Real Estate Agent, Brokerage and Mortgage Blogs

So, you are seeing some of the benefits of a blog but you wonder why you would want to replace your current site with a blog. In part two of this series I will show some of the common reasons why conventional websites fail to draw visitors and the advantages a complete blog would offer. This part is going to have some geeky information but trust me it will all make sense by the time I am through. What if it doesn't make sense? Well, that is what we are here for. Our job is to make blogging and SEO painless or very nearly so.

Problem number 1

Most web site designers come up with new and interesting looks but they fall short when it comes to implementation. Many times a site designed by a "graphics artist" will be either have no keywords and descriptions or they will have relatively unrelated and off-topic phrases and they may even contain the dread poison words and stop words. Very briefly, stop words are words that are ignored by search engines and poison words and words that can cause a search engine to ban a page from its index. A stop word is wasted space from an SEO standpoint and a poison word can kill a site.

So the short version is that your site may not be getting indexed properly and combinations of these items can lead to a poorly ranked and nearly invisible website. I cannot tell you how many sites I have seen that have terrible Google PageRank, hundreds of pages of content and inbound links and have almost no client traffic.

I did an analysis on a real estate website today that has a Google PageRank of 1 (out of 10 so that tells you how poorly the site is doing), over 600 pages of indexed content and almost 250 inbound links and you still cannot find them with two hands, a flashlight and a Sherpa! This poor realtor was sold a lemon of a website and blogging service, has invested 8 months of time and money and has no traffic to show for it. I don't know about you, but if I cannot see real and measurable performance increases I start looking at other solutions.

Solution? SEO. SEO. SEO.

Problem number 2

Just like life, there is synergy in websites and sites that are improperly constructed will lead poor site traffic. The typical scenario is that a company hears that blogs are great, buy the service, spend a year with it and still have seen no clear improvement and I can tell you why it happens or should I say that it doesn't happen. Synergy.

Let's say that you are client X and you have a website at www.ClientX.com. You hear that a blog will drive traffic so you subscribe to a service that gives you a blog and they put it at blog.ClientX.com. You then write tons of content and no one comes to the site! Do you know why? Because your primary website, the one that Google and Yahoo! knows is so poorly SEO'd that these search engines give up on them and never bother to crawl the blog.

A friend of mine used to describe this sort of add-on behavior as "Pierced ears on a pig" because even though you slapped on some nice diamond studs, at the end of the day it was still attached to a pig! To really maximize your traffic, the blog and the website should be on the same domain and sub-domain.

This happens all the time and a quick glance through server logs and querying the major search engines will show that it is true.

For a blog to drive traffic to your site, leaving fresh content and other factors aside, you must give the search engines an incentive to visit the blog itself!

Problem number 3

The next problem is ineffective content. If you write an article about your new 'Hello Kitty' cigar cutter and lighter and you are trying to sell homes, guess what? You just wasted your time. Search engines know what kind of content your site is likely to have and they will consider off-topic articles as non-sense that should be ignored and can you blame them? A search engines job is to provide links to relevant content and not just any old junk they run across while perusing the web. If you did a search for information about the new IS300 and you got search results that included DVD players and portable grills you would consider that search engine to be useless and you would stop using them altogether. These companies know that so they will go out of their way to exclude irrelevant pages from the index.

What does this have to do with you? Odds are your site was written by someone that doesn't know this fact or they may not think it is important so they have littered your website with pointless content.

Keep and maintain relevant content!

Problem number 4

For all their perceived abilities, a spider (slang for a computer program that scans the Internet for new web pages) is still a program. And all programs just like all computers can only do what they are told. And like all other computers and programs, they are very needy, clingy, temperamental and sticklers for detail. Because of that, many websites don't get crawled by spiders well because the web-pages are so poorly constructed that a spider cannot effectively read the pages.

Too help with the SEO process and ultimately generate traffic for your site you need to make sure your web pages can be validated by the validation tools at W3C.org. Barring some kind of fluke, the page you are viewing right now will validate completely and I didn't even have to do any magic because it is part of the blogging platform.

Spiders cannot understand garbled text and cannot read pictures so you better make the page validate and keep the design clean!

Problem number 5

So, today I am going to put new content on the site. So I have to come up with the idea, flesh it out on paper, type it into a Microsoft Word document, email it to my web designer and have them format it as HTML, check to see if it validates, post it on the website and... Wait. Is it Tuesday already? Where did the time go?

Conventional websites make the process of adding content to your site unbearable. If I had to wait for someone to do this for me, it would never get done or at least it wouldn't get done fast enough for me.

Blogging platforms make publishing content and linking to sites easy.

Problem number 6

Your web designer, who happens to be your nephews, friends, cousins, roommate from boarding school built you this great site using Flash. Stop the presses. Flash even in its newest incarnations and a strong search engine like Google do not play nicely. The reason is that Flash presentations and not text and the text that is shown is frequently some tweened, colorized picture of text and Google simply cannot read it and worse yet is that they built all the links into the Flash presentation so there are no links and no relevant text!

Congratulations, you just paid for nothing and if you like that I have some ocean front property in Arizona and it just may be in your price range.

Avoid Flash for all but the most basic tasks and don't put any links in it at all!

Problem number 7

Your website guy or girl or company or blog reseller tells you that you are doing great! Traffic is through the roof, people are bookmarking your site and you are being crawled like there is no tomorrow.

Guess what? Most conventional websites and blogs can't give you that information because they don't track it or don't track it well or they simply don't provide it to you. So without proper numbers how do you know that what you are doing is even working at all?

Get on a blogging platform with full analytics. One that let's you analyze trends, customer pathways and spider activity. Prove to yourself that it works.

Problem number 8

There is no eight but I thought it sounded good so here it goes. After having read this you wonder how switching from a website to a blog is a good thing.

One answer is the synergy that is afforded by successfully merging the two into one and generating new and useful content.

The next answer is that it would be the perfect time to scrap your current site and all of its problems and move to a new site that would be clean, searchable and usable.

The last answer is that we provide a blogging platform that addresses these concerns and others. To facilitate the move, we create a new look and feel for your site that includes a fully validating XHML/CSS site that is driven by a custom blog and automatically generates fully SEO'd content and even suggests the words and phrases that should be in an article. We can import your existing site or blog so you can transition from one to the other without missing a beat. We even have full analytics built in so you can see for yourself what works and what doesn't work and even which pages seem to interest people.

In closing

A properly built and maintained blog can drive traffic to your site and sales to your company. Contact us if you want more information or visit our home page to download PDF's that detail or services and feature set.