Leading People to Your Site


Because the Web is a vast sea of sites spanning the entire globe, the most difficult step is getting people to your site. Fortunately, there are a few things you can do, some high-tech and others decidedly not.

Checklist Promoting Your Site

Here's how to tell prospective clients that you have a site and how to go to it:

  • Make sure your Web address (and e-mail) is listed in all your marketing materials.

  • Use keywords within your Web site to help search engines find your Web site and present it in response to searches by prospective clients.

  • List your Web site on popular search engines, but be leery of paying someone for the privilege of doing so on your behalf.

  • Use local online business directories, community forums, and community sites.

  • Consider advertising on Web sites where buyers and sellers are likely to be.


List Your Site Everywhere

You should include your Web address, along with your phone number and e-mail address, in everything you distribute to people: in flyers, on your business cards, in any Realtors association profiles and member directories, in your MLS profile, in ads, and in your broker's printed and online agent directories. If you send out postcards, calendars, refrigerator magnets, or other marketing tschotchkes, make sure your Web address is on them. Basically, anything you distribute should include your Web address.

You're probably listed in more places than you think. Your broker likely has its own Web site with a list of agents. Your local Realtors association likely has a site listing all agents; so do the local, state, and national Realtors associations. Your local MLS will almost always have an agent search feature. You might be listed in business associations, service groups like the Kiwanis Club or Elks Lodge, and alumni groups. Review your profile in all such lists and be sure to add your Web address where that's an option.

It's particularly important to list your Web site in every online directory you are included in. (The reason is that search engines typically give more prominent placement in their search results to Web sites that are linked to by other sites.)

Be Sure That Search Engines Find You

Because the Web is so vast, one of the most common ways for people to find information is to use a search engine like Google (www.google.com) or one of the search engines included in portals such as Yahoo, MSN, and AOL.

There are two basic ways to help a search engine find your site and know what its content is, so it can present it in response to user searches:

  • Keywords: Search engines use Web crawlerstools that read through the top of each page to collect information for indexing that page. These Web crawlers look for keywords embedded in your Web site.

  • Indexes: Many search engines let you add details about your site to their indexes, and a whole bunch of companies will take your money to improve the odds the search engines will display your site in response to a query.

It's All About Marketing

A key goal of a Web site is to put yourself in front of potential clients. And that means marketing. "Marketing" has two basic components: outreach and presentation.

Just as you no doubt give out your card and discuss your services with people you meet in social and professional situations, you need to put yourself in front of potential clients in the electronic world. (The key is to realize that all marketing is expensive, with uncertain results, so be judicious in your marketing investments.)

You also need to back up that outreach with a solid presentation that shows off your abilities, using tools such as a Web site, e-mail newsletters, and even ads for individual listings.


I've highlighted the keywords in my Web site's home page. In the top window is the actual HTML code, while the bottom window shows the keywords in a friendlier dialog box. Most Web editing programs let you work directly in your choice of HTML code or friendlier dialog boxes.

Adding Keywords

To ensure that Web crawlers get the information they need about your Web site, you need to enter keywords into your Web pagesat least into the home page (the one named index.html or index.htm). There are four places to enter this information, and you should enter this information in all four places.

First, in your Web page's HTML code, you should include a tag like <meta name="keywords" content="real estate"> somewhere between the <head> and </head> tags. (A tag is a specific piece of HTML code, usually enclosed in < and > characters.) The list of terms inside the quotation marks after content= should of course include all relevant terms, such as your name, cities and areas served, and words that people will likely search by such as real estate, realtor, house, buy, and sell. Note that capitalization doesn't matter.

You will probably use the same basic keywords on every page, although you might want to add or customize keywords on specific pages. For example, if your site has a page about mortgages, you should add keywords such as mortgage, finance, loan, rate, and interest to that page's meta tag.

Second, also in the HTML code, you should include a tag like <meta name="description" content="Specializing in San Francisco real estate for buyers and sellers">, also somewhere between the <head> and </head> tags. Include as many of your keywords as possible in the description, but the keywords should be written as sentences, because it might be the text that displays in search results as the description of your site.

Third, also in the HTML code, you should include a tag like <title>San Francisco real estate for buyers and sellers</title>, somewhere between the <head> and </head> tags. This tag should be a phrase or short sentence that succinctly describes your site, using your most critical keywords. This text often appears in search results as well.

Fourth, the text of your pages (if you're working in the actual HTML code, that's anything between the <body> and </body> tags) should include as many of the keywords as possible, because search engines compare the actual content of a site's pages with the keywords to make sure the site actually is about what the meta tags claim it to be. Obviously, not every keyword is relevant on any page, but be sure to include all the keywords that are relevant. One way to accomplish this is to include a succinct sales pitch of your services on every page as a repeating element.

