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This article is the second in the series to help Australian Real Estate Agents improve their traffic from optimizing their website. If you have not read the first article in the SEO series I strongly suggest you start there instead and return to reading this article after that.
Referral Building
One of the recognized methods that Search Engines use to rank websites is by placing preference on what they consider authoritative websites. One of the key methods to assess your authoritative value is by analysing your website content, but we will discuss that in a future article.
The other way they calculate a websites authoritative value is by checking what websites link to you and to a lesser extent what websites you link to. The search engines understand that if popular well visited and quality websites who cover your website’s topic link to your website then there is a very high chance that you are also a quality website on that same topic. It conversely stands to reason that links from low quality off topic websites will provide no authoritative value at all, and in fact can impact negatively on your ranking. A link from a highly ranked website is like a “vote” and the more votes you get the better. The seo value or “vote” a website passes to another with a referral link is often coined “link juice”.
PageRank
Google uses a page quality ranking system called PageRank which covers the popularity of a page or website. PageRank is only part of the whole equation but it is a useful way to determine how popular a website is with incoming weblinks. Just remember as far as google is concerned PageRank is only one of the ranking factors of why your website is top of the list. A good PageRank (abbrieviated to PR) for an agency is 3 or 4. Anything higher is probably an unrealistic goal given the traffic and exposure an indivudal agency can generate… but there is no harm in trying. 
So one of the most important parts of improving your SEO strategy is to build quality referral links back to your website. These links back to your website will create a level of traffic in their own right but their real value from an SEO perspective is the “link juice” they pass to you allowing you to rank higher and get more traffic from the search engines.
There are several ways to build referral links to your website but the easiest quickest place to get your site listed on Interent website directories. That’s what we are going to concentrate on first but I will discuss other strategies of building website links later in the article.
Website Directories – Paid or Free?
In the early days of the web very few web directories charged as they all tried to build up their website’s content. Over recent years things have changed and now a few web directories have started to charge to list your site. They built up high PageRank rankings for their websites when free and then changed a “fee” to websites to get themselves listed on a high PR site. Google recently applied a manual override to many directories “selling” links from their websites for what they considered as an excessive charge.
Even though paying a reasonable amount to get your listed is probably not out of the question, for my mind there are very few websites that are worthwhile paying for at the end of the day. There is one major exception for that rule though and that’s Yahoo.
Get Ready
Before you start submitting your website some thought has to be put into exactly what information you submit. Other than your website address and email you are going to require two other pieces of information for just about all directories you submit to. You should prepare these for two reasons. Firstly its very important that you use the right keywords as it will help your SEO and secondly it will speed up your submission process when you can cut and paste the information every time.
Website Title
It is important to include your primary keywords in the website title but ensure you don’t include promotion terms.
“Nerang First National Real Estate – Gold Coast Real Estate Agent” might be acceptable but
“Nerang First National, the Gold Coasts Best Real Estate Agent” would not be.
Description
It is important to cover the range of services on your website. Different sites will allow different length descriptions of your website so create one default description and change it if you have it or you can create a small and a large version.
“Specialising in residential real estate services for the suburbs of Nerang, Carrara, Highland Park, Worongary and the surrounding hinterland of the Gold Coast, Queensland Australia. Website features include property for sale, property for rent, real estate guide, free advisory guides to download, local community and business directory, email newsletters, blog and more”
might be ok for a directory submission but something like
”Nerang property for sale and rent” would be very poor utilization.
Selecting the Right Category
When you submit to a business directory it is vitally important that you submit to the right category. Submitting to the wrong category will at best slow down your acceptance but at worst will mean that your submission is not even considered at all. Some directories are sorted by suburb or city. Some are just sorted by state.
