Agent Support Center

Monday, November 28, 2005

Growing and Managing Your GD Website is a Real Money Saver

I was reading an article the other day, and it made me reflect on challenges most of you face when needing a website. I hadn’t really even considered it before...one’s choices when wanting a good, functional website on the internet. Being a designer for the past 10 years and watching websites evolve, I have never had the challenge of the who, how, why, and when of building a site…I’ve just built whatever I have needed, whenever I have needed it, and the cost was just my own time…no lengthy learning curve required!

The author, of the article I mentioned, pointed out that there are really only 3 choices in building a website. The first is buying a template. The second is paying a designer to build a site. And the third is purchasing a software program and doing it yourself.

I reflected on the first option of template design, and perhaps for a simple site there may be merit here. But when a professional looking and unique site is needed with databases and information systems that need to flawlessly integrate, these would be severely limiting. They would ultimately reflect a low-level of professionalism and probably frustrate the end user as well. And you still have to populate the templates with your information, and that may not be as friendly or as simple as might seem. Cheap and possibly easy, but not that easy! And cheap, but what do you lose…maybe a lot of business.

The second option of hiring a designer I am very familiar with…after all, it’s me! This can be a good option and very often is the only real option one has. As it relates to real estate, it is very important to have a designer who knows and understands real estate. Sort of like having an assistant…it sure is a lot easier if the assistant has been an agent at some time, or at least understands the nuances of our industry. And the designer should have some experience in designing real estate sites specifically…and, understands the capabilities and the limitations of the home search database that he or she might be framing into your site for the best integration possible. Of course, a really good real estate site will run probably no less than $1000 to do right, and upwards of $2000 and more. Then with remodels ever so often, this can get downright expensive. Looks change, technologies change. Designers can move and then who takes care of your site. Usually, you have very little ability to directly input changes to your site. You have to provide your changes to your designer and they will then do the work (and work is time, so they need to charge for it). If you have provided for a modestly robust budget, then this certainly can be a good option.

The third option of buying software and then mastering the curve that a good program demands still calls for a good cash outlay just for the program…and then countless hours spent in learning the program from trial and error…and from hundreds of page of manual reading…and still your site will probably look amaturistic until you’ve developed the artist’s eye and touch. This can be costly as well since you are now a student and not out selling!

Well, after rambling on…let me just say this…again a well thought out GraphicalData site can take all the honors. The design program is online…no expensive programs to buy. It is easy to work. Granted, the first tour may look overwhelming, but as you “compartmentalize” your mission each time you go in, it looks simpler. And once you’ve driven the admin center a few times, it looks and seems even easier.

GraphicalData sites publish into “real html” pages so you don’t pay the penalty of the “templated” sites that often don’t rank well with search engines, etc.

Well, I have probably “reflected” enough here, but these are just some of the reasons why I feel that GraphicalData sites are some of the best sites out there today for real estate agents.

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Search Engine Friendly

I often see real estate websites on the internet that I refer to as “Realtor-in-the-Box-Sites”. These are sites that cater to real estate agents and offer many of the same types of products that are available in a GraphicalData site. However, there are usually major differences…

Many of these sites are based on what we call “active server pages” technology. These (website) pages don’t actually exist in real time…each page is generated dynamically when it is called up (by clicking on the page’s button in the nav bar). Since they don’t really exist in real time for a search engine to crawl, it is nearly impossible for them to become part of a search engine’s index (unless one is paying for pay-per-click).

Some sites do not allow you the ability to modify the title tag in the head section. This again is one of the most important areas to control for search engine rankings. It should most certainly reflect your business and the area of your business (ie. Bellevue Washington Real Estate and Relocation).

Of course, it is also beneficial to be able to control the content of your Meta description and keywords tags.

Your site should allow you to control the sizes and emphasis (ie BOLD) of your fonts. Search engines perceive larger sizes and emphasis to be important.

You should have the ability to provide ample amounts of text (in real live html format) on your page, not generated into graphics. Search engines read html text. They don’t read graphics. The text on your page should be good, “honest content” and reflect what your site is really all about. This means good target words/phrases that describe your area/business. Remember this: Good quality, relevant content is king! If you provide that, your ranking will take care of itself.

