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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).

In Part 1 of this series on real estate blogging platforms, we discussed social networks like ActiveRain. In part 2 we take on another low cost alternative, the standalone blog.

The Stand Alone Blog

Companies such as Blogger.com allow you to set up and run a free blog. If you want, you can purchase a domain name and point it to your blogger account. I recently helped Purva Brown do this with her Sacramento Real Estate Gal site.

On the plus side, with a free blog, and a domain from Godaddy.com or another low cost Internet domain registrar, you can have a blog up and running for less than $10 per year. Just add the sweat equity of an hour or more of writing every day, and if you pick your keywords and topics wisely, you’re in business!

Also on the plus side, if the social networking sites buried your content under layers of clicks (e.g. State -> County -> City), the stand alone blog puts all your content right there on the home page. This is a very good solution in terms of Search Engine Optimization, especially if you take care to optimize the “front matter” that appears above your posts.

On the minus side, I believe that the big down side to the standalone blog approach for Realtors® is the is the problem of how big your audience is. A lot of (electronic) ink is spilled on the virtue of establishing yourself as an expert and gaining a following in blogging, but the fact remains that the blogs with the biggest audiences in real estate are not about their local areas, but are really blogs about blogging, or blogs about real estate trends or technology in general.

At the national level, It’s great to have a readership of 4000 or so out of hundreds of millions of Americans. But if your focus is local, your local area blog will do the most good when integrated into an IDX solution where your users can search for real estate listings. Otherwise you’re developing content that may attract a search engine, without the “killer offer” of homes for sale.

In Part 3 of the series, we’ll address this problem when we take a look at the third (and, we believe, the best) option for a blogging platform — combining your blog and web site into one site.

One other possibility that we should mention in passing is creating “a standalone blog”, but setting it up on what will later be a full fledged web site. Though it may seem counterintuitive to put a blog in a “subdirectory” when there’s not much going on in the main directory, the advantages to this approach are the ability to begin to get content indexed and to establish reputation with the search engines. (The well known “Google sandbox” effect is used to describe the fact that Google does not rank new sites very well). Though somewhat more expensive than creating a free standalone blog and later moving it to a web site, this approach ensures that all the links to your content will remain in place once you move.

With so many ways to get started in real estate blogging, which one should you choose? Should you have a standalone blog, or a web site and blog integrated together (sometimes called a “blogsite”), or should you simply start blogging at one of the many free sites that offer you the opportunity to start blogging with zero investment of money and very little learning curve?

In this article we’ll go into the pros and cons of the various choices. Fair warning: I’m a big fan and vendor of the integrated blog + web site approach, so there’s likely to be some bias in that direction. That said, I’ll try to be fair to the other approaches.

Part 1 of this article deals with social networking sites. In Parts 2 and 3 we’ll discuss standalone blogs and blogs integrated into your main web site.

Social Networking Sites

In 2006 and 2007, a number of companies began offering blogs to Realtors®. Most famously, ActiveRain provided a real estate community that was free and easy to use. ActiveRain also provided a strong social network with a good sense of community. Other attempts to capitalize on the popularity of the real estate blog soon followed. Real estate web site vendor RealEstateWebmasters.com began offering free real estate blogs, and soon after, even Realtor.com figured it out and started offering blogs as well.

In the Fall of 2007, many of the members of ActiveRain were somewhat chagrined to learn that their beloved real estate social network had been the subject of a failed sale to Move.com, the parent company of Realtor.com. The management at ActiveRain were quick to do damage control with a post claiming that ActiveRain members own their own content.

To me, there are some far bigger question than who owns the content, however.

The first is, who owns the offer where the content is placed? If I write for ActiveRain, I get a free service and that’s great, but what we’re selling on every page is not something that’s going to lead a visitor to use me — what we’re selling on every page are products and services aimed at Realtors®.

A second important question about where your content goes on a social networking site is this: who is the content aimed at? First and foremost, ActiveRain is a social network. The content there is a discussion among Realtors®. To be sure, ActiveRain later launched Localism.com as a site geared to real estate consumers, but localism.com has yet to make important inroads for the more major keywords. Even on relatively easier keywords, I have perused the Google search results several pages in in vain to find much in the way of an impact of localism.com. (Indeed, you have to go back a few pages to find much impact from ActiveRain.com, for that matter).

Finally, there is the question of where on your site your content appears. To be sure, on a huge aggregate site like ActiveRain, you get the benefit of hosting your content on a site that has a lot of “authority” (sometimes colorfully called “Google Juice”). For really “long tail” (obscure) niche keywords and titles, this is a good thing, but anything more obvious is buried several clicks away from the main page, and has to compete in the search results with sites that are competing for the same keywords from the home page or a click away from home.

ActiveRain gets extremely high points for user-friendliness and ease of use. In terms of impact on your bottom line business, however, I believe that owning both the content of your blog and the offers it promotes will lead you to a much higher conversion rate.

In Part 2 of this article, we’ll talk about another low cost or no cost real estate blogging solution, the stand alone blog. Then in Part 3 we’ll talk about having a blog as a fully integrated feature of your real estate web site.

Part 2 — Stand alone real estate blogs

Part 3 — Integrated  Web Site with Blog

Toprank blog had a short but intriguing essay recently discussing predictions about the Death of SEO within the next five years or so. To me, this is one of those articles that is important not because of the answers it provides but because of the questions it raises.

On the one hand, I do agree with the author that Search Engine Optimization is getting harder and harder to do. I say this with some confidence because, over time, I’ve found that the effort that I need to expend to promote a site to top place has grown over time from something I would consider child’s play to a sort of full time Herculean task that may or may not produce results.

So, indeed, to the extent it becomes more difficult, I’m sure that over time SEO failure stories will become more prevalent than the success stories, and that won’t be good for SEO as an enterprise.

I must admit, however, that the author loses me later on in the article when he talks about building traffic through social media becoming more effective. Although in a later article the author does go on to give specifics as to how this might work, I do feel like there’s a little bit of the ubiquitous “If you blog it they will come” hocus pocus going on. To me, there’s nothing more effective than the following scenario:

• User is looking for a solution to a problem, and types a search in a search engine.
• User finds results that match what she’s looking for, and clicks through to a web site.
• The web site looks like a fit for what she’s trying to do, and offers more information.
• Phone rings. Start selling.

There are probably cases where one can sell effectively through the social network of fellow bloggers, but it all depends on what you’re selling, I think. In the case of real estate blogging services, the people reading your blog are also your likely buyers. My friend Jim Cronin is doing a brisk business capitalizing on this. But in the case of real estate blogs, on the other hand, I’ve found that most of my readers are either fellow Realtors® or folks who want to take pot shots at us. So there’s no direct correlation between blogging and business — the “social network” I’m targetting here starts with a “G” and rhymes with frugal.

What I’ve found, however, is that this is only working for me on sites with a long history already, so for me, “search engines versus social networks” not is not a case of either/or, it’s a case of one of those hands washing the other.