Online Real Estate Technology

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I’ve been chatting to real estate offices lately about including social media into their long term communication and web strategy and as I’ve mentioned in my previous post on SEO How Important is An Effective SEO Strategy to Your Real Estate Business  you can use social media to build traffic to your web site instead of paying Google to do so.

Given that you may have the best real estate web site in the country, how do you use social media to drive lots of traffic to it. Here are a few tips and suggestions to help you, as long as you have great content and your site is up to date. There are more social media sites out there than you can possibly use in a lifetime, so lets look at the ones that will have a major impact for you.

Social Bookmarking sites: There are lots of social bookmarking sites for you to use on the web, so bookmark and tag all your content. Sites such as  delicious.com and Mr Wong are a great start to expose your content to other web readers, Mr Wong also allows do follow links which will help with SEO for your blog.  Stumbleupon.com is another great site to use, you should also leave a review of your content. Make your tags as broad as possible to allow users to find your site.

Blogs:Do they really work? Integrating a blog into your web site is a great way of bringing new content and visitors to your site or blog. The trick to blogging is to always provide good quality content in a consistent manner. Once you start cranking out consistent quality content, you can then start to submit your posts to news sites such as Digg, Reddit and Mixx.com, which will open up new audiences and web traffic for you. These are really good sites for exposing your content and will generate backlinks for your web site.

Facebook, Myspace,Linkedin and other networking sites are all smart places to submit your  blog to, all your connections will be able to see your content and blog. Twitter.com is another great resource to share your posts, for both business and pleasure just check out my profile at http://twitter.com/mikeandrewre to see how Twitter works.

Make sure you set up RSS feeds and email subscription links to allow readers to continue to recieve your posts and content once they leave your site. 

Hopefully this may answer some of your questions on how to set up an effective social media strategy for your office. A good social media strategy will help you build good quality backlinks to your web site that will also help your Google ranking. 

Good luck with your planning and let me know if I can help

I’ve mentioned social bookmarking in a couple of previous posts, and on the right hand side of this blog, you will see both Mr Wong and Delicious as widgets, but what do they mean and how do they influence traffic or search engine rankings.  Lets break this down into plain speak for you and look at the effect for example, of social bookmarking on my blog.

The best known use of bookmarks was adding a web site to your favourites tab on your computer, the limitation of this was that you had to always have your computer with you and if you travel or wanted to search your links from another computer you had no way of remembering what those favourite web sites were, now if you have a photographic memory, then you’d be ok, but if like me and probably 90% of the community, there’s a lot going through the old brain cells and sometimes when I would like to revisit a web site for research, entertainment or information without my favourites section, I’d be at a loss to revisit these.

Some consumers visit lots of web sites per user session per day, and the ability to be able to save and access those favourite web sites from a central location is both time saving and convenient. Thats where social bookmarking comes in, take delicious.com, you can create an account and then bookmark or save all your favourite sites in one location and then come back to those from any computer anywhere in the world. The other benefit is, you can also see who else, on the web, has bookmarked your posts, web site etc. You can also search by tags, and see at a glance what other web users find popular or of interest. For example, if you click on this link  http://delicious.com/mikeandrew you will find all the bookmarks for my blog, and by searching Delicious for Mike Andrew Real Estate, you will find, who has, on the web, bookmarked my content.

The other impact on blogs and web sites of social bookmarking, is the use of either “nofollow” or “dofollow” links, these are links that allow search engines to follow your bookmarks and popularity on the web. Sites such as Delicious have “nofollow” links so they have little effect on your search engine rankings, however, Mr Wong.com, Spurlit.com,backflip.com etc do, as they have “dofollow” links, and by bookmarking your posts and articles, they do have an impact on your search engine results.

Bookmarking your posts creates backlinks and you need to make sure these bookmarks are public, so that consumers, ( Meaning Google ) can see them.

You can also see at a glance what the most popular tags are that are being searched on the web, and what content is important or valuable to on line consumers. Be careful though, if you are a blogger or web site owner, you should only bookmark one piece of content or web page per day per site.

I’ve included a link to a video which explains the process of bookmarking in plain english for you, and I hope you enjoy, also check out the bookmarks available on Mr Wong and Delicious.com as a start.