You should also have the ability to add ALT tags (Alternative Text) to any graphics (You know, the text that pops up when you hold your cursor over a graphic).

It is also important that your keyword phrases be used as html in your buttons (links)…and on GraphicalData site, this is indeed what happens. It just automatically takes care of this, so you don’t even need to worry about it.

Your site should, if at all possible, provide for a site map of your website. Many search engines, especially Google, like them.

Actually all of the above criteria that I have touched upon happen in the best light on a GraphicalData site. We want to not only provide the best in real estate web sites, but also make them search engine friendly…and the best part of all…you can control it all (unless you really don’t feel comfortable doing so…then we are more than happy to assist).

Saturday, November 19, 2005

EMPOWER YOUR WEBSITE TO SELL YOU (Without You Selling You)

When a potential client walks into your office and announces that he or she wants to buy a home, what is the first thing you do? Do you share your credentials, your education, and your hobbies with them? Probably not! I'll bet you start by asking them some qualifying questions so that you can ascertain their needs and goals. Right?


Well, I would suggest that the closer you come to creating a website that treats prospects the way you would treat them if they had just walked into your office, the better your web responses will be.

Show folks your expertise, less by telling them about yourself, and more by providing them with what they are visiting your website for…helpful content. Demonstrate to them that you understand their needs, their mission, their goals…by providing them with interesting and useful information on your website. Place yourself into their shoes and think what you would like to know if you were visiting another area. Listings…of course! Schools? Neighborhood information? Other community links? Try to incorporate everything you feel a buyer would want to know into your site (or a seller if that is the case).

People will respond to you based on what you provide and the questions you ask. You need to spend less time on you, and more time on them. Give them what they want to achieve their mission…and a reason to bookmark and return to your site. Give them good, honest content. Give them answers to moving. Give them a reason to believe in you over the other guy. Give them a reason to contact you.

If you can show your visitors why they should select you…by demonstrating that you understand their needs…you can become their agent of choice…and get the order. And with a real estate website, that means an email response or a phone call.

The great thing about a GraphicalData website, in addition to built-in information and lead generating systems, is that you can create as many pages of content as you like, and it doesn’t cost you anything but the time you invest into it. So, address issues that your client wants to know. What he or she would walk into your office for…help them achieve their goal…their mission in your website, and empower your website to sell you!

P.S. Am I saying not to talk about yourself? Certainly not. You need to provide an ample amount of info about yourself, as is appropriate…and some “kudos” if you have them. Place this on an “about you” page and then those who want to meet you can easily do so.

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Your 1st School Information Request

OK…You just received an email from one of your lead generating systems. Let’s say it was a request for school information from your school report request form (or, neighborhood report request form…handled pretty much the same). So, what do you do??? You log into your GD admin center. You then select “Tools” and “School Digest” (or Real Property Digest, if for a neighborhood report).

At this point, if you have not printed out the Instructional PDF manual (for either report) it might be a really good time to do so. The manual pretty much walks you through the steps involved (better than I can explain here in just a few words) in creating the report, and the options of either printing the report or emailing it to the recipient.

After creating a couple of reports, you will be able to do the whole process in just minutes. The only editing you really need to do after creating the report is to edit the cover letter. I always copy from my previous report and then paste the “template” into my new report. I then change my salutation from previous requesting recipient to the new recipient. For your convenience, I am providing the format that I use below. Either create your own message, or modify my “template” message to help make this an easy setup for yourself:

Dear Beth,

Thank you for visiting our real estate web site. Enclosed please find the information you requested.

Kitsap County is an excitingly diverse area of Washington State. As a resident you can enjoy beautiful views of the Olympic and Cascade Mountains and find an assortment of view and waterfront properties.

As you view the many homes that we have available on line, please remember that as hard as we might try, there are still a large number of homes which have not yet made it to the internet.

The Windermere office in Silverdale is located so that we can easily service all of Kitsap County. As your real estate agent my goal is to find properties you are interested in based on your needs as well as your long-term goals.

Please feel free to contact me so that I can personally provide the information necessary to help you make sound buying or selling decisions.

I can be reached at (360)692-6102 or ozzie@windermere.com

Thank you,

Ozzie Nohre

Associate Broker, GRI, Realtor®

P.S. Don’t forget to bookmark our site so that we can continue to provide you with the most up-to-date listings and real estate information in Kitsap County.

www.windermere.com

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I sincerely hope this helps you in preparing your school and neighborhood reports.

