It is important to understand that just because you have a website floating out there somewhere does not mean people will visit it.  At best, you can hope that you will get visits to your website because you have printed your website address in various places including your business cards, sign riders, property brochures and advertisements.  That is not enough to generate the type of traffic that you will need and that is also a very expensive exclusive way to send traffic to your website.

Here are some suggestions for updating your site so that you can generate some organic search engine traffic.

1. Localize your site

Your clients come to you because you are an expert in your area.  They did not come to you because they were looking for an agent who would show them homes all the way from Castle Pines to Fort Collins.  Listing general information about every city in the Denver Metro area as your coverage area will not help you generate traffic.  If you typed Denver Real Estate into Google today as a search term, a little over 16,000,000 results would come up.  By writing that you specialize in Denver Real Estate on your website will just make you one of those 16,000,000.  You have many pages and many years of writing to catch up and get to that first page of results of Denver Real Estate on Google.  It’s best to start with a smaller attainable target area, your farm area or the place where you have generated the most leads in the past few years.  Even better, would be to narrow that target market down to a niche in that target area, like kid friendly areas.  For the sake of this discussion, we will start with Piney Creek.  If I typed in Piney Creek Real Estate, I come up with around 64,000 results.  Most of those results are large real estate websites like realtor.com, homes.com and trulia.  We can write a few nice articles about living in Piney Creek and fun things for kids to do in Piney Creek and climb that list in a reasonable amount of time.

2. Track your website traffic - Google Analytics

One of the first things that I set up when I set up a new site is web statistics.  It is important to know if the content you are writing and the ads that you are running are working.  It is important to know how people came to find your site, how long they stayed, what they looked at and what page they were on when they decided to leave.  Google Analytics is FREE and once you have it set up on your site, you can have an email automatically sent to you each Monday with your report.  Google Analytics also helps reward you for all of your hard work because after you spent an hour writing an article about Fun Things for Kids to Do in Piney Creek for the Summer, you can see how many people visited your site to read it!

3. Make It Part of Your Routine

Setting up your site is the easy part.  Now you have to spend hours every month maintaining and updating it.  I know it’s difficult to do this on a regular basis, especially when you start to get busy, but content writing for your site is as important if not more than sending your Just Listed Postcards or newsletters to your clients.  This is an investment in your future and the sooner you start, the more savings you will have in future years.  Try to block out an hour of time each week before your sales meeting and make that your routine.  Start saving articles in a folder in your email to review at this time each week to give you ideas.  If you truly do not have time to sit down and write articles or research content for your site, I would suggest hiring a local college student to write for you.  You will still need to give them ideas and review their articles, but at least you are moving in a forward direction.

4. Make sure you have useful quality information

Give your clients a reason to add your site to their favorites! Give them a reason to make comments on your posts! Keep your information useful and entertaining.  Don’t just sit down and write an article with lots of keywords for the sake of catching the eye of a search engine.  Write something that you think your clients would want to read about.  Create a page of useful links in the area.  Write some reviews on your local restaurants or businesses.  Put together a calendar of current events in your community.  Display photos that you took of your neighborhood.

5. Sometimes you just need a little extra help

If all else fails, and you cannot figure out how to do this with your site or just need someone to work with you and motivate you once a month, I am here for you.  It is part of my weekly routine to sit down with agents and show them how to use their sites and give them pointers on things that they should do with their site.  I can help you until you feel confident to do it on your own.  Feel free to call or email me anytime! My hourly rate is $45/hour and I would be happy to meet with you in your office in the Denver Metro area.

Angela Miles

angela@milesofdesign.com

(303)667-9821

]]> http://www.milesofdesign.com/blog/2010/01/20/fixing-up-your-real-estate-website-in-2010.html/feed http://www.milesofdesign.com/blog/2010/01/06/start-over-with-your-website-or-redesign-the-old.html http://www.milesofdesign.com/blog/2010/01/06/start-over-with-your-website-or-redesign-the-old.html#comments Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:27:16 +0000 Angela Miles http://www.milesofdesign.com/blog/?p=132 We have a lot of clients who come to us stuck in limbo over what to do with their website.  Their website is not getting the traffic that they would like, doesn’t look the way they would like it to or they just feel the need to change their look on a continual basis to keep it fresh. 

There are a couple of questions that you should ask yourself before scrapping your old website and starting over.

1. What is your budget? Every project starts with a budget and you should have a good idea of how much you are able to and want to spend on your redesign before looking for a designer. 
2. Is your current website getting acceptable traffic results with the top search engines?  If so, you probably shouldn’t be redesigning it or moving it to another host without thinking about loosing some of that traffic.
3. Is it possible to make some adjustments to your current site or does it really need to be redesigned?  Is it a template that has limitations in design?
4. What is your desired result for the functionality of your website? To provide your contact information to your clients? To display samples of your work? To talk about your services? To generate sales leads?

These are just a few topics to think about when thinking about giving your website an overhaul.  We can help you with any level of modifying your old website, giving your site an update or starting over with a brand new website.  Please email us with any questions at angela@milesofdesign.com or view samples of our work here.

“We have come to a time where we need to better define our Free Hosting services. With millions of members building free, ad-supported sites at Bravenet, we have been buying tons of hardware to store, backup and serve all of your sites to the world. In fact, it has been hard to keep up with all the storage required!”

