Blogging For Real Estate Professionals

If you are blogging to attract real estate leads, which many of us are, you know the value of having your content found on the internet. I have been working for some time to get the word out about the Real Estate Lead Generation Software provided through RedX and have learned a great deal about search engine optimization in the process. What I have learned is that if you want to successfully drive leads to your blog, the actual post is only the first step. The steps following your post will truly determine your level of success in attracting traffic and subsequent real estate leads to your blog.

Steps To Attract Real Estate Leads Through Your Blog

Let’s face it. Any time you spend creating a blog is an investment in marketing. However, your return on investment is determined primarily through how many people read your blog and visit your site. Fundamentally, the best way to get your blog read is if it shows up on a search engine. Therefore, getting a high ranking for a given search term is imperative. So what are the steps necessary to search engine optimize your blog post?

Before you even begin writing your post, you should determine what keyword phrase you are targeting. If you have a topic in mind, spend a few minutes on google to see how competitive the phrase you are focusing on will be. To see the level of competition, look next to the search box for the search results information. For example, the competitive information for the term “attract real estate leads” is “Results 1 - 10 of about 4,230,000 for attract real estate leads. (0.55 seconds)” Because this article is competing with over four million other entries, it is unlikely to rank high on the search term “attract real estate leads.” Therefore, optimizing it for that term may be relatively futile and I should probably optimize this post to a less competitive phrase such as “listing leads for realtors”, or even “GRAR” which only has one million competitors.

After you have chosen your search phrase, write your post to include that phrase one to three percent of the time. Be sure to include the phrase as part of your header tags <h1> as well as your subhead <h2>. Back to our example, the phrase Attract Real Estate Leads is in the <h2> tag of this article.

Now Start Your Real Estate Search Engine Optimization

Here is what I do to promote these posts as well as the RedX discount page.

* Ping your entry using a pinging tool to multiple sites. I use pingler.com

* Use an article rewriting tool to create multiple unique versions of your article. Unique versions are needed so that each syndicated site that posts your article is counted as a unique back link to your real estate blog. I now use Magic Article Rewriter as my tool of choice.

* Submit your unique article to as many article directories as possible. I use two tools 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 gradually increases your links and your search engine rank. Their actual sales pages are pretty cheezy, but the tools work great.

* Bookmark the post to StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicous, and the rest of the bookmarking sites. 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 multiple feed readers, then now is the time to do so.

* Update the post on your facebook, MySpace, ActiveRain and Broker Agent Social pages.

All of the above sounds like a lot of work, and it does take about an hour to complete all of the steps. However, where you may attract 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.

SEO Backlink Tools

I have been doing a bit of article marketing lately to promote the RedX FSBO and Real Estate Lead service and have found two very effective tools to attract numerous backlinks without a lot of work. The first tool takes your article, walks you through a process to create multiple unique versions of each paragraph, the automatically submits a hundreds of unique versions to over six hundred directories. The service is the Unique Article Wizard, and I found it by reading about various backlink shortcuts on a few different internet marketing forums.

The service came highly rated, and I have been using it for a short time. So far I have published two articles with the identifier “randy xyllion” and one containing the word “xyssion.” In the past two days, I have 106 indexed links from google for the xyllion articles and 16 links from bing back to the xyssion. Overall, not bad for drafting three articles about internet marketing and sending them out to the world.

The other tool that I have recently had success with in building backlinks to increase the search engine position of my agents online website as well as the supra ekey and lockbox sites is a service called the LinkJuicer. Okay, not a great name, but an interesting service. If you recall how a link circle used to work with multiple participants sharing links back to other member’s websites, this service will be very familiar. Essentially, the LinkJuicer is the social network equivalent of a link circle. The beauty of the service however is that backlinks to your site grow slowly and naturally over time as the system places your link into the social accounts of other participants and places links to their site from yours. Because the system limits the addition of only three sites per day and includes fifteen of the popular online social networks, your backlinks grow slowly and reliable which the search engines just love.