You might not see these meta tags directly in your HTML editing softwaretags might be accessed through a dialog box.

For example, in Adobe's Macromedia Dreamweaver 8, you can add new tags by choosing Insert > HTML > Head Tags, and you can edit existing tags by choosing View > Head Content and then selecting from the row of tag icons at the top to have the current tag data display in the Properties palette at the bottom.

How Search Engines Work

Search engines keep huge indexes of Web addresses cross-referenced by keywords (what users search by), the number of links from other sites, and the frequency of visits to a site. They then use this information to figure out which siteand, as important, in what orderto list in response to a person's search text.

Because search results are based on frequency of visits and number of links to your site, chances are that any individual real estate agent's site will never rank very high. But your chances do go up if someone searches by using a lot of specifics such as the neighborhoods you serve and your name, because fewer sites will match all those items. In other words, the more detailed the search the user enters, the more likely your site is to be found.

Therefore, be sure to include as many keywords as possible in your site and in your search engine profiles to increase the odds that a user's detailed search will turn up your site. But search engines aren't stupid: If the keywords you include aren't actually in your site's content, they'll assume you're doing the electronic equivalent of stuffing the ballot box and lower your score, making you harder to find. That means your home page's text should include most if not all of the keywords in the actual text displayed to visitors.


In Microsoft's FrontPage 2003, you can add new tags by choosing File > Properties and going to the Custom tab. Then click the Add button in the User Variables section to get a dialog box where you enter the tag name (such as description) and the tag contents. Click OK when you're done. To edit head content in FrontPage, follow the same steps for creating a meta tag but instead of clicking Add, select the desired tag and click Modify, then edit the text.

The complexity of adding meta tags without using actual HTML code in these two programs shows that sometimes it's better to bite the bullet and just deal with the code directly.

The most effective way to enter this keyword information is to create a list of all the terms you want the search engines to associate with your siteto help your site appear in a user's search resultsbefore you create your Web pages. Create a blank Web page with these tags already added for use as a template, and then use a copy of that template as you create each new page for your site (that way the meta tags are also in each page). If your Web site already exists, add this information to the home page and then copy its code to all other pages rather than reenter it from scratch on each page. I've included a sample of all these tags on the CD that accompanies this book to help get you started.

As you can see from these results, search engines like Google rarely show individual real estate agents' pages anywhere near the top of its search results, because agent pages typically get small volumes of visitors, lowering the score used to determine their position in the search result lists.

CD Resources: For helping search engines find your site, a code snippet containing example meta tags.

Updating Search Engines Directly

You can supplement these embedded keywords by entering terms directly into many search engines. This can speed up your entries into the search engines, since it can take a few months before the Web crawlers find your site on their own. Some domain registries and Web hosts offer a free or low-cost service to do this for you; you can also pay sites such as NetMechanic to submit your site information on your behalf. I would try their free service first, to see if it gets any results before agreeing to pay money for "premium" services. It's impossible to guarantee the effectiveness of these services, since the search engines have their own secret index methods these site-submission services can't control. Paying for "optimized" search-engine placement is one of those areas where the lure of technology can cause real estate agents to waste money. Don't be lured.

I do recommend you take the time to list your site yourself on key search engines such as Google, HotBot/Lycos, and Yahoo Search, as well as the Open Directory Project that is compiling local directories of businesses and other resources for the Web.(Note that several popular sites such as AltaVista, AOL, and Netscape use one of these search engines instead of having one of their own.) Even though you're not likely to get at the top of their lists, you do increase your chances of being in the first dozen or so pagesand even higher if users enter detailed search queries.

As you can see, search optimization isn't a high-impact use of your time or money. But it is worth an hour or two implementing the keywords in your site and submitting your site to search engines.

CD Resources: For search engine submissions, links to Google, HotBot/Lycos, NetMechanic, the Open Directory Project, and Yahoo.

Participate in Local Sites

We all know that real estate is a local business, but sometimes we forget that the Web is really a global resource, so 99.999 percent of the people using it will never be prospective clients of yours. But the Web is also home to many local sites, online directories, and communities that use the easy access of the Web to serve small geographic areas. That's a perfect venue for real estate agents.

The trick is to find those local sites that might be a good place for you to participate in. Do Web searches, check local newspapers, ask your fellow agents, and of course ask your friends and colleagues if they know of any local business directories or community sites. Then check out the sites to see if there's a possible fit.

One popular community site is Craigs list (named after founder Craig Newmark), which provides classified ads (free in most areas) and community discussion boards in dozens of cities. So it's a great example to use to show you the pros and cons of using local sites. But keep in mind that these pros and cons apply to all such sites, not just Craigslist.

