), but I might take my rentals page and go a little more niche-friendly with something like this: “Oklahoma City Rentals – Find apartments for rent in the OKC Metro area, duplexes, multi-family units, property search”.

That one page now covers lots of rental-specific ground which would have taken a lot of room to try and cover if I tried to squeeze it into the homepage’s page title as well. So, the homepage’s page title summarizes and sub-pages’ page titles emphasize.

What’s in a search phrase?

2012-01-30T14:52:11+00:00

As I said in the beginning, there's a lot to cover and we're about half-way through. Today, we'll cover why it's important to include your area name since it's usually half of your search phrase.

If you’re looking for a dog groomer you don’t just type “dog groomer” and hit Go – you type “dog groomers in Oklahoma City” so that you only get results you care about. With this in mind the search engines care a bunch about making sure your site is obviously relevant in a specific area. First and foremost you have to mention an area somewhere on your site or you just won’t be a match. Find a way to mention it that doesn’t mess up the flow of the page, like putting it in a headline (like Smalley Properties – Servicing the greater OKC Metro area including Oklahoma City, Moore, Norman and Edmond) or a simple bullet point list (“Learn more about our communities…”).

If you’re in a competitive market and need to rank better for certain areas then you may also consider going for the “richness” score and dedicating a part of your site to talking about that area. Create a separate sub-page and go through things like local attractions, reasons to live there, price ranges, neighborhoods, demographics or just about anything else of interest. The search engines will see you’re going into detail, which matters a lot more than simply mentioning an area name in passing on a page. Our "Featured Communities” feature is a great shortcut to creating pages that focus on an area and it just takes a few minutes to run it. See how easy it is here.

Here’s a portion of my “7 Steps to Success” video class that covers more advice on adding area info to your website.