Well optimized and maintained Google Places Page (GPP) can serve as the gateway to your real estate website. The GPP can even bring clients directly to your real estate business. Your Google Places Page should be considered as a must-have element of any local marketing campaign. The best part of the news: IT’S FREE.

To build the most effective Google Places page and bring more action to your real estate business, you can hire an expert or you can do it yourselves by following these simple steps:

1.    To get started, you will need to have a Gmail or Google account.
If you don’t have one, read this article to learn how to get started, or simply go to www.gmail.com and follow the instructions.

2.    Claim Your Listing by adding your account information. Provide as much information as possible. Having Google account without claiming your place with most accurate information and updates is like opening an office with no doors.

3.    Make your Google Places Page effective by providing complete information about yourself, your business, your listings, upcoming events, etc. Search engines love data; they also love more frequent updates. You can keep you GPP automatically updated by connecting to your IDX pages, such as open houses, new listings, community pages, and other Interactive IDX components.

Be sure to follow the Google Places Guidelines. Google is strict with these guidelines, and following these requirements will determine your listing or delisting from Google Places.

According to Google, only 7 percent GPP have been actually claimed (4% up from last year). This creates a window of opportunity for your business to get your business listed and get higher ranking by getting ahead of your competition.

If you are serious about local internet marketing, contact our IDX Consultants to get help with creating effective Google Places Page.

Call us at 1•800•966•4431 or click here to request a free consultation.

Once your website is online and have added unique content, many site owners begin a process known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This process is best handled by professionals but a site owner can achieve equal results by using a variety of free tools and a bit of research.

Analytics and Statistics

Learn about how visitors find your site and what they are doing. IDXnetwork recommends Google Analytics which provides enterprise class functions in a free powerful statistics tool.
Simply send your Google Analytics U-A code to the IDXnetwork support team along with any specific installation instructions.

• Google Analytics main page http://www.google.com/analytics/
• Product Features http://www.google.com/analytics/features.html
• Product Tour http://www.google.com/analytics/tour.html

Good SEO Practices

Search Engines, like Google, determine your rankings based on proprietary formulas which change frequently. It is best to learn the rules directly from the source.

• Google Basics http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=70897
• Starter Guide http://www.googlekeywordtool.com/reports/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf
• Webmaster Guidelines http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

Submit Your Content and Business Details

Submitting your Business and website to various directories is essential to top search engine performance.

• Google Places http://www.google.com/places/
• Google Content Submit http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/index.html
• Yahoo Business Directory http://listings.local.yahoo.com/
• Yelp http://www.yelp.com
• Bing Business Portal http://www.bingbusinessportal.com/BusinessSearch.aspx
• DMOZ Open Directory http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

Keyword and Competition Research

Knowing your targeted Keywords and Competition is half the battle. Collect information on how your competitors have achieved top ranking in your area and then use that information to your advantage.

• Keyword Tools https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
• Keyword Tool Tips https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=64886
• Choosing Keywords (video) http://services.google.com/awp/en_us/breeze/378766/index.html
• Google Sets http://labs.google.com/sets
• SEO Quake Browser Extension (Check Statistics, Backlinks, Site:, Alexa) http://www.seoquake.com/
• DNS, Whois and other Lookups http://www.dnsgoodies.com/

Social Networking

Promote your business via various websites by placing backlinks to relevant pages on your social networking sites. These will help build overall ranking.

• Namechk (Find if a name is available on multiple sites at once) http://namechk.com/

Follow Trends

Be sure to keep up on trends both in and out of your industry.

• Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends
• Insight http://www.google.com/insights/search/#
• Realtor Research http://www.realtor.org/research
• CNN Money/Real Estate http://money.cnn.com/real_estate/

While we cannot advise on all possible SEO choices, our Support and Sales Teams will be happy to help implement any specific requests, whenever possible. Contact http://www.idxnetwork.com/support.php.

For those not familiar, a QR or Quick Response code is a type of barcode consisting of black blocks arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The code can contain text, URL or other data and is commonly found in print material, signs business cards and more.

For example, smart phone users can simply take a picture of this code to reach the IDXnetwork contact page.

Take a picture of me with a smart phone

Example 1 – Excerpt RSS Feed – Unordered List

Example 2 – No Excerpt RSS Feed – Unordered List

Example 3 – Property Sliders can add function and style:

Let’s suppose you want your Real estate listings displayed in numerical order.

Example 4 – No Excerpt RSS Feed – Ordered List

Example 5 – Excerpt RSS Feed -Ordered List

This only scratches the surface of the capabilities of IDXnetwork. To learn more, Contact us today for free consultation.

The Result:
faster search engine indexing -> more online exposures -> more traffic to your listing pages.

Bonus Tip:
Want even more traffic? Use this technique for your Open Houses.

Want more IDX and Real Estate Marketing Tips? Subscribe to our Newsletter.

Need help with your real estate website?
Let one of our Online Marketing Experts evaluate your website for its marketing strengths and weaknesses. Ask for FREE Consultation.

The fist step is to find a weather badge or widget that works best for your site.  Here are a few recommended providers with lots of options.

Accuweather http://netweather.accuweather.com

Accuweather provides a simple to use interface which creates a badge in 9 sizes and 10 colors.  Options include the ability to display current conditions, 5 day forecast, temperature, radar and precipitation maps.

Example:

Weather Underground: http://www.wunderground.com/

This site has the most options, but can little more difficult to navigate.

Example:

Plan your trip Local Radar Detailed Forecast

To add a weather badge simply copy the code provided and paste the code into your website, blog or community filters page.

What follow up method really works?

Using an autoresponder to follow up with each lead:

~ individually
~ multiple times
~ at set intervals
~ with personalized pre-written messages,

will dramatically increase sales!

The display URL (the URL that appears within the ad itself) shows potential visitors to a site where they’ll land when they click on an ad. For sites that sit on shared or hosted domains (such as wordpress.com) all ads will be required to display URL “that accurately reflect their destinations.”

Going forward, ads that do not include this additional information in their display URLs will be disapproved. A suggested display URL will be provided in the disapproval email notification, but we encourage you to proactively adjust any ads that you think might be affected by this change.

If you’d like to learn about this policy in greater detail, please visit the AdWords Help Center.

Need help with Google AdWords optimization? Click here to request a Free Consultation.

Experience the benefits of RSS, starting today.
In addition to the obvious sales and marketing benefits, RSS offers real estate agents:

» Instant access. IDX-driven RSS feeds allow instant access to the latest listing data.
» Search-engine friendliness. Search engines love pages with feeds (and rank them well),
because they represent continually updated content.
» More subscriber options. Customers can choose their own criteria for searches,
making sure they receive only the most relevant listings.
» Personalized feeds. Agents can also personalize feeds based on each client’s preferences.
» External flexibility. RSS feeds can easily be used outside the original website,
expanding visibility through backlinks and beyond.

To learn more about putting the power of IDX-based tools and RSS to work for you, call 1.877.439.4967 or click here for FREE consultation.