Real Estate Agent, Brokerage and Mortgage Blogs

Because I love TMZ and The Superficial and because I just thought it would be fun to have an occasional real estate technology gossip piece - so, here are a couple of SEO related real estate rumors making their ways across the blogosphere.

Is Trulia cloaking pages?

Trulia Caught Cloaking Red Handed

Eric Bramlett catches Trulia in what appears by all accounts to be a serious case of cloaking.  Cloaking is an age old shady technique that based on user agent (i.e. GoogleBot, YahooSlurp, (robots) IE, Firefox (people)) serves one set of content to the search engine and another set of content to people visiting the site through regular browsers.  In this case, Eric shows how Trulia is using a redirect and cloaking to direct Google to Trulia's own Seattle Real Estate landing pages when it crawls Seattle Weekly's real estate section. This could be one of the possible cataysts to Trulia's recent jump on the engines in many major markets.  Basically, Trulia is boosting pageviews through partner sites and the techniques they are using while not necessarily evil it may be against Google's TOS.

Conspiracy Theories on Trulia's SEO

Is trulia cloaking? Interesting Sphin story

YouTube Video of Trulia Cloaking

Trulia.com Uses Hidden Text

Trulia's Web-ranking strategies catch heat | Inman News

Read also: White Hat, Gray Hat and Black Hat SEO Explained

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Hey, real estate agents should be too busy to blog. It's a fact. So, sometimes you need quick, easy and effective posts that take minimal time and brain power. So, here are examples of simple posts that will quickly become cornerstone pieces on your blog.

Please note, most of these revolve around you knowing your way around the MLS and listings. Why? Because every successful real estate blogger knows, the bread and butter of their blog are posts about listings.

Read also: The First 30 Days of Blogging

1. A monthly top 10 listings post.

This is a very simple post. Each month, you probably walk through upwards of 20 homes and view even more on the MLS with clients. So, make a list of your favorite picks for various types of buyers.

Examples:

• Top 10 Denver CO Homes for first time home buyers
• Top 10 Salt Lake City real estate investments
• Top 5 Fort Lauderdale Foreclosures

How to implement this post:

• Use MLS data like listing info, address, description, photos (if copyrights do not prohibit you) etc.
• Make your own brief analysis of what makes each home a best buy or good investment (be specific - people like specifics)

Read also:Top 5 Easy and Effective Listing Posts You Can Write for Your Real Estate Blog

2. Use a listing that has sat on the MLS for months to show what prevents a home from selling

Hey, you've been in the house or you have seen it on the MLS. You know the house. The one where the front yard hasn't been tended to or the home is never in showing condition or the MLS info plain old stinks. Or worse yet, the home is just grossly overpriced. Take an explicit example from the MLS of a home that has sat on the market for months and explain all the problems with it and why it isn't selling.

Examples:

• Why this 3 bedroom DC Condo won't sell and how you can make sure yours does
• Why great San Diego Homes like these go unsold
• Why good Portland homes can't sell and bad ones do

How to implement this post:

• Find one home that has sat on the market for a while that you can clearly identify why it has not sold. It is preferable to pick a home that you have been inside.
• Use MLS data like listing info, address, description, photos (if copyrights do not prohibit you) or take your own photos etc.
• What is preventing the home from selling and list things that the Realtor or Seller could do to help this home get sold.

Read also: Formula for a Successful Blog Post

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Landing Page Optimization is an essential component of good web design. It is the process of improving a visitor's perception of a website by optimizing its content and appearance in order to make the pages more appealing to the target audiences, as measured by target goals such as conversion rate. What does that really mean? Basically, it means you need to make individual pages on your blog or website so simple and compelling that visitors WANT to contact you. And, isn't that what we all want... people to contact you through your website?

So, how do you optimize the layout, calls to actions and content of your real estate agent blog or website to get more conversion?

1. Identify mission critical parts of your website and their true economic value

Your only answer should be "my conversion forms." As a Realtor, your conversion forms should be one or more of the following:

• Contact form
• Search for properties registration form
• CMA/House Value form
• Market report form
• Special Offer/Newsletter form

These forms are the most important pages on your site because they are where conversion from visitor to contact takes place. Therefore, each of these forms has to be clearly identified, visible on each and every page of your real estate blog and incite people to want to click them.

Read also: Let's Talk Landing Page Optimization by SEOmoz

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A real estate blog or website without well crafted and placed calls to action will simply fail. A call to action is simply that single offer on your page that gets your visitors to convert from a casual reader into a contact by clicking on and filling out one of your lead generation forms.

BONUS: RSS Pieces and 1ParkPlace have teamed up to provide you with complete sets of high quality, graphically relevant and SEOed call to action buttons you can use for free on your real estate blog or website. Each button is already SEOed with high quality, universal, real estate related "alt" and "title" descriptive text- all you do is copy and paste these buttons to your site and add the link to your lead gens!

See our real estate button sets here.

Sample:

What makes a good real estate call to action?

1. Invaluable Offer. The call to action HAS to offer some value to the visitor. That means that you must have lead generators connected to tools that truly have some function that is critical to the user experience. So what types of tools are critical to your real estate visitors?

Read also: How to generate leads from your real estate blog: we have proof

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Alright, Ines has finally agreed to come back and post on RSS Pieces (we all recall the Great Trackback Debacle of 2008).  And this time, she is giving up the goods on how she creates those fabulous Maps on her category pages!  I get asked how she does them about 20 times every week... and the worst part is... I had no idea until now!  So, without further ado...

See a map in action: Miami Beach Neighborhood Map

How to make Ines' famous Miamism Maps

So Mary likes my neighborhood maps and I have gotten bombarded by calls and e-mails asking me how to make them.  I don't know whether to thank Mary for the compliment or have her treat me to mojitos the next time she visits Miami.  (hmmm....not a bad idea)

So a tutorial was in place - it really is pretty simple and I don't mind at all if you contact me if you still have questions.  Here are the step-by-step instructions:

Go to Google Maps at http://maps.google.com/ and if you don't already have a Google account, create one.

For this tutorial's sake, I will use Sunset Islands, Florida as an example, but it will help you to have a map of the areas you farm with the exact neighborhood boundaries.

Type in an address or city name in the search box next to Google maps and press "search maps".  Zoom in and pan the map so it sits exactly where you want it once the map is created.

1. Click on "my maps" tab on the left hand side

2. Click on "create new map" right under it.

3. Give your map a title and description keep in mind your keywords

4. Keep the privacy settings as "public" you want your maps to be "searchable"

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