How many visitors will bring your real estate blog? January 25, 2006
John Vanhara
Some real estate agents will never do any action, because they don’t believe they can do any change. I know that from my own experience. When I give advice to someone and say it will work and will cost them nearly nothing they rarely believe me (but what motivation I have to lie? I am not selling them anything.). On the other hand they often believe some sales person who tells them to buy website, their marketing tool or advertising, which will bring nearly miracles and all they need to do is to write a check. Often signing contract for at least 12 months is required, in case they really see it is not working for them so they cannot go back:-)
I don’t believe in crap like that. There are many tools which doesn’t cost money (like free blog software Wordpress). Such tools can bring substantial results with small effort. But I am very frustrated when talking to many agents (often inside my own company) to see they rather believe in writing check or waste time instead of doing something what makes sense and doesn’t cost much.
Therefore I am bringing some real examples. This was a real estate web for commercial real estate with very mediocre number of visitors (30-40 a day). That’s not enough to bring substantial amount of leads. And it as flat like that for about year or maybe even longer.
We have placed a WordPress blog on this site in December 2005. As you can see from the stats the number of unique daily visitors nearly doubled in December (average 61 per day). January is already on 113 unique visitors per day!
If you don’t do any action with your real estate website even after I post examples like that then there is no help! Success is very close, but you have to look at right places. My only reason why I am publishing information like this is total frustration with real estate marketing companies and the way they treat real estate agents. You don’t need to pay hundreds or thousands to make hundreds thousands in commissions. The tools are here. Just use them!
How to pay SEO company for your real estate web January 22, 2006
John Vanhara
Would you like to get more visitors to your real estate website, but don’t want to pay chunk of upfront money with no guarantee? What if you could make a deal and pay based number of actual visitors who came to your site? Something like pay per click, but based on natural search engine results?
There will be not many SEO companies who would be willing to do such deal. Why? Because there are many people who have no idea how to accomplish any results at all. They go and sell service using telemarketers, but there is no actual result delivered. I actually tried one of such companies. For $1,500 per month I was supposed to get to top 2 search results for my selected keywords on Google.com. The result was going down 6 months in the row after I signed up with these guys. I had about 200-300 unique visitors per day on this web. After six month it went down to 60 visitors per day. Not only whatever this company did never helped, but it actually hurt my rankings.
Don’t let the same mistake happen to you! If you need some recommendations how to go about SEO let me know. Don’t pay upfront.
Do you type WWW in front of your domain name? January 13, 2006
John Vanhara
When accessing different websites do you type just domain name (iloverealestate.biz) or do you type www in front of the domain name (www.iloverealestate.biz). Everybody is different and people are using both options. But the important issue is how your own website works.
When you type just domain name will your website show in the address bar: www.iloverealestate.biz (automatically add www)? It is very important to use just version and set up your web server so whatever option users type it will show just one option.
The set up is done through function called mod_rewrite and what you have to do is to place small piece of code to your .htaccess file.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^iloverealestate\.biz [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.iloverealestate.biz/$1 [R=301,L]
Why is it so important? Because otherwise search engines like Google might think that there are multiple versions of your website. We can help you fix small things like that for less than $25 fee. It takes few minutes, but can make long term and substantial effect on your search engine rankings.
Free advanced stats for your web January 7, 2006
John Vanhara
I think everybody already knows, but just in case. Google introduced great and free statistics program, you can you for your real estate website.
The program was formerly known as Urchin and cost about $500 per month. The company was acquired by Google and price dropped to about $200 per month and now the great statistics program is available for free.
Here is the main window showing you the trend in visits and unique page views. How many visitors are returning or first time visits. As you can see on our ILoveRealEstate.biz website we have currently 28.57% returning visitors. It shows the main sources of visitors. In our example we have 53.17% direct requests, which means people directly typing our domain name in their browser, 16.67% from Google, 4.67% from technorati.com (this is search engine for blogs and it is another example how blogs can bring traffic).
Just for knowing where is your traffic coming from is good reason why to install Google Analytics on your web. It takes about 15-45 minutes depending how many pages do you have (you have to copy and paste code to your page). If you need help we can hel you set up Google Analytics for your website. We like to keep things simple so work like that will be always for less than $50.
Will you real estate web go up or down in Google?
John Vanhara
Google.com is preparing new search infrastucture and it can be seen on two datacenters at this moment: 66.249.93.104 and 64.233.179.104
You can check if you real estate websites are doing better or worse and try to make some action ahead of time. The new search technology will be put in action within 1-2 months.
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