Real Estate SEO, Getting to the Top of Google

Those of you that have been reading this blog know that I am using the search term Agents Online and the associated website AgentsOnline.Org to demonstrate in real time how to get your website to the top page of a search engine for a specific phrase.  For this specific example, I have chosen the phrase “Agents Online” and I am slowly moving the site up to the first page of google for that respective phrase.  

To provide an update on where we are on this experiment, I signed up the URL AgentsOnline.org less than a month ago and created a basic website optimized for the term.  Next I added links from this blog and built a Squidoo page which in turn linked to the site.  I also created a twitter account dedicated to Agents Online.  Currently there are about 16 total sites that are indexed on the search engines and link to this site.  

Now for our progress on Google.  If you search for the term “Agents Online”  in quotes, the page ranks as number seven among the entries on the first page of Google.  Not bad for having a site established for less than a month.  When you search on google for Agents Online  without the quotes, the page pop up as number 21 on Google which is at the top of the third page.  While this is not as significant, it does make the point that by building  a page optimized to a specific term, and using your target term as part of your URL, you can capture a premium place on the ranks of google very quickly.  

Now to move the site rank up from number 21 to within the top ten we just need to add some more high quality, high page rank links.   The can be achieved simply by posting comments on real estate related blogs, associated websites and forums.  

As you read through this post, you will no doubt realize that this is a very easy way to boost your web traffic without extensive Pay per click.  However,  as a word of caution, this process doesn’t always work.  For example our Real Estate Country site has yet to show up at an acceptable level for the term Real Estate Country.

Improving Keyword Search Traffic

My ideas building squeeze pages is not unique, and is in fact becoming a widely practiced technique for search engine optimization. As a reminder, a squeeze page is a search engine optimized keyword specific landing page to gather leads. An example of this would be my expired listing lead site, realestatecountry.net.

Here is a link to a Marketing Sherpa article on how Jelly Belly has used this technique to grow their online customer acquisition and conversion by 200%. Now for many REALTORs, using an enterprise system to create 500 keyword specific pages is just not economically viable. However, I can tell you that similar results can be achieved with a simple WordPress blog, templates and a godaddy account.

Just to keep score on which of my links are currently getting first page exposure for a search term on Google, “Real Estate country” is still low on Google, but gaining rank. Expired Listing lead and Expired Listing Lead software is dominated by my links. For my wife, “Chewable Prenatal Vitamin” shows up on Google twice with a link to Bloom’en Nutrition, and I just registered PregnancyVitamin.net so we shall see when it finally ranks after I get the pages loaded.

Appear Multiple Times on the First Page of Google

Google  “Expired Listing Leads,”  Half of the page  references me through  4MySales, Barrett Niehus, or through my relationship with the RedX Expired Listing Lead Service and its associated savings.  Getting this type of rank can be a good amount of work, but it can also help you attract many many clients.  So what is exactly do you need to do to dominate the first page of google to maximize your web traffic? 

The approach simple, and just requires you to realize that you need to have relatively big presence online, with a keword-narrow focus.  What does that mean?  It’s simple really.  I have lectured for a while that in order to be a successful Realtor you need to serve a niche and create a value proposition that differentiates you from your competition.  That sentiment is reflected online, but with some SEO specific caveats.   

So what are the steps to get your links listed on the first or ten results on google for a specific search word go back to you?  It all starts with picking the right search words.  Depending on the group and cities that you want to target, start creating a list of keywords that you feel that your clients will be searching for.  With this list, use a keyword tool (I actually prefer the Adwords keyword manager for Google) and take a look at the relative number of searches that your target keywords get per month.  

After choosing your keyword, optimize your website for that word.  I won’t go into details on site optimization, but be sure to update your meta tags, description and the keyword frequency in the body copy of your site. 

