Web Site Design and Development

This is our third and final installment in our series comparing real estate blogging platforms, having a blog that’s part of your main real estate web site. Earlier articles in the series include:

Part 1 — Real estate social network blogs

Part 2 — Stand alone real estate blogs

An Integrated Web Site and Blog Solution

I believe that the best place to have a blog is as an integral part of your web site. By integral, I mean at the very least having it on a subdomain of your web site’s main domain name, though it’s far preferable to have it as a folder off your main domain name.

For me this is not a theoretical idea. For the better part of the last four years, I’ve made my living leading teams (and now, as a broker, a company), whose main source of leads was a successful web site and blog combination. If I point to the web addresses themselves you can better see the structure:

The web site home page is: http://www.sacramento-home.com

The home page of the blog is: http://www.sacramento-home.com/real-estate-events

There are a number of reasons why I think this configuration is ideal, but it boils down to this: eyeballs and fingertips. You need to have the eyeballs of potential home buyers and sellers finding you first when they start looking for a solution — hence the eyeballs. As for fingertips, their fingertips need to be clicking on listing information that you provide, so that when they’re ready, their fingertips can be keying in your phone number.

Background: Pay per click is expensive
Pay per click gets a bit of a bad rap, but really there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with it. We like the “click” part. It’s the “pay” we’d rather dispense with if we can. The online “sweat equity” that we use to dispense with pay-per-click is search engine optimization.

1) Good Search Engine Optimization Requires Lots of Fresh Content
The search engine boost that having a blog will give you is often overstated, but one thing is certain: becoming an authority in a competitive market requires lots of original content. So even though a blog is a web site is an HTML page, the tools that have evolved to blog will help you enormously. Even though I am a web site developer, it is still much, much easier for me to post to a blog than create a “traditional” web page, simply because the tools I have to do the task make it so much easier.

2) Good Search Engine Optimization Requires Natural Incoming Links
Once upon a time, Realtors® were some of the Internet’s biggest fans of reciprocal linking. I link to you. You link to me. Everyone rises in the search engine. Several Google updates later, reciprocal links are no longer valued as they once were. However, bloggers are still notorious for quoting (and linking to) other bloggers.

3) Having the Blog Integrated Means Good Internal Links – Naturally
If your blog is integrated into your web site, naturally each blog post you write will have a link to your home page, your search page, your contact form, and lots of other places where a visitor can begin the path toward becoming a client. There’s nothing problematic there — it’s just good internal site navigation. This means that the benefits you received from #1 and #2 above are going to be passed on as much as possible to your main site without even a whiff of SPAM.

4) Your Best Offer is on your Web Site
In Part One of this series, one of the criticisms we had for social networks was not the question of who owns the content, but what is the content being used to promote and sell. Unlike 90% of the authors who write about blogging, I don’t think that the main goal of blogging is to establish you as an expert. Certainly I don’t have a lot of buyers who call me up and say “I heard you were an expert.” What I DO have is a lot of buyers who call me up and say “I saw a house on your web site”. I think we can dispense with a lot of the silliness that’s written about real estate blogging with a simple quiz. It’s fill in the blank:

“My ideal customer is someone who is pre-approved and has a strong need to buy or sell a ____________ this weekend.”

Did you say “house” or maybe “million dollar home”? If so, great! Now you know why your blog should be on your web site, with a clear path to your real estate search. If you look at my blog, you’ll see you can get to the search page at least two ways from any page, and three from the home page. In fact I think it should have three from every page. I think I’ll go change it.

If you filled in “Realtor®”, then you need to go get your picture printed on BOTH sides of your business card, so you can stay busy flipping it over and smiling.

7) Your Web Site Can Support Other Search-Friendly Work
Are vacation homes popular in your town? Then how about a directory (literally a “directory”, or computer folder) with different pages about vacation homes? Now your blog can support the directory by being your vehicle to announce new features to what in effect has become a “mini-web-site” on a less competitive niche keyword.

6) Competition is Fierce
Back in the reciprocal linking dark ages, many of us would put up five or ten sites or more, optimized for different keywords, since the effort required to boost any single site to the top of the search engine results was fairly mechanical and well known. Nowadays you need a sustained and focused effort to master the search results for even a moderately competitive keyword. That’s why we recommend a clear click path to your best offer, and focusing most of your efforts on a single site (except perhaps for link building and other promotional work, which may of necessity get you out into the world).

Tags: Blogs, Blogsites, IDX blog integration, Real Estate Blogging, Real estate blogsites, real estate web sites

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