Saturday, November 12, 2005

Don't Overlook Your Resume

Did you know there is a place to provide your personal “bio” information in your GraphicalData site? Should you even bother to place your “Resume” into this section?? The answer to the second question is yes. Let’s take a look at the where and the why.

The WHERE…once you have logged into your GD administration center, you will note there is a button in the grey menu bar entitled “Edit Account”. Upon entering this section of your site, you will note that in addition to other things, you can update your telephone number(s), accreditations and so forth. For the topic at hand however, let’s visit the blue button entitled “Resume” in the left navigation bar. You will find a simple set of fields where you can add content. You may populate (or not) the Heading fields and the Paragraph fields with your “Bio” info that you would like to share with your potential client/customers.

Now, the BIG WHY you should complete this section. This is the information that will be pulled into your neighborhood and school reports that your visitors will be requesting from you. WOW! That could be important! And what is cool about this is that you will seldom need to update it…just remember it is here for when something pertinent does need to be revised.

[AND REMEMBER…do a spell check, or carefully review your spelling…nothing ratchets down your level of professionalism than a misspelled word or two…here or elsewhere in your site]

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Marketing Your Website

It is probably a good idea to develop a budget for promoting your web site. It can be minimal or robust, but especially if you have a new domain name and web site, you should plan on offline and online promoting…just like marketing a new listing.
Promoting your website is like a 3-legged stool. You need three legs for it to stand. Your online website success also depends on 3 things.
*  The first is owning a clean, easy-to-navigate website that looks professional, has content that visitors are looking for, lead generating systems to make it easy for them to contact you and is at least modestly positioned or better on the internet search engines.
*  The second leg is driving your visitors to your website through off-line means such as any advertisements, mail-outs, flyers, business cards, and anything else that you send out to your sphere of influence, farms and the like.
*  The third leg of the stool is utilizing email to always be directing folks (back) to your website. This can be from driving electronic newsletters to them with links back to info on your website; with other opt-in mailings (ie. a visitor signing up for notification of new listings, receiving the notification, and then following the link) pulling subscribers back again to your website. In essence, a well-oiled, well positioned website will create a loop where folks visit your website, opt-in for more information...they receive the notification with link(s) back to your website...and back into your website they go...
In essence, any and all media that you produce should include your domain name and point folks to your website. Your website should have all the information, tools, listings and anything else people are looking for. You probably do need to plan a budget for a modest promotion or advertising for your website. It's really like anything else we do to promote ourselves...getting our name out, and in this case our domain name as well.
I highly recommend a book by Dan Gooder Richard entitled Real Estate Rainmaker, Guide to Online Marketing. I think he hits marketing your site right on the money. If you don’t mind reading about this topic, you will be delighted with the help and suggestions this book will provide you.

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Powering Up Your Auto Responder

Many of us take our “Contact Us” form in our GD web site for granted. There is really more depth under the hood than you would think. If you sign in to the back door to your site and select the edit tool for this page, you will discover two fields which you can edit. The first field provides for a custom message that you create. This message will be seen by your visitors as soon as they submit your contact form. In this message, you can thank them for their visit and any other short message you might like.

The second field which you can edit provides for the actual “auto responder” message that will be generated at the same moment they send your contact form, and is sent via email to your visitor. You can again thank them for their visit and interest in your web site, that you will be in touch with them as soon as possible to fulfill the needs of their inquiry, and any other pertinent thought that you would like to impart at this time. Be sure and include your “internet signature” which would include your name, web site address, email address and telephone number. Remember, this is an email that will arrive, probably after their visit to your site, and so it is a follow-up with your contact info and the means to revisit your site if they wish. When editing this feature, simple instructions and example text are available next to each of the above mentioned text fields.

The next time you are in the “back door” to your website, check to see if you have harnessed this additional power.

Sunday, November 06, 2005

Do Inbound Links Matter?

