Real Estate Blog

It’s a large real estate agency, and the company depends on a steady stream of leads. The website is classy, with delightful graphic elements and layout. There is well-written copy, designed to both entice the reader and search engine spiders. The website was obviously done by a professional and probably cost a bit of money.

Only the website missing something — an easily found address and phone number!

While researching realtor websites a few months, we came across a suprisingly large number of real estate websites where the contact information was buried. Some websites put their contact information on a Contact or About Us page. Even worse, a few had their contact information enbedded in an image. Search engines don’t read text in images. Users can’t copy and paste from an image if they want to copy your address to, say, a mapping program.

It’s like putting a sign above your office building and forgetting to unlock the door.

Don’t bury your most important information. Contact information should be in the footer of every page and preferably higher on the website’s home page. Each individual listing should have associated contact information. Real estate is one of the few types of websites where an interested customer is actually likely to pick up a phone and call rather than email you.

Sometimes, with everything that goes into creating and marketing a website, the simplest things are left behind. Don’t let it happen to you!

Brought to you by RealEstateAgentProfiles.com and RealtyFeedSearch.com - helping real estate agents improve their search engine marketing.

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Realtors: Forget Your Address?

RSS, Newsletter, Blog, Website…with so many places you can publish your web content to, how do you choose; especially when articles and time to publish them is limited. Besides, why should you publish your content in so many different formats? If you’ve been doing business online for any amount of time you know that building a list is integral to success. Regular website content brings search engine robots back. So do blogs. Blogs also help build your expert status and RSS is the new way for people to subscribe to your content without giving out their email address – among other things.



Ok, so you know it’s all good and they will help build your business, but how can you do several or all without piling more work on your already full to do list? It’s really quite simple. Make your content work harder and milk it for all it’s worth.



Instead of publishing your newsletter entirely by email, publish it to a content management system or blog that will automatically create an RSS feed each time you update it. Your next step is to put that RSS feed into your mailing list manager* create a signup box as you would a regular newsletter and put it on your website or blog in a prominent area together with the RSS feed. It, probably won’t take more than a few minutes if you already have everything at hand.



From now on, people can choose to subscribe to your newsletter by RSS or email and every time you publish the newsletter to your website or blog, RSS subscribers will see that you have new content and people who opt-in for email will receive an email notice. To top it all off, the content is also archived online permanently and all you did was type and publish one time.



You know the amazing part is, that’s not all. You can syndicate your newsletter for more exposure. Contact a few webmasters and ask them if they’d like free, automatically updating content on their websites. Create the codes for them so it’s super easy for them to add you. When they do, the next time you publish your newsletter, their website gets updated immediately. If anyone wants to read more of your content, they would be brought to your site.



RSS is truly an exciting technology. Not only does it open many doors for you to share your content, it can also help you work smarter by cutting down your work as you read above. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have an RSS feed today and if you already have one, it’s time you should milk your RSS feed for all it’s worth.



*Note: Not all mailing list managers can take your RSS feed and convert it into email updates.



Lynette Chandler helps marketers make the most of technology in their marketing. She most of technology in their marketing. She shares what technologies, why and how to apply them in her newsletter. Get a hold of this valuable marketing technology information at www.TechBasedMarketing.com

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How To Milk Your Content For All It’s Worth With RSS

SUNNYVALE, Calif. - Looking to gain another edge on its rivals, Internet powerhouse Yahoo Inc. on Wednesday will begin testing a new e-mail folder designed to make it easier for people to track the latest information posted on their favorite Web sites.

The free feature relies on Really Simple Syndication, an increasingly popular technology that can compile content from a wide array of Web sites catering to a user’s personal tastes.



More …

Read the rest here:
Yahoo Unveils RSS E-Mail Folder

‘Add to Google’ has been added to the quickSub RSS button functionality, which provides a list of newsreaders to which users can add RSS feeds.



Now, when people choose the ‘Add to Google’ option on the subscribe list, they are directed to add your feed to either their personalized edition of the Google homepage or Google Reader.

Credit:
Add To Google button added to subscription button functionality

There are millions of dollars and multiple hours spent every day trying to increase website traffic, by both ethical and unethical means. There is so much demand for traffic solutions that people will go to any lengths to get ranked higher in the search engines. But did you know that you could increase your traffic by about 20% right now, with virtually no effort?