Classified Ad Sites

Craigslist can be a good place to advertise your property listings. But note that in many areas of the country, Craigslist classified ads (called posts) are littered with out-of-area properties, mortgage lenders advertising their rates, and a variety of likely scams such as "80 percent off repossessed homes." That garbage quotient is particularly high in its urban listings, burying legitimate listings and turning off prospective buyers.

Despite the high garbage quotient in many of its sections, I still recommend using Craigslist to post your listings, but you need to delete and repost your listing every few days, so it doesn't get swept out of sight by all the garbage listings. (Listings expire automatically after 10 days in most areas, but in many areas, a single day's posts can fill two pages, so your ad still gets buried quickly.) If you're in one of the Craigslist cities that require payment for real estate classifieds, you'll of course see less junk and therefore won't need to repost as frequently.

CD Resources: For local community sites, a link to Craigslist.

Creating Your Own Community Site

If there's not a good local business or community site in your locality, you might consider starting your own local directory or site. While you might consider undertaking this effort yourself, it usually makes more sense to partner with a local business association or with other agents and/or mortgage brokerage and title company colleagues. Such an effort would bring in local businesses, volunteer groups, and so on, all of whom would help in the promotion through their own marketing, advertising, and communication efforts.

If you do create a local site, be careful that it is truly a local site, not just a big ad for you (and your partners). Visitors will quickly know if a site is what it claims to be; if you mislead them, you'll lose their trust. If you help create a real local site, keep it neutral. Use ads and links to get its visitors to your marketing-oriented personal site. Otherwise, you'd be better served to add community resources to your personal site, as I described in Chapter 4.


Community Forums

The other half of Craigslist is its group of community forums, which in most areas include real estate forums. These forums seem like a good place to show your expertise by offering advice on posted problems, but many times they just waste your time. Because it has local sections for dozens of cities and is often profiled in business magazines, Craigslist is a popular example of both the good and bad of community forums. But make no mistake: The pros and cons of forums are likely to exist in any community forum, especially those that promote free speech and don't charge membership or posting fees.

First, if you're just posting marketing materials about yourself, you'll quickly get blacklisted, because the forums are not meant to be used as advertising vehicles. Therefore, never include your phone number or e-mail address in your posts, and never recommend that people contact you for advice. If someone does want to contact you, she can usually click your user name in your posts to get your e-mail address.

Second, these forums tend to attract a lot of negative people with lots of time on their hands. (They're called flamers.) Flamers pollute the forums with hateful comments, particularly against landlords, mortgage brokers, and real estate agents, and they flood a forum with inane arguments. For flamers, a true discussion is not the point; participation is an opportunity to anonymously be cruel to others or to feel self-important. Because there are no moderators, these flamers get free rein to stomp over everyone else.

Craigslist can be a good place to advertise specific property listings. But, as you can see, its listings are polluted with out-of-area properties and other unrelated offerings, forcing would-be buyers to wade through a lot of junk to see your legitimate listings.

Unfortunately, flamers are a common outcome in community forums that aren't moderated (or policed, according to some). Unfortunately, chances are that participating in a Craigslist real estate forum will just set you up for attack, not let you offer legitimate advice that also (and subtly) helps market you.

So before you decide to spend time posting on a community forum, read through a week's worth of traffic and see if it's really a positive venue where reason rules and you can actually communicate with people other than flamers.

CD Resources: For blog providers, links to www.Blogger.com and TypePad.

Consider Web Advertising

It's an old adage that you have to spend money to make money. But we real estate agents also know that there are hundreds of organizations hoping we'll spend money on their services, which can quickly eradicate any money we do make selling real estate.

Advertising is a natural area in which to spend money, but you have to be careful. It's worth trying a multifaceted ad strategy, such as running ads in local community or neighborhood newspapers, sending out postcards to target neighborhoods, and even buying ad space in more exotic venues such as on bus benches and shopping carts. But test these venues carefully and make sure you track the number of responses you get to see if they're effective. And always talk to others who have used these advertising venues to see if they really work.

When you hear from someone new, just ask how he heard about you. If someone contacts you via e-mail, consider asking her how she heard about you when you reply. (Chapter 7,"Managing Marketing Campaigns," shows you how to track your efforts methodically.)

An increasingly popular form of advertising is Web advertising, because people who use the Web are often in active research mode, looking for properties or agents. So the theory is that they're more ready to contact you than someone who's looking at the newspaper or walking by a billboard.

What About Blogs?

There's been much ado recently about Web logs, known as blogs. Blogs are Web pages where an individual posts his thinking on a topic or two, perhaps daily, perhaps less often, and then has a space where readers can post their own comments. Often heralded as citizen journalism, the medium is just as often an outlet for egotists and marketers. Like everything else on the Web, the quality varies.