I will try and make some recommendations along the way but do some research and make sure you place your submission in the best category. Some directories will even let you submit to more than one category so when you can maximize your exposure and select as many as you can. On the directory pages look for words similar to “add your site”, “add your url”, “add your business” or something similar
The Top Tips for your submissions
- No words in CAPITALS
- No promotional language – ie. Sydney’s Best Real Estate Agent
- Remember to use keywords that buyers or sellers would use.
- Read the submission rules and follow them.
- Submit to the right category
Major Web Directories
There are two web directories that are essential in SEO and are the single most powerful things you will do throughout this whole series.
DMOZ or Open Directory Project
This is one of the most powerful web directory and your listing in the directory will provide you an instant boost to your SEO. Why is it so powerful? “The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.”
This directory is used directly by nearly 150 other sites on the interent as their own directory. In simple terms you list once on DMOZ and if accepted you will automatically get listed on nearly 150 other high quality sites. Even Google itself rebrands the DMOZ directory data as its own Google Directory. Because of this sheer power and the fact that every single submission is checked manually by a real person, the directory is held in very high regard.
You are only allowed up to 30 words as a description so make them count. Browse to your geographic region first. Ideally submit your category into the real estate section of the business section under the locality but if one does not exist yet, just submit to the business section or even the locality category. Do not submit to state or national real estate sections as it will not be allowed unless you deal with the whole state and will just delay your submission.
This is the only directory that I would suggest you pay the listing fee without question. Listing in the yahoo directory is very important SEO wise and like DMOZ every submission is manually checked. Unlike DMOZ that is a community maintained, the Yahoo directory is a business which is why there is now a listing charge.
Browse to the category of your local area and then add your listing to the real estate section if it exists or else just add it there
Other Important Directories to Submit To
For some search types (and real estate is one of them) Google includes a map section at the top of the page when you use their search engine. This information is populated directly from the Google Local Directory. The default data is now drawn from the Yellow Pages but DO NOT rely up on this. Creating your own listing is easy and will get you on the top of the list on the front page plus it puts more information in the directory listing.
This is a well regarded business directory and although US centric, most of the search engines are based in the US as well.
Other Directories to submit to include:
- Hotfrog
- International Real Estate Directory
- Property Listings Australia
- Come on Aussie
- TrueLocal
- Brownbook
- Start Local
- YourEstate.com.au
- HouseHunters
- Real Estate Guide.net
- Just Real Estate
Link Exchanges
There are many websites that will list you in their directory if you link back to them first. If it’s a good quality site and its about real estate then this may be worthwhile. Don’t bother unless it is about real estate. If you decide to exchange or swap link then you will first need to setup a links page on your website. Call this page, Links, Real Estate Links, Real Estate Resources or whatever you want but its purpose is to provide links to other real estate websites. Search “Real Estate Link Exchange” on google and you will find plenty of contenders.
Dont base your whole link building efforts on these exchanges but they are good to bolster your numbers.
Local Directories. Do a search on google to find local business directories to submit to. As an example searching for “Gold Coast Business Directory” and “Gold Coast Website Directory” identifies a number of local web directories that we can submit our agency website to.
Other Link Building Strategies
Here are some ideas for building other links back to your website, all of which will help your SEO.
- Include your link on everything off the net, especially if it is published online as when it is it becomes a link back to you. Things like job ads, print magazines, press releases and many more things end up online.
- Because Government (gov.au) and Educational (edu.au) domains are unavailable to just anybody, getting a link from them is very good for SEO and one of the best ways to get this is to sponsor your local school and get them to link to your website from the schools website.
- Get everyone from the same real estate network and the same area to all link to each other.
- Make sure you comment on blogs and forums and use your web address.
- Create your own blog. Other people will reference your blog posts either in their blog or will book mark it in many of the social bookmarking sites.
- Setup accounts on social bookmarking sites like Delicous and Stumbleupon and bookmark your own websites but don’t just stop there
- Create a Google Profile, Linked In Profile, Twitter Account for you and then a Twitter Account for your agency, Facebook Account for you and then a Twitter Page for Your agency. Each of these accounts allows you to link back to your website and to each other.
