I spent some time today looking at other real estate agent websites and landing pages both of HomeGain clients and in the search engines. I will say that most HomeGain agents are doing it correctly or are close.

However, this email is really for the others who are not doing it right, or if you are marketing on the Internet and still use your home page as your landing page.

It’s amazing to me how many Realtor and Broker websites don’t even try to capture names, emails, and phone numbers. Their [home buyer and seller] visitors come to their websites, use their tools, and then call another agent.

Firstly, do you understand what a landing page is?

I know, some of you might be smirking right now, but there are a lot of people that don’t have any idea what that means. A landing page is the page in which a customer coming to your site lands on.

For instance, if a customer comes to your site from the Internet and when they click on a link they end up on your Continue reading this post

Not! Does anyone want my advice on blogging? Ok, good, I’ll give you some advice: start by writing. It’s always best to start your blog by writing something.

Now you might ask—write about what?

And that would be a good question. Well, if you are a real estate agent you might want to write about real estate. That’s my first two pieces of advice—write, and write about real estate.

Seriously, if you are just starting or thinking about starting, there are a few things that might help. I will assume you’re an agent writing to consumers, and I will assume you’re not an experienced writer—otherwise you wouldn’t need my great advice. I write on several blogs, some related to the real estate industry and some related to consumers, but writing to consumers is the business end of blogging and it’s the main usefulness to you as an agent.

What are blogs good for?

They are good for informing consumers about your local market, about the real estate process in general, about market trends, about your services, about neighborhoods and listings and about how all this ties together.

You might want to develop a list of topics, such as: Continue reading this post

People love pictures.

Homebuyers REALLY love pictures of homes and buildings and parks and waterways and anything that will help them gain a better feel for the place they will be moving. (I’m assuming an out-of-town buyer who is unfamiliar with the area.)

If you have a website with a photo album function and the ability to write text below the pictures, I suggest you utilize it, and if you don’t, then I suggest you set something up you can link to.

Photos are a great way of making your site useful and worth coming back to. But photos are only one part of it, the power of the photo idea goes beyond just the picture, plus Google doesn’t do photos, so it won’t help with search engine placement just to have pictures.

Having the ability to place text below the image serves two purposes—

The most important is it allows you to tell the story of the city to the potential buyer and to inform them of important facts about the city (or neighborhood, or area, or particular house), and it helps with search engine placement so you can be found online.

I suggest having the albums categorized into different areas or neighborhoods or Continue reading this post

I’m a research person. I love having lots and lots of research to back up my statements and decisions.

So, let’s first take a look at the blogosphere as a whole, how it began, how it grew and where it is going.

According to Dave Sirfry’s April 2007 report on the blogosphere, Technorati currently tracks 70 million weblogs. The report shows that 120,000 blogs are created each day with 1.4 blogs created every second.

Since October 2006, there a slight slowing in the growth of the blogosphere which was expected as its previous growth rates were staggering having grown 60 times what it was in 2004.

In 2006, the blogosphere saw 1.3 million postings per day or 15 posts per second, whereas in 2007 it grew to 17 posts per second. Interestingly, the percentage of blogs in the top 100 reached approximately 25% (22 blogs). Also, interesting is the consumer perception that blogs are just as good a news outlet as main stream media sites like the New York Times.

The breakdown: Continue reading this post

OK OK, only a retarded monkey would think SEO doesn’t matter. (Sorry to call out your mentally challenged peeps, Max).

But being on top of Google’s first page totally matters. In fact, I can prove it.

I write a lot about SEO, but what I don’t write about a lot are the results people get by using simple search engine optimization techniques. ROI on SEO is very easy to measure. You measure it in terms of positioning in Google for your prime terms and on the increase in traffic.

And, by virtue of those two simple things you WILL see more leads and if you are a good Realtor you will be able to convert those leads into dollars.

Read also: How to select the best possible keywords for real estate blogs

Remedial Learning: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic“) search results for targeted keywords. Continue reading this post

Dear Matt,

I currently pay for driving visits to my web site (with the BuyerLink program), but have a limited budget. Are there any free ways I can get more visits to my web site in addition to what I do with HomeGain?

- Sally Dalhgren, Minnesota (real estate agent)

Dear Sally,

What you’re referring to is Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the art of making your site more findable by the search engines (and therefore getting free traffic!).

While you could get a 4-year degree in SEO and still not know everything there it to know, one of the easiest things to do is improve your site HTML tags. Continue reading this post