I would like to spend one more posting on basic search engine optimization. My first article involved “behind the page” optimization hints…my second article in this series discussed “on the page” criteria and this article will spend some time on “off the page” ideas. Of course, this is the one where we have least control as well. One of the most powerful means of increasing our visibility on the search engines revolves around inbound links. Again, this is especially important to Google…so much so, in fact, that without them it is difficult to show near the top of the rankings…which is where we would all like to be. In the old days, we tended to exchange links with others (reciprocal linking) and that gave us inbound links. This was good…especially if they were quality links of related business similar to our own. One never knows what search engines build into their algorithms (their individual recipes for trying to rank web sites better than then the other engine), but it now appears that it is better to build good, related, one-way, inbound links. It seems like they carry much more weight. How would you do this. Well, 1) write some good articles and then have them posted online (with a mini-bio and link to your site) to an appropriate e-newsletter or the like. Good articles are always in demand. 2) Perhaps pay the $25+/- per year that some of the real estate directories charge for inclusion. 3) Blogs appear to also be finding favor with the search engines. So for example, if I should refer to my site at www.agentsupportcenter.com from within this blog article, with all the target words that it contains, it might help my site. That is how articles published on the web can help you. And, 4) any public interest articles that wind up in any of the newspapers online (ie. The Kitsap Sun) could have your domain name noted in it as well.
So, from the articles I have published in this 3-part series (although there are other tweaks we can make and I’ll try to cover a few more that are within your capabilities…especially if you have a GraphicalData site), we have looked at Titles and Meta tags “behind the page”, we have looked at quality content “on the page” (good quality, relevant, honest verbiage), and today we have looked at how inbound links can benefit us “off the page”. Remember everything you can do helps stack the cards (rankings) in your favor. But, a final word, don’t get so obsessed with rankings that you lose track of your real purpose…working with people like we always have…face to face…with all the other lead generating methods that are available to us…and show and sell :~)

Friday, November 04, 2005

Optimizing Your Website

Continuing on my last post…how does one optimize content on your home page for the search engines. Search engines perceive top of the page is more important than the bottom…big text is more important than small…emphasis (bold) is more important than not emphasized. So, it would benefit a website in rankings to endeavor to achieve these criteria. I like to make a large, bold header which should contain the most important keyword phrase (and what the site is really all about). I then like to follow up with a secondary, slightly less sized sub header emphasizing the rest of your site objective. For example “Bremerton Real Estate” in large text, followed up with “Also Focusing on Port Orchard, Silverdale and neighboring communities in Kitsap County”. The search engines (Google especially) like enough content to sink their teeth into so that when they receive a search query from a search, they feel “confident” in serving up their results. If you have not provided good, quality content, then they will feel less “confident” and you will not be ranked near the top of the results.
There are other criteria for optimizing your page which I am not going to get into in this discussion as they are more difficult to understand and implement for most. HOWEVER, REMEMBER THIS…if you have the right content on your page…it says what your site is and validates it with proper verbiage, then most everything will take care of itself. What too many folks try to do is use a popular keyword or keyword phrase lots of times, create content that is redundant and not in proper context and expect their site to show well. Just be honest…provide good content…use keywords wisely throughout your site, and you’ll be surprised at how well your site will rise to the top…albeit slowly. WHY? The search engines what to serve up honest content…good content…relevant content. So, why not give it to them and benefit from it???

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Optimizing Your GraphicalData Website

GraphicalData enables you to optimize your own website for helping it to rank well in the search engines. You not only can control the Meta tags on your home entry page, but all lower level pages as well. And the best part is it’s EASY!
After logging in and navigating to your “Website Pages”, you can view all the pages in your site. On any of the pages, select the “Meta Tags” (ABC) button to begin editing. You are presented 3 simple fields labeled Title [VERY IMPORTANT], Meta Description and Meta Keywords. Each section has its own instructions to aid you in your task. Be sure and click the save button at bottom of page when satisfied with your changes.
I highly recommend Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Watch which is chalked full of helpful search engine optimization tips.
The bonus from placing the above title and description on your home page (and actually all pages for best results) is that it will generate them in the site map that will appear at the bottom right of your pages. Although this link is usually generated automatically, if for some reason it is not there, and you looking for every means to optimize your site, then call GD’s support line and ask to have it added.
Adding /controlling your title and Meta tags made easy! But wait…there’s more…what to include on your home page to make the search engines happy…that’s another story…stay tuned.