So Who Should You Link To
Since what sites you link to also improves your own authoritative value why dont you consider creating your own link section by linking to other websites about real estate and about your immediate area. Setting up a local business and community section on your website and a real estate guide will help find a home for these links. Government and education websites also have extra importance here so dont forget to link to those sites. Things like state industry bodies, local schools, universities, local businesses.
Dont go crazy and link to every single website you can find on the topic and dont link to everyone that links to you. Most experts agree that a link from someone that you dont reciprocate to is worth more than a link you do. Some seo experts suggest Site A links to Site B which in turn only links to Site C which links only back to Site A.
When you create your own link exchange pages you will get others contacting you to ask about exchanging links with you. Why not get a little proactive about it and set the rules on your page for how to exchange links. Something like these:-
If you wish to be considered for addition to this links page :
- All websites are to be for sites on Real Estate, Property, Property Investment, Nerang or the Gold Coast
- Links are not to include no follow attributes and if you remove your link so will we
- Please create a link on your website that can be accessed through your homepage (no orphaned pages) with the following link “Nerang First National – Gold Coast Real Estate Agent – specialising in residential real estate services in the suburbs of Nerang, Carrara, Highland Park and the Gold Coast Hinterland including property for sale and property for rent”
- Please send the location of our link on your website and the link text you require to linkexchange@nfn.com.au
WARNING ! Do not participate in a Link Farms or link building system.. ever..
A link farm is a collection of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of links to other websites through an organised link swapping. The links are not natural and each particpant has the same links page on their website with virtually the same links. This practice is frowned upon and you will probably get a negative impact on your SEO. Link farms certainly use to work when authoritative value was first introduced but now they do not.
At least one self styled Real Estate SEO expert is still pushing his link farm matrix as some magical form of SEO even though it has realy helped nobody else and all major search engines strongly warn in writing against participating or running a link farm. It is believed that a possible link farm trigger will be raised with search engines if you have any more than 100 links on page. If any page is even approaching this limit split it into multiple pages. If someone promises to give you hundreds or thousands of links for a price remember, if it sounds too good to be true… IT IS.
Link building should be done manually which is time and effort.. but you only have to do it once for the link work for you for years and even decades.
Next Article
The next article in the series will cover Keyword Research and working out exactly what sort of keywords outside of the “<<Suburb>> Real Estate” and “<<Suburb>> Property” normal ones you should be targeting.
Further Reading
The SEOmoz article Search Engine Ranking Factors is the results of a survey covering this very topic with 37 SEO Experts. It ranks common SEO strategies, how the experts rank each strategy and rates the agreement between them all. SEOmoz also produce a fantastic “Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization” at . You can even download the guide and print it out for later reading.
Giving Private Sellers access to list their property on realestate.com.au has been a very hot topic recently. I first posted about the issue back in April and Realestate.com.au issued a Private Selling Policy on the 28th of May which further defined the rules and which Peter posted on.
In this policy, REA state that their “business model focuses upon licensed real estate agents as our primary customers”. It also states the “entity does not obtain at least the range of agent services set out above, REA will consider that such a listing is a “private listing”” and that “REA has made the decision not to allow private listings on its website”
However this is where the Hypocrisy starts as one hand forgot to tell the other what it was doing. REA forgot to tell Hubonline just what the rules are and even though REA owns and operates both realestate.com.au and hubonline they are working against each other.
Hubonline created the website for www.myhomeisforsale.com.au which in turn uploads and continues to upload their listings to realestate.com.au but these listings are in clear breach of realestate.com.au’s “Private Selling Policy”.
From the website of www.myhomeisforsale.com.au – “My Home Is For Sale is a professional property advocacy company which holds a real estate license. We work with you to sell your home, providing you with the tools to sell your home without paying agents fees.”
When you see realestate.com.au’s sister company is guilty of flouting the rules, you can understand why nobody else in the past seemed to have been forced to follow the rules and stop uploading private sales.