You might consider establishing your own blog to assert your real estate savvy and attract potential clients. That's great, but understand that you'll need to devote time regularly for both creating your content and moderating the responses. And of course, you need to find a way to make your blog known to your potential audience, so you're not your only audience.

I believe that, for most agents, blogs take more time than you can really afford to spend, but that's a decision only you can make. To reduce the time investment, you could use the same basic material from a weekly or biweekly e-mail newsletter as your blog content, making the blog effort a small addition to the work you're already doing. (A blog that is updated less frequently than biweekly doesn't usually gain as much of a following, given the high value Web users place on current content.)

If you do decide you want a blog, some Web hosts offer blog tools to use in your Web site. Or you can use blog sites like www.Blogger.com and TypePad.


Tracking Results

It's also easier to track the performance of Web ads than other media. A common technique is to provide a unique link in each ad. You then use the tracking logsif your Web host provides theseto see how many times each unique page was clicked. If you use this technique, it's wise not to create separate pages for every ad, because each page will include a lot of duplication and maintenance effort. (You'd end up, say, with a copy of your home page for every ad you run to track how many people clicked from each ad.)

Instead, each of these unique pages should redirect users to your home page (or whatever page you want the visitor to see). At a minimum, a redirect page contains the following HTML code (you'll also find the code on the CD that accompanies this book):

   <html>   <head>   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type"   content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">   <meta http-equiv="refresh" content=   "0;URL=yourURLhere">   </head>   <body>   </body>   </html> 


Replace the yourURLhere with the actual URL to your site, such as www.grumanhomes.com to go to the home page or http://www.grumanhomes/mlssearch.html to go to a specific page. Ideally, you'd also have some text in between the <body> and </body> tags that provides instructions of where to go if the redirect does not work for some reason. For example, for my site, I have the following code, which tells the visitor what the destination page is and provides a clickable link to it:

    <p><b>If this page does not automatically jump    to the Gruman Homes page, please click here:    <a href=""http://www.grumanhomes.com"">    http://www.grumanhomes.com</a>.</b> 


The e-Pro Label

Recognizing the importance of technology in how people today buy and sell real estate, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) is promoting its new e-Pro certification for real estate agents. e-Procertified agents take a course that teaches them about Web and e-mail marketing, using technology to serve clients, and other techniques that you're learning in this book. (Just to be clear, this book and the e-Pro certification are unrelated, and the content of each was developed separately.)

The idea is that real estate agents can use the e-Pro label in their marketing to let potential clients know they are tech-savvy. However, as is true for all the certifications offered by NAR and other organizations, clients have no idea what the certificates mean.

Perhaps NAR will extensively advertise the e-Pro label as it does the Realtor label, and clients will begin demanding agents who have the e-Pro certification. But until then, consider e-Pro certification as simply a training class on potentially useful techniques for using online technologies to sell real estate. Clients won't know or care about the label; they'll simply judge you on what you actually do.


Paying by the Click

An increasingly common type of Web advertising charges you only when visitors click the links in them (these visitor actions are called clickthroughs), so you know exactly what the ad's performance is. Google is a good example of a site that charges for clickthroughs: You tell Google the search phrases you want your ad to appear with, and you pay whenever a user clicks your ad after conducting the search.

Obvious terms like Akron real estate or Tampa homes in these search-phrase-based ads tend to be expensive, since many other agents use them as well. That creates competition for which ads will be placed more prominently, which raises their prices. Your ad is also presented along with competitors' ads, diluting your message. So consider buying more specific search phrases to reduce the competition. For example, a Los Angeles agent who specializes in western Los Angeles might buy neighborhood-specific terms such as Los Angeles Mar Vista Real Estate and Los Angeles Palms real estate.

Also, you might considereither instead of or in addition to the obvious termsbuying search terms that reflect the interests or characteristics of your audience instead of buying real estate market terms. For example, you might choose Detroit machinists credit union or Denver kennel club so your ad appears to Detroit-area union members looking for a credit union or to people in Denver looking for pet-oriented organizations. The downside to this approach is that the people seeing your ad may not be currently interested in buying or selling real estate, but the upside is reaching an audience without significant competition from other real estate agents.

At a fee of a few cents to a few dollars per clickthrough, depending on the desirability of your ad placement, you can quickly go through hundreds of dollars with clickthrough-based ads. Fortunately, most sites that sell ads based on clickthroughs let you cap your total spending, removing your ad when that cap is reached. I strongly encourage you to set a fairly low cap when first buying Web ads, so you can test the effectiveness of your ads based on actual contacts with prospective clients rather than on raw clickthrough counts. After all, it's not how many people go to your site that counts but how many people follow up and contact you by phone or e-mail.



The Tech-Savvy Real Estate Agent
The Tech-Savvy Real Estate Agent
ISBN: 0321413660
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 100
Authors: Galen Gruman

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