Altos Research is the premier source for real-time real estate research. Our real estate data and local real estate reports are used by financial firms, investors, and thousands of real estate professionals around the country.
This blog is primarily authored by Mike Simonsen, co-founder and CEO of Altos Research. Other ways to be in touch:
Many of you are not only real estate agents, but your own personal website developer and programmer.(Not that working with clients and finding new ones doesn’t take enough time!)As a way to help with developing and managing your website, we’ve collected a list of helpful online tutorials and websites dedicated to providing you with step-by-step help and hints on HTML.
1. W3Schools is an Internet Developers Portal that is designed to help everyone learn how to develop their website.Their section on HTML provides very basic steps to help you:
2. HTML Code Tutorial is the official website of The Idocs Guide to HTML:
4. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. W3C's mission is “to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web. There is a great introduction to HTML on their website.
With the general slowdown in housing markets, many of are considering ways to maximize your marketing budget. Here are a couple of questions to help you with this exercise:
1. How much of your budget is spent using technology and online marketing tools?Here’s an article published in 2005 that couldn’t be anymore timely if it was published this morning.Real estate information is online. Your customers are online. If you are thinking about cutting back on your marketing budget, be sure that you expenditures match with the behavior of your potential clients.
2. Are you giving people a reason to visit your website?More importantly – are you giving people a reason to visit your website again? You can add fresh content to your site with a weblog. Several sources for free weblogs include:
Blogs are free to set up and operate – you just need to spend 15-30 minutes/day posting an entry. Don’t be intimidated – just start one and let it roll from there.
3. How “findable” are you online? Have you set up a profile on LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, ActiveRain, and other online communities that can link you to potential clients?
4. Finally, here’s a checklist of Real Estate Marketing Tips to consider provided by Arming Your Farming.
Using <FRAMES> in your website can impact its “findability” on Google and other search engines. Search engines generally do not understand the <FRAME> tag. This means they do not read or see any of the content in the frame and move on the next website without counting the relevant content you may have that matches someone’s search.
If your website is using Frames, don’t despair! There are actions that you can take to help resolve this problem. In short, you can use the <NOFRAMES> tag as a workaround to this challenge.
There is a great explanation describing the challenge that search engines have with websites using Frames and an explanation on how to use the <NOFRAMES> tag at SEOLogic.com.
For more detailed information about Frames and search engine optimization (SEO), start at this overview about Frames and Google. There are links to additional resources that will help with increasing your “findability” if you are using Frames for your website.
We all know about Google and use it for web searches. Of course there are many more search engines out there that are frequently used – Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista, Lycos, and others.
In thinking about the “findability” your website for each of the different search engines, take a look at the chart available at SearchEngines.com. It lays out how each of the major search engines determines their individual page rankings.
This is a helpful tool to print out and discuss with your website developer as you continue to monitor and improve your website.
For many of the real estate professionals out there, August is the time of year to take a look at your marketing and web/online strategies as you gear up for the Fall season and plan ahead to next Spring. In developing and re-developing your online strategies, a key factor in effective implementation is whether or not you can be found online.One way to increase the number of home buyers & sellers that find you on the web is through “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO).
In short, SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to your websites and blogs. (thanks Wikipedia!) For real estate professionals, this means increasing the number of prospective home buyers and sellers that can find you via a web search on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and other search engines.
Think of it as the “Findability” of your web site!
The good news is that you don’t have to pay an expense tech consultant to help you with this (though you can if your budget allows!).
So you ask – “What are some quick and easy ways to begin to increase your SEO for your web marketing?”
Ask yourself – “What are the top 10 search terms that a home buyer or seller will use in searching for real estate and/or an agent in your area?” Be sure that these terms are well-integrated into your web site and URL.
Add a catchy title and key phrase to your website that includes key search terms that you developed. (i.e. “Mary Smith, Anytown’s Real Estate Agent”).
If you are not planning to add a Blog to your site, be sure to constantly update your website with new content on a regular basis.This includes information such as real estate market information for you area or maybe a Commentary section to your site where you add new content at least once a week.
Be sure that the “key words” on your site are in TEXT, not in static images like .GIF or .JPEG files.Many website that include an agent’s contact info integrated into a nice looking .GIF or .JPEG file.The problem is that Google and other search engines cannot read this information and the information in a static image will not be found, thus hurting your Google page rank. An easy test is whether or not you can copy and paste text from your web page to a word document, such as your name, areas that you cover, and email address.If you cannot copy and paste, then Google can’t find it.
We recently put together a tour of our product offering for real estate pros. It's yet not as polished as we'd like it, but I thought I'd drop it in here to get some feedback from our regular readers.
If you're a realtor and wonder what the heck Altos does for a living, check out this slidecast. [The presentation is really targeted for real estate professionals. It doesn't contain a lot of details on the market analytics, rather focuses on how our clients use the system in their marketing.] At some point we'll integrate it into our main site for all to see.
Following the postings summarizing the Inman conference's BloggersConnect workshop, we've had requests from many of you for some more information about "widgets."
In short, a widget is a graphical web tool that you can insert into your website or blog. I like to think of it as a "little critter" that sits on your website. It has the ability to "think" because it is programmed to show specific information or behave in a certain way.
In the case of the Altos Charts widget - once you create an Altos Chart, it sits on your site and asks itself - "Am I showing the most up-to-date data available?" Then it runs back to the database to check, then runs back to your site to display any changes.
A more specific definition of a widget and a list of widgets available for real estate marketing and blogs is located at Future of Real Estate.
Realivent lists a series of more specific widget and plug-in types in on their blog.
A couple of books were mentioned throughout the Bloggers Connect workshop on Wednesday. Just in case you missed the titles and authors, here’s a few that were mentioned:
A real estate blog is an opportunity to build a relationship with a visitor.
A quality real estate blog is maximizing its search engine optimization, guides the visitor to a “call to action” and invites the blog visitor to participate with comments.
You absolutely must have a “call to action” on your real estate blog.
Write a blog business plan – what do you hope to achieve over the next 6-12 months?What type of real estate business do you want to build?
As additional resources to help you increase lead generation from your real estate blog – register your blog at Yahoo! Directory.
1. Remember the difference between a real estate “Blog of Voice” vs. “Blog of Information” – Do you want to be hired, or do you want to be a journalist?
2. Voice is the reason to read blogs – show your personality!
3. If you are just starting a real estate blog, write for yourself first – you’ll need to make 20 or more posts before you realize what the voice of your blog will be.
4. Write about topics that you are passionate about.
5. Remember that early morning blog posts are better to increase blog viewership and posts on a Monday are generally read the most often.
6. Controversy on your real estate blog isn’t necessarily a bad thing – just be sure to monitor your post and delete with extreme caution.
To help you keep track of all of the great resources from today's Bloggers Connect session at the Inman Conference here in San Francisco, I'm posting a series of blog entries to summarize some of the main points from the panel and providing links for everyone.
As you saw from Mike's post from earlier this week, I've joined the Altos Research team! It's exciting and fun to work with the team at Altos and the real estate community. If you like what we're building now - just wait. There's plenty more to come. . .Thanks to everyone for your energy and good humor this week at the conference. I'm looking forward to working with all of you very soon!