So what does all this mean..?? First of all, let be clear… you can’t blame websites like www.myhomeisforsale.com.au and the others. They are just trying to make a buck and if REA does not enforce its own rules you can understand why they continue to upload private sellers to the system. In fact given that it was hubonline that built their website you could argue that it was given some sort of implied approval at least. In fact, if that website turns out to be pointless for their business model I reckon they should be able to ask for their money back as Hubonline should have known the concept breached REA’s rules.
A few of the comments in the other posts have focussed on the ACCC getting involved with this whole issue based on anti-competitive grounds. Till now I personally thought that was stretching it but when an REA business builds a website that is outside of the rules of another REA business, then there may be an anti-competitive case to answer after all.
One things is for sure…. Websites like www.happeningrealestate.com.au and www.place2live.com.au which I mentioned in the first article have had to change their offerings substantially. There products they offer are vastly different that those they promoted in April. They are now marketing themselves only as discount real estate agents and are not offering a service for private sellers. From this I can only conclude that realestate.com.au is now actively enforcing the rules right around the country but to be open and fair they need to have their own people follow the same rules or else someone might argue that it is anti-competitive!
Naturally this issue polarises opinions especially when you have some serious money involved. Real estate agents watched their impact on realestate.com.au being diluted with more and more private sellers popping up every day. REA had $1,000 per month per client on the line. Just www.myhomeisforsale.com.au had over 200 clients being charged $295 up front and then $79 per month so private sellers represented a fantastic income stream for those online agents. No wonder the FSBO sites were so upset!
REA made its bed with an agent only, no private sales policy and in the end they had to lie in it because agents helped to create realestate.com.au where it is today. The moral and right thing to do was to start properly enforcing their own rules again, which to their credit they did.. after a push, a shove and a nudge.
I suspect that this issue highlighted has fallen through the cracks and will be rectified shortly, as they seem to have fixed the problem with the other companies. Whilst they may not have cleaned up every incidence just yet it is probably well on the way.
The issue of private sellers on realestate.com.au will probably raise its head again one day. As an agent my preference is that private sellers be kept off the portal.. but IF it was ever to change, I really dont think it will make that much of a difference. Some.. but not much. I know many agents will consider that as blasphemy but lets look at it another way… Google’s entry (Where the bloody hell are you?) could mean that they become a major player in presenting listings to prospective purchasers and anybody can upload to Google Base.
This all got me thinking about what everyone’s preferences would be over the matter…How many would agents would accept private sellers if www.realestate.com.au decided to allow them? Would love to hear your thoughts!
Feel free to forward this around via email/twitter/facebook etc and ask real estate agents and salespeople to complete the poll.
EDIT: It seems that the deadline for the updated Private Selling Policy is still to come which goes a long way to explain why www.myhomeisforsale.com has not been updated. I think we can expect to see policy enforcement very shortly … Glenn 26/7/09
On the back of Domain recently announcing a partnership with 1Form, today they launched a very nifty iPhone application. I am lucky enough to own an iPhone so I eagerly downloaded the application and took it for a quick test drive.
The initial look and feel of the application is a much needed improvement on the mobile phone website which Domain currently provides property seekers (which is far inferior to that of REA’s). The layout, design, functionality and speed of the application is excellent highlighting some time and thought has been devoted to developing it.
A few features worth noting include:
- Option not to include surrounding areas - Unlike Domain’s website, the user is provided with the option not to include surrounding suburbs in search results.
- Results Ordered by Latest Listings - By default, search results are ordered by latest listings rather than featured properties.
- Show More Results - Similar to how Twitter limits tweets. Search results are limited to 10 and at the bottom of the page the user has the option to select further results, reducing the time it takes for the page to load.
- View Images - Users can view images in a slide show and can zoom in or rotate images, alternatively they can view all images in a thumb grid.
- Add to favