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!

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!

The first new feature that’s gone live today is an automatic process that builds your XML sitemap and submits it to google.

A XML Sitemap is a file that lists all of the pages and posts within your website in a certain format which the search engines can quickly access, scan and move on. Its incredibly important to have a well formatted sitemap submitted to google on a regular basis and we’re taking care of the whole process for you!

Any questions just drop me a note.

Firstly, a little about this awesome little tool. All in one SEO is a wordpress plugin that makes your content (pages and posts) completely search engine friendly, automatically. After you have set the basic parameters the plugin will do the rest and the search engines will thank you.

Lets take a look at the important fields:

• Home Title
• Home Description
• Home Keywords
• Re-write Titles

When configuring All in One SEO these 4 fields are essential to the success of your IDX Blogger site within the major search engines. Your Home Page title is probably the most critical element – when writing your title, take into account the words and phrases people might use to find you, your company, your agency, specialty etc. Take into account your company / team name and any other important information you would want to be found under. Prioritize your target phrases towards the begining of the title. here’s an example title that’s very successful within the search engines:

“Real Estate IDX – IDX Blogger from HomeQuest – The Ultimate Blog and IDX Web Platform“

This puts the most emphasis on our target key phrase “Real Estate IDX” while covering all of the other important terms we would like to be found under within the search engines.

Home Description and Home Keywords are generating “Meta Tags” for your pages. Sometimes (randomly) the search engines will show your site on a results page and generate a random description based on the users search term and content on your page. Other times, the search engines rely on you for providing an accurate description of your website. Type a description that best fits your sites content, its purpose and use terms you would expect to be found under. The Keyword field is used exactly the same way – simply enter 15-20 key phrases you wish to be found under, make sure they are relevant and what a potential client might search for.

The last option is to Re-Write Titles. This is important, if you wish to use your blog post or page title as the actual title of the page, keep this box checked, otherwise you will need to write a page title each time you make a new page/post.

Phew – Thats it for this week on All in One SEO. We have already configured the rest of the settings for you to be optimal within the search engines, you may thank us later! As usual, any questions, comments, feedback… feel free to leave comments or you can email me directly! simon@pdxhomequest.com

I wanted to write a weekly column on this blog to offer helpful tips and advice on how best to use our new IDX Blogger platform to succeed within the major search engines, This weeks tip will cover unique content and its importance.

The most important factor search engines look for whilst ranking sites in their index is fresh, unique text content. There’s an old saying in my industry “content is king” that still holds true.

The search engines (Google specifically) will crawl your website and read all of the text on the pages, each time you add more unique text you are inviting the search engine back to your site for an update and increasing your visibility within them

Unique content is key, if you use duplicate content (content you have cut/paste from another site) you will actually receive a penalty from the search engine, if you wish to show someone else’s content its best to only copy a small snippet, then add a link to the original article to avoid any duplicate content penalties.

The content we have used on our demo sites is a prime example – this content has already been crawled by Google, so Google knows that the demo site is the “owner” of that content. If you were to copy a page and paste it into your own site – you would be penalized by the engine and it would have a negative impact on your listing within Google.

When adding content to your website, remember these tips and avoid any unnecessary penalties and hopefully be successfully within the search engines!

Next weeks Tip: All in one SEO walkthrough.

1. Its incredibly SEO (search engine optimization) friendly – that is, the code and its design is loved by most search engines, with its “just add content” formula, its the best platform for agents to market their website within the search engines.
2. Its the most user friendly, light-weight CMS on the planet – or at least, we think so!
3. Its completely customizable – With widgets, themes and more, you can completely customize the look and feel of your agent website with just a few clicks

Moving forward we have several new custom HomeQuest plugins being developed and an abundance of Realtor website themes, If there is something you would like to see in the new HomeQuest system, leave a comment and we’ll get right back to you!