Training for Real Estate Agents On OnSite SEO
November 15, 2009 by Aaron Evans
Filed under SEO
Real Estate SEO Pros have assisted Real Estate Agents with their SEO needs behind the scenes for over a decade. After some deliberation we decided that it was time to unveil our SEO training for the general public and allow all Agents access to our free video series.
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short is part of any modern day Real Estate Agents marketing toolkit and is important for success on the Internet. Over 80% of buyers and sellers (USA Today 2007) make inquiries their market prior to approaching a Real Estate Agent, and so the lucky Agent that captures these hungry prospects is a top seller indeed.
There are two types of SEO to think about when you are looking at starting an on line campaign. There is onsite and then there is offsite optimization. The search engines look at your site from a number of angels so in order to achieve good placement on their pages you must learn to master both sides of the SEO equation.
To have long term success on the Internet you need to use these concepts in concert with each other.. While it is not difficult we felt by offering these videos that Real Estate Agents could benefit by learning about these parts of SEO. Lets talk about our onsite Optimization video at this moment.
Our onsite optimization video will be mostly primarily concerned with showing you what are the vital factors to your onsite optimization. Our free videos present anyone with a basic level of website knowledge with a way to manipulate and improve your site so that you can improve your sites standings in the search engines and show that your site is worth visiting.
The primary step to onsite or On page optimization is applied to your sites, page titles. This is an often overlooked but important onsite factor in search engine algorithms. Folks often have the same titles on each page but page titles are viewed by search engines as a guide to a pages topic. A good quality title should be key phrase rich and be specific to the content of the page. This is the beginning of good information architecture (a sites layout). It is perfect for every topic within your website to have its own page.
If you market beach front acreage, have a page for that. If you sell in San Diego have a page for that, if you market Lofts have a page for that. This allows you to optimize a page for a very focused set of key phrases. The Search engines prime job is to deliver web pages to users that are directly related to the terms that they are typing in to search for. This means that the more specific your web pages are to a search term, the more likely you will achieve good rankings. More importantly, Real Estate is local, so don’t just use the term “real estate’ as a keyword. use “Miami Beach Front Property Real Estate” in the title and content of your page and you will get way more hungry buyers that are specifically seeking just that information out.
Then comes the central page content and this should also be defined and clarified by the nearby subject matter. Writing good quality and unique content is a ability and as with anything it takes practice to get good at it. You know your subject better than most, so you can really communicate your viewpoint in a unique way that can draw clients to you. It is essential that you remain professional and be sure that your subject matter reads well. Just be natural in the use of your keywords and phrases, and as you are writing just sprinkle them in the beginning and end of your articles.If you seek to use your key work phrases over and over the search engines can detect it as they look at the density of your keywords. This ploy will only lead to dropping the quality of your website visitors experience and therefore the search engines will likely punish your website with a lower quality score. It will also most likely lead to a high bounce rate.
Picking your sites name by buying a keyword specific Uniform Resource Locater (URL) is a good way to rank highly for your term. But if you have a site name by now don’t be bothered as your content and page headers will make up for this over time. If you decide to develop a number of sites, as many top sellers do then next go round include key phrases relating to page content. It is of value if your site names can be both short and memorable. Have your key phrase at the beginning of your site URL, MiamiBeachFrontRealty.com means you will show up for prospects that are searching for Miami beach front property not San Diego beach front property.
Use of alt text for images on your site is often overlooked in onsite optimization, but is a powerful tool. As the search engines come to your site they index your images along with the text on the page, so it is worth using keyword phrases in alt text on your images. There are readers that are used by the visually impaired that read the tags on your images, so using alt text is also a courtesy to people have web accessibility issues. Once again, more is not better so do not go the path of ALT tag stuffing, which would not only hinder usability for the visually impaired but would hurt your rank in the search engines as much as keyword stuffing does.
As the spiders come along from the search engines they come by and look at your header tags, that are behind the scenes on your page. These are called Meta Tags and should incorporate key phrase variations such as pluralizations along with a keyword rich explanation of your site that clients will read on the search engine page results. In view of the fact that these denote the subject of your page it is seen by search engines as an over view to the key phrases being targeted for that page and that page only.
It is valuable to be aware of that each of these onsite SEO factors are of value. So as you create your page, or have your web master attend to it, or the kid down the block, begin at the top with the URL purchase then move to your header tags and the page titles. These are weighted the most by the search engine algorithms. Then focus on your content as in the end all factors need to be considered if top rankings on the search engines are to be achieved for the most competitive key phrases.
Want to hear more about SEO? Stop by our free training at Real Estate SEO Training blog.
SEO For Real Estate Agents
October 31, 2009 by Silace Zyllion
Filed under SEO
If you spend any time marketing through blogs, which many of us are, you understand the value of having your subject matter found on the internet. For some time I have been working to get the word out regarding the Real Estate Lead Generation Software served through RedX and have learned a impressive deal concerning search engine optimization in the process. Outside of the primary post, there are many steps needed to get your blog read and recognized. The steps following your post will really uncover your level of success in attracting traffic and subsequent real estate leads to your blog.
Steps To Attain SEO Success And Draw Real Estate Leads
You should realize that your blog is a promotion investment. However, your return on investment is determined primarily through how many people read your blog and visit your site. With this in mind, your biggest return will be from the blog posts that are search engine optimized.