The next step is much more critical.  Start increasing your online footprint to feature that keyword and link back to your site.  Start a blog on blogger and choose that keyword as the URL (for some reason hyphens aren’t currently searching as well as run-on words so choose URL’s such as realtorleads.blogspot.com  as opposed to realtor-leads.blogspot.com.)  Post a few keyword-rich articles to that blog and add links back to your home page on the blog-roll. Add other links to your blog roll as well, but if possible add nofollow tags to those links as they do affect the pagerank of the blog.  If you have a similar topic with a related keyword, you may choose to two or three related blogs.  However, don’t overdo it as legitimately keeping these blogs up is a challenge and at certain levels it could be considered spam.  For me I have just two blogger sites dedicated to real estate, the most active dealing with viral marketing for REALTORS.  

After completing this work on blogger,  you may choose to do something similar with Wordpress.  The idea is to get five to ten quality blogs that you can legitimately maintain by posting just an entry per day.  After you have created your sites, be sure to ping them to the various blog search networks so that they get indexed promptly.

 

Next, turn to social networks and for each netword, choose a username that is your keyword.  Create your profile using keyword rich text, and use these pages as well as your blogs as selling opportunities.  People in the network will find you and connect with you, so put your best face forward.  Spend time getting to know the community and post information that will help the community grow.  

After creating your presence in the communities, spend some time on Squidoo and Hubpages creating lenses and pages that feature your keyword and link back to your site.  Once again, the idea is that when a person searches a specific phrase, multiple pages from different sites all linking to you show up.

 Once you have done all of the above, it is a matter of maintaining the content on all the sites (I allocate an hour a day for the prospecting expireds system.)  and adding content that serves your target search term.  

It is a fair amount of work, but the system does work.  My current project is Bloom’en Nutrition Prenatal Vitamin Chews.  I just started last week with the search term “prenatal vitamin chews” so there are only two entries on the first page of google that go back to Bloom’en Nutrition.

Automated Directory Submitting, Fast and Easy

Previously, I suggested a quicker way to submit your URL to the multitude of internet directories to grow your backlinks. I did this for a few hours on Friday to grow the links to the discount page of the RedX expired listing lead software and system. Fortunately for me, in my search for an even better approach to directory submission I found a website that automates almost all of the process. I spent another four hours on Saturday submitting 4MySales.com to promote my relationship with the Real Estate Data Exchange (Red X) to the list of directoris and received about 400 backlinks by the end of the process..

The website that I found is http://www.availablescript.com/submiter/index.php?menu=join with the corresponding password of hallo. What the system does is uses a script similar to that of directory submitter to populate all of the fields of your target directory. The only think that you need to do is enter the captcha (human identifier string) and choose the best subdirectory for your particular URL. It is a pretty cool tool and the number of link confirmations that I received in my email confirms that it does work.

Online Marketing Resource; The Best That I Could Find

It is obvious to most of you reading this post that online marketing is going to be the most cost effective way to attract new business. You have the farthest reach, can touch the most people and it is the only advertising that you can do to get prospective clients when they are sitting at their desk at work during the day. This is no shortage of places to learn about marketing your site online, and making the conversion process more streamlined, but I have to tell you that the information taught by MarketingExperiments in their bi-weekly webinars is by far the best. I attend their online marketing optimization webinars every other week and have a lot of success in growing the conversion and even the page rank of 4MySales.com and leveraging the benefits of the RedX real estate lead attraction system.

Marketing Experiments is owned by Marketing Sherpa, which is one of the most best known online marketing resources around. Their entire approach is to take the websites of small businesses and organizations, and run optimization experiments on those sites to increase lead capture by focusing on various aspects of the website and the steps that the prospect goes through as they convert to clients. The online webinars are hosted by a well respected team of researchers whose only job is to find out what best practices actually result in additional sales for a given website. The link to their site is above, and if you want a great resource to learn how to improve the effectiveness of your website and online marketing I would recommend Marketng Experiments.