Most times when you hear something like this I suggest that you turn tail and run as it will normally lead to your site’s ranking demise. This particular method of boosting traffic, however, is not a scam; it’s not an unethical ploy; it is a genuine method of increasing traffic via a future internet standard. The reason that you can increase your traffic so vastly is because you are getting in on the ground floor of a new technology which will revolutionize the internet and the way that traffic is distributed.

To understand what we’re about to tell you, you need to understand what an RSS feed is. Put simply, it’s a standard format for sharing your content instantly with users and other websites. People can quickly get access to ‘teasers’ for your latest newsletters, articles, blogs, content and more, and click through to see the full version. This method of distributing your information is very helpful because it basically generates dynamic newsletters without spamming and without causing your visitor any grief at all. In fact, many users find RSS to be their preferred way to hear about updates as RSS is so fast, user-friendly, and (most importantly) dynamic.

RSS feeds are often used by news sites or blogs, as the content changes often enough to make it worth while. By using highly targeted RSS feeds, you can improve your site’s web content without having to write it on your own – if someone offers you an RSS feed of their site, you can add it to your site easily. This provides you with a good content base which will keep visitors coming back. The more information that people associate your site with the more important they consider your site. The more important they consider your site, the more important search engines will consider your site. Providing RSS yourself will get lots of people to link to you and so potentially improve your search engine rankings. Why?

1. RSS feeds can provide good, relevant content for your website – there are plenty of RSS publishers with themed content for you to choose from. These highly-targeted feeds will often contain your keywords, and so increase the keyword relevancy of your website. This helps even more than you may think as the key words will be within link or “anchor” tags. Search engines value anchor tags almost as much (if not more than) header tags (h1-h6).

2. RSS feeds can provide new, fresh content. When new content is added to them, the old content drops off, making sure that your website’s content doesn’t go stale. Most of your visitors will not visit your site if they find that there is nothing new between the first and second time that they visit it. If you want to keep your visitors where they belong, you have to have a good selection of content that is updated on a regular basis.

3. RSS feeds can get search engines to crawl your site more frequently – daily in some cases. This helps your site to rank higher in the search engines, and gives you an advantage over your competition. Your RSS feed can do your SEO work for you.

RSS feeds can be great for getting your newsletter, articles, or blog onto other people’s sites, and that’s very powerful, as long as you make sure that your RSS feed is adding more to your business than it takes. In some situations, you might find that including RSS on your page makes visitors click away from your site, as they find that site’s content more interesting than you – and people who click on RSS links might be less likely to click on ads. Use caution with RSS feeds, or you could be in for a shock.

About The Author:

Lawrence Andrews is an ePublisher, software developer, consultant, and author of numerous books. Visit his Private Label Content and Software site at http://www.lmamedia.com for more information about SEO and PRL.

Excerpt from:
Using RSS to Increase Your PageRank

Web feeds, or RSS, has exploded in popularity over the last few years. It’s a powerful marketing tool that will have a major affect on real estate marketing. Millions of people use web feeds every day. Most users view feeds through Newsreaders, but many web browsers and future operating systems are incorporating this technology.

If you are looking for a house or a place to rent, use web feeds to keep up with the latest listings. You can use feeds to easily keep track of properties from a wide variety of sources. As new properties are added to the feeds, you are notified almost immediately. If you see something you like, you can go directly to that property’s web page. This saves time over continually checking individual web sites for updates.

Many real estate websites offer the ability to subscribe to email updates. Unlike e-mail, web feeds have a 100% delivery rate and there is no risk of spam problems.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult these days to find real estate professionals offering web feeds, let alone feeds that are purely property-driven or contain news specific to a certain geographic area. A majority of feeds are offered through ‘blogs’ of various qualities. More savvy professionals break their web feeds into categories, such as commercial, rentals and residential properties. Even mortgage finance professionals can use web feeds to keep customers and potential customers aware of market changes.

As web feeds become more popular with the average user, expect more real estate professionals offering their listings via web feeds. If you aren’t finding the feeds you want, ask for them!



S.R. Daley is the web developer for http://www.myrealtyfeed.com, a service that allows real estate professionals to maintain multiple RSS feeds with a simple web interface. Those who have real estate feeds can submit them to http://realtyfeedsearch.com — a free real estate feed directory.

Original post:
Using Real Estate Web Feeds For House-Hunting

Like anything else, a little work can pay dividends. Well-written RSS feeds are more useful to readers and result in more website traffic for the publisher. Here are several tips for making your RSS feed more effective.

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Tips for a Better RSS Feed