A REALTOR® with John Hall & Associates recently told me he attended a real estate technology class / sales pitch.  The product they were selling put his real estate listings on his facebook profile.  He declined to purchase, but liked the idea.  I asked if he had looked into the REALTOR.com facebook app that displays listings on REALTORS’® facebook profiles for free. He hadn’t heard of it.  So we checked it out together.

It’s pretty slick.  Super simple to set up, and looks professional. If you’d like to check it out, it’s called See my Listings.  I’m pretty sure more people call it that facebook app that displays your listings on your profile.

[Updated: same day]

Why I like the REALTOR.com Facebook App

This section was added after publishing because I need to address the debate of whether real estate listings in facebook are good or bad.  My answer to this debate is – it depends.

RE Barcamp San Diego session: WordPress SEO Tips and Tricks

This session was run by three guys that know a lot more about this stuff than I do. Bob Wilson was the one whose name I caught – and the one I got a chance to talk with more at the after barcamp bar.  The guy is definitely knowledgeable about search engine optimization.  Here are my notes from all three of the presenters…

• Always use pictures in blog posts and make sure to label the pictures appropriately. Instead of uploading an image with filename IMG_8098.jpg and adding it to your post (or page) about Phoenix homes for sale. Rename it to something like Front-of-home-in-Phoenix.jpg. Google gives your file names credit – so you should name them appropriately.

• When you rename your files, be sure to use hyphens or underscores to separate the words. One of the presenters said hyphens are good if you want google to read the words individually. Underscores are better for phrases.

• Make sure to change your permalink structure. Permalinks are the URL or unique web address associated with each individual blog post. By default, wordpress sets them to use the post ID which is numerical and provides no value to google. Instead, go into the Settings (from the Admin panel), click Permalinks and choose an option that includes the title of the post. He said there was no real google value to have the date and recommends the custom option which allows you to remove it.

• Some themes allow you to add a meta-description to each post – if yours does, use it every time. The meta description is what will show up in google 9 times out of 10. Plus it’s another opportunity to use keyword variations associated with the specific post.  You can be more specific and more accurate – search engines (and readers) like specific, accurate descriptions!

• As for the title of your blog – they do not recommend using an image for the entire header. You can set an image to the background, but they say have your text title overlay on top of the image for maximum SEO benefit.

• Ready to talk heading tags? Like h1, h2, and h3? One presenter said he tags the first sentence of each post with h2 tags. Then if he has sub-headers within a post he uses h3. Google scans header tags first to see what the page is about. This is documented in Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (free PDF) and well worth the read if you are trying to get your website to show up higher in search results.

• A tangent on design – set a static page as your homepage. So many authors keep their blogs as the homepage because they are proud of the articles they write.  Some may think that’s what their visitors care most about, but if your goal is to create leads, you should have a static page with a crystal clear way to search for homes, get market statistics, and some way for them to figure out what their home is worth. Widget Me was a recommended plug-in.

• Some themes allow you to choose noindex for archive pages and category pages – this is a good idea to avoid duplicate content penalties. However, if your category pages show excerpts instead of full-posts and you write unique excerpts for each post (not auto-generated or first paragraph copy and pasted) then you can allow google to index those pages because there is no duplicate content. If that makes no sense, set your category pages to noindex.  Regardless of noindex, it’s recommended to add a content block to the top of the each of the category pages explaining more about the … category.

Thesis was the most recommended wordpress theme, Headway followed.

(Next session: Google Analytics. You like?  Subscribe with your email or RSS reader.)

I don’t need to explain why search engine optimization (SEO) and real estate agents should be friends.  Based on some of the questions I get asked, agents already know that showing up on page 1 of google’s results for popular search phrases will drive traffic to their lead generation systems – aka websites.  What I do need to explain is how real estate agents can improve their rankings/show up higher on the results page.  Since there are lots and lots of other people that know a whole heck of a lot more than I do when it comes to this search engine optimization concept, I’d rather find one of them to explain it to you, maybe an employee from google perhaps?

So there I was, dorking it out hardcore last night, watching a bunch of videos that google has posted to their webmaster help youtube channel when I ran across this gem.  In this video one of the google employees (Matt Cutts – thx @maxchirkov) answers this ever popular question, “How does someone begin to SEO their site on a small budget in an overwhelmed industry such as real estate?” Perfect – just what every real estate agent with a website wants to know.

Now that you know starting with a smaller niche is the main secret to seo success on a budget, read this Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide google has published.  This will enlighten you with the best practices moving forward.  It’s a 20 page pdf that is designed to get everyone up to speed on some of the basic concepts of seo.  You don’t have to be an expert, you just have to pay attention to the fundamentals.  It really isn’t rocket science, you just have to know which details to pay some attention.

If you listen to what Matt says in this video and understand the concepts of the starter guide, there is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to move your real estate website higher up on the results page for your particular niche.