The first step in the writing procedure should always be choosing a target keyword. Once you have decided on a topic, spend a few minutes on google to see how reasonable the saying you are focusing on will be. To see the level of competition, look next to the search box for the search results information. For illustration, the competitive data for the phrase “attract real estate leads is “Results 1 – 10 of regarding 4,230,000 for appeal to real estate leads. (0.55 seconds)” Since this post is competing with over four million other entries, it is unlikely to rank high on the search term “appeal to real estate leads.” Therefore, optimizing it for that phrase may be quite futile and I ought to perhaps optimize this post to a less competitive phrase such as “listing leads for Realtors”, or even “GRAR” which only has one million competitors.
Once you have decided on a target phrase, write your post to incorporate that expression one to three percent of the time. Include the expression as part of your header tags as well as your subhead Back to our illustration, the phrase Appeal to Real Estate Leads is in the tag of this article.
Now Start Your Real Estate Search Engine Optimization
This is the approach that I am now using to promote the RedX markdown page.
* Ping your entry using a pinging tool to numerous websites. I use pingler.com
* Make multiple unique versions of your article with an article rewriter. Unique versions are needed so that every syndicated site that posts your blog is counted as a single back link to your real estate blog. I now use Magic Article Rewriter as my instrument of choice.
* Submit your unique article to as many article directories as possible. I use two resources concurrently for this. The first is UniqueArticleWizard, the second is Magic Article Submitter. Both tools allow you to syndicate your article across the web over time which steadily increases your links and your search engine rank. Their actual sales pages are pretty cheesy, but the tools work great.
* Bookmark the post to StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicous, and the rest of the bookmarking websites. If you are using a Wordpress, Orlywire has an interesting tool that allows you to automatically bookmark your post to your accounts.
* If you haven’t submitted your RSS feed to the various feed readers, then now is the time to do so.
* Put a copy of your article or post on your social networks.
All of the above sounds like a lot of work, and it does take with reference to an hour to complete all of the steps. However, where you may appeal to one or two real estate leads from the post alone, you can now expects a few hundred more people to find you from your search engine optimization activities.
Interest more listing leads through GRAR and MRMLS as well as through FSBO prospecting. Real Estate Software is available to help you succeed in real estate
The options-for-sale you never knew about real estate
Okay, so you have your letter of intent ready for distribution. It’s now time to move onto the second stage in closing a deal; deciding on an option for sale that is acceptable to both you and the seller. Before we move on, it is prudent for you to note that there are many options for sale you can suggest, and each one has its own benefits. Therefore, you will need to analyze your particular situation and see which of the options best fits your situation. Remember that there is no one option that will suit all deals.
For instance, if you are short on money currently and require some time, you can pick the options contract to facilitate the sale. What an options contract basically does is to allow you to stretch the payment terms so that you are not burdened to come up with a lot of cash fast. This option for sale is particularly useful in cases where you absolutely love a property but the seller is asking a high price. By using the options contract, the seller knows he’s selling for the price he wants, therefore he’s happy; meanwhile, you on the other hand get to control of the property during the interim period without having to make a lump sum payment.
A similar yet slightly different concept is presented by the split-funding option. While it allows the buyer to meet a seller’s demands without meeting them all in one go, split-funding also gives the seller some reassurances. To better understand this concept, consider the following hypothetical situation. You as the buyer are very interested in purchasing a hotel while the sellers are cordially opened to the sale. All looks good, however when you sit down at the negotiation table, you find out that the sellers are highly keen on using their money tied-up in the business as they want to recover all the money they invested in the hotel very quickly.
To make matters worse, although you recognize the potential benefits the hotel has to offer, its asking price is a little steep for you. Thus you find yourself in quite a quandary. Here’s where split-funding works its magic. You offer to assume financial responsibility of the hotel’s mortgage while simultaneously agreeing to pay half of the amount the sellers want at the time of the deal’s close. You are then expected to make the second half of the payment within eighteen months after the close, with an additional sum as owed interest. This way both the buyer, i.e. you in this case, and the seller come out benefiting, thus all parties are happy with the arrangement.
But what if the seller you are dealing with is fairly keen on offloading his property. In such a situation, it is better if you offer a floating seller-held mortgage. What this option for sale does is to allow you, as the buyer, to finance the purchase of the property with the seller’s assets. The seller, in turn, would take on a second mortgage for you, while you will be obliged to pay off the mortgage with interest to the seller over a mutually-agreed timeframe.
In addition to the above mentioned options, if you dealing with development opportunities such as land, you might think of choosing the partial-release agreement. This deal is referred to as such because the seller agrees to release portions of the desired property to the buyer over a fixed payment timeframe, while the buyer is allowed to develop the property in the meantime. An initial down payment may however be required by the seller.
That said, let’s now move onto our last option for sale known as real-estate exchange. Under Section 1031 of the Internal Revenue Service Legislation, real estate investors may rollover their investments without having to make any capital-gains tax payments on the property in question. What this basically means that you can use the real estate, which you hold as an investment, as equity to finance the purchase of another property. Pretty neat huh?
Now that we’ve gone over all the options, one final word of advice. Always keep in mind that you have different options, so don’t get into the habit of sticking to just one option. Analyze your situation thoroughly and then pick and choose between the various options for sale outlined.
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