Naming Pages and Site Navigation

Hey Folks,

Just wanted to give you a bit of advice when creating new pages. Remember, each new page you create will be displayed in your sites top level navigation bar (unless you specify otherwise via the site naviagtion editor under the manage menu). When naming pages please take this into account, naming a page: “About me and what I do for a living” is great but it will take up almost half of your navigation bar and is way to informative for a text link to an information page, The best way to represent that link would be: “About me”

If you would like to get creative with page titles, remember to use the site navigation editor to change the  display title used within your navigation. To access the navigation editor enter your dashboard and navigate to manage > site navigation.

An Important Reminder

If you have recently switched your old HomeQuest site to a new IDX blogger site, Please bare in mind this is a pretty huge platform change and these changes take time to propagate within the search engines.

If you had some organic traffic previously and have noticed a drop – don’t worry! its just the search engines re indexing your new site and it will return to normal usually within 12-14 days (sometimes longer depending on the size of your old site and how many pages it had indexed)

If you already have an established blog or website you would like to switch to the IDX Blogger platform, Please contact us before making the switch, we may be able to help minimize any disruption with your search engine positions and traffic! We can also help with exporting and importing from any WordPress platform.

Remember, once these changes have been indexed you get the huge SEO benefit of using the WordPress platform so you should see some overall increase in search engine positions making the switch well worth it.

Any questions, comments, feedback? please contact me!

How To: Display Listings On Your IDX Blogger

We’ve been getting a lot of questions regarding displaying your listings on your new IDX Blogger websites, Well – in todays how to we’ll walk you through displaying all of your personal and office listings and also how to maximize visibility of your listings.

Firstly, if you log into your HomeQuest account and navigate to Search listings > My listings you will see all of your current listings and your office listings with checkboxes beside them. If you check the boxes they will be displayed under “Featured listings” within your IDX sidebar widget. you can be as selective as you like and only display listings you want to show up.

To enable the “Featured listings” widget in your sidebar navigate to your IDX blogger site, then design, then widgets and drag and drop the widget to your sidebar and click save.

Going one step further, if you would like to promote a individual listing, you can always make a page or post (navigate to write then page) and make a marketing page specifically for that listing, even add a gallery or two! This is great way to maximize exposure, even save the URL and distribute it to clients or print out some business cards, the possibilities are endless.

How To: Get a URL from the IDX

In this how to I’m going to cover how to get a URL out of the IDX and into a link on your IDX Blogger site. What can this be used for I hear you ask? Well, a number of things actually:

• Put a direct link to a neighborhood / area  on your site or sidebar
• Link an image to a certain part of the map
• link directly to a listing in map view that can be sent to a client or individually promoted

To get the URL (link) from our IDX system, simply open the IDX map view in your browser then Right click on the area / neighborhood / listing / blog post from the list view and select “copy link location”

Thats it! now you have the link you can paste that into your wordpress editor, paste it into an email, paste it onto your facebook or whatever else you would like a direct link!

Stay tuned over the next few days for some slightly more advanced SEO techniques

How To: Choose the Perfect Domain Name for Real Estate

I’m often asked whats the best way to choose a domain name, what are the important factors to take into account etc.

So I decided to write a list of ten tips and tools to help you find that perfect domain for your real estate business

1. At the very top of the list is to use a relevant term that people trying to find you would search for! Don’t worry if its too long, you can always buy another, shorter domain name and forward it.
2. Use a tool like domainsbot – its fast, efficient and will help keep you focused whilst searching for the perfect available domain name.
3. Always, always use top level domains (.com .net and .org) .com obviously being the absolute best choice.
4. All the search engines can separate words in a phrase, don’t-use-too-many-hyphens!
5. Try and research your domain names search popularity, use a tool like Wordtracker or Google Adwords keyword tool to quickly gauge the traffic for that search term / potential domain name.
6. Avoid .info, .biz, .cn etc – they are treated differently by the search engines and are incredibly difficult to rank
7. Make the domain easy to type, easy to spell, easy to remember!
8. Avoid using numbers and hyphens, a single hyphen is fine. Numbers get confusing when talking about the domain name verbally.
9. Make sure the domain name is unique! there is nothing worse than loosing type in traffic to another domain that’s plural of yours!
10. Watch out for copyrights, don’t use terms that are registered, you will get caught, you will get it taken from you.

Next up this week is a guide on how to extract the links from our IDX map and display them within your site!

Get Your Social On! Social Networking for Realtors

The last few weeks have been pretty hectic in our office, one of the biggest projects we’ve all been working on is our social media outreach and strategy.

With the explosion of social networks over the last few years now is a good a time as any to start your social media empire. There are some massive benefits to having social networking profiles and accounts, heres just a few:

• Free back links – worth their weight in gold, remember to use good keywords in them.
• A new source of potential clients, maybe you have things in common or know the same people.
• A great way to connect and also boast testimonials from past clients! (facebook and myspace are excellent for this as a realtor)
• More visibility! lets face it, your competing, the more visibility the better your chances.
• They are fun!

Remember when creating all of your Social networking profiles to keep them consistent, try and use the same user name, or similar, use the same graphics and the same email addresses this is also a great way to build personal branding. We highly recommend using:

• Facebook
• Myspace
• Twitter
• Youtube
• Active Rain

There are also a lot of real estate related social network websites out there, go get connected and see what a difference social media and networking can make!

Mapping your Posts!

One of the biggest features we have with IDX Blogger is the ability to map your blog posts. When you map a blog post it appears right next to listings on the IDX map. There are so many uses for this feature, obviously the main one is being able to show your knowledge of a particular area and connect with potential clients before you’ve even met. To map a blog post follow these steps:

Steps: After you have written your blog post, scroll down to the “Location” box

Remember to click “Save” when you are finished.

Thats it! your post will now be “Geo Coded” and appear on your neighborhood map. We are also working on giving you the ability to place other geocoded content like pictures, tweets, youtube videos and more. Stay tuned!

How To: Add Links and Display Them

One of the very cool features of WordPress is it’s link management system. I’m sure you all have many, different sites out there, from facebook profiles, twitter profiles and other farming sites you wish to link to from your IDX Blogger sites. The best way to do this within our system is to create link categories. To create a link category and display it on your site simply:

• Enter the dashboard of your IDX Blogger site
• Navigate to Manage then Link Categories
• Give your Link category a Title and description
• Add your links to the new category
• Save changes then navigate to Design then Widgets
• Find the widget with your link category title and drag it onto your side bar
• Save changes and verify everything looks good via your main page

The next how to will cover GeoCoding (mapping) your blog posts! so stay tuned.

How To: Simple Image Link

This weeks How To is about the popular sidebar widget “Simple Image Link”

Simple Image Link is a powerful little widget that will allow you to place any image into your side bar, and give it a link, header, title and some other parameters. Its got a lot of great uses but the best we’ve seen so far is using it to link to your blogs RSS, to connect to your social network profiles (twitter, facebook etc) or simply to link directly to one of the neighborhoods within your IDX map.

Using Simple Image Link is a breeze, Here’s How To:

• Log into your IDX Blogger site
• Upload* or find the image you wish to use in your sidebar
• *If uploading an image, navigate to Write, Post. Click the “Add image” icon from the post editor and upload your image, Once the image is uploaded, Copy the URL of the image and close the upload window.
• Navigate to Design, Widgets
• Drag the simple image link widget to your sidebar and click “edit” to bring up the options menu
• Give the image a title and select if you wish the title to be displayed within your sidebar
• Paste the image location you copied earlier from the upload image box (or the URL of the image thats already online)
• Type or Paste the Link location (where visitors will go when they click the image)
• Click “Change” and your widget will now be saved, you can drag and drop it around your sidebar to position it and reorder where it appears.
• Click “Save Changes” from the widget menu and your done!

Here is a great example of a site using Simple Image Link connecting all kinds of content from the sidebars. A video tutorial will be coming later next week so stay tuned!!

Tracking Your Traffic – Optimizing Your Content

We recently installed Google Analytics to our platform, I just wanted to touch on the importance of tracking your website’s usage and the ability to optimize content based on the analysis of your visitors/traffic.

One of the key aspects you should focus on is the bounce rate, displayed on the Google Analyitcs dashboard page.

Bounce rate is a percentage given based on visitors who simply leave your website after landing on it. Ideally, you’ll want the bounce rate to be low – around 15-25% is a very good number.

Bounce rate will give you an overview of content consumption – adding new content, changing your navigation and layout will all have a pretty big effect on your sites overall bounce rate, make sure the pages your visitors are landing on are well layed out, clean and written well with good spelling, grammar and good use for formatting (bolds italics etc)

Improving your bounce rate over time will lead to more conversions. Next weeks tip will cover other aspects of Google Analytics and tracking. stay tuned!

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