Bravenet pricing model has been revised as follows:

“For a limited time we are offering you, as a valued Bravenet member, our 1,2 and 5 year Professional Hosting service for only $3.99 per month when you pay for at least a year (our regular fees are: $12/month or $99/year). If you want to really take advantage of this low price, you can sign up for 2 years, or even 5, and lock in the special price long-term!”

In other words, we didn’t really think this all through, (or maybe they did), and now we have to change our business model and charge you for what was previously promised for free.I just checked their home page and they are still offering Free web hosting?  Also, would you sign a 5 year contract with a company, as indicated above, when in the same email, they are telling you that they have changed their minds on their past hosting fees?

The moral of the story is that you get what you pay for.  If your website is important to  you, then it’s worth paying a reliable and reputable company to host it for you.  In addition, when you use free hosting for your website, what kind of message are you sending to your clients?

Please post notes of any other web service companies that you know of that have done the same.

Paypal Account Information

When I looked at my Paypal account online, I noticed 3 charges from Europe for Skype on my account.  I wish I were leading the jet set life and traveling all over Europe, but those were definitely not me.  I tried to dispute the charges in the Paypal Resolution Center, but Paypal had already taken care of it.  They were all showing “Refunded” status.  I think it’s great that Paypal caught them right away, but it would have been nice if I had been notified right away too?  If I hadn’t caught the charges when I logged onto my First Bank, I would have never known.  I would have never known that someone had somehow gotten my password.  When I called the customer service rep at Paypal, he assured me that as long as I changed my Paypal password, my account would be safe.

After I got off the phone with him, I started thinking and became too paranoid to believe that Paypal rep, so I closed my checking account immediately with First Bank and opened a new one.   First Bank was great and took care of everything right away.  I had a new account in few minutes and First Bank’s customer service was working on transferring all incoming/outgoing charges on my old account so that nothing bounced during the process, but also so that no more charges could be made on the old account. 

After I had all of that resolved with First Bank, I tried to change my password for Paypal online, but so far have been unable to.  According to their online instructions, I am suppose to login, go to My Account, Profile and then click on Passwords.  There isn’t an option for Passwords under Profile? The Paypal online instructions for changing a password seemed incorrect.  I don’t know if they recently changed the navigation of their website, but something wasn’t working right there?  I emailed customer service and should receive a response in 2-3 days.   

Paypal Change Password?

I am not sure why Paypal never notified me?  If indeed the customer service rep was correct and I had nothing to worry about?  Or if they do not want to alarm the public everytime this happens because it may cause them to be a little freaked out about internet cash transactions?

I will probably use Paypal again in the future if I ever decide to venture on ebay again, but I will have to make sure I keep a close eye on my accounts.  First Bank also suggested that I link my PayPal account to a savings account instead of my checking account in the future to make it more secure.

When I try to email a Comcast.net address, I get a bounce back message containing a 554 error message, which links to this page.  (The problem is that I never got a bounce back message…I just received frustrated phone calls from clients wondering why I hadn’t responded to their email.)
 
Answer:  You have been blocked from emailing the Comcast network because we have determined that your mail server does not properly identify itself when attempting to connect to the Comcast mail servers.  This process is known as Reverse DNS and associates your mail server’s IP address into a domain name for Comcast to know who is attempting to send email into our network.  Individuals who send spam commonly hide their Reverse DNS to avoid being detected when sending email. 

How do I get this resolved?

Your mail server’s IP address is not blocked by Comcast.  As soon as your mail administrator properly configures Reverse DNS on your mail server, you will be able to email the Comcast network again.  When contacting your email administrator, you should include the error message contained in the email that alerted you to this problem.  This error message contains important information to help your email administrator resolve this issue. 

If you have your own private email account and are having similar issues, you might want to try this fix.

We have devised a team to help agents with these websites at an affordable price with the Miles e-team.  In about 2 hours ($90), we can sit down with an agent and add important content about their farm areas to the website, and also help them optimize any content that they do have.  The Miles e-team can also assist the agent with setting up free Google Analyics reports to track the effectiveness of their SEO and marketing efforts.

The Miles e-team can also help real estate agents with everything from converting their listing presentation to an electronic format in Microsoft Power Point to setting up email signatures.  If you would like more information about the Miles e-team, please contact us today!

1) Subscribe to other blogs through RSS feeds.  When you do sit down to write your blog, you can get ideas of what others are doing by skimming theirs

2) Keep a folder in your email of industry related articles that your friends and colleagues send you.  Again, when it’s time to post, skim through that folder and look for ideas.

3) Write about something that interests you in your blog. 

4) Write about something unique in your blog.  I see a lot of real estate agents who write about Foreclosures or Denver Real Estate.  Those articles are too vague and have a lot of competition on the SEO charts.  Try writing about foreclosures rates in your specific subdivision or farm area instead.  There are not as many people searching for those terms on the search engines, but then again, you won’t have as many articles to compete with for #1 blog post on that topic either.

5) If you are one of those people that does not like to write, try a video blog.  Most laptops are equipped with a web cam.

6) Schedule a time for yourself every week to blog and stick to it!

7) If you decide that writing a blog is not something that will ever work out for you, but that you need more content for your website, please feel free to contact the Miles e-team!  We have writers and SEO experts that are able to help you with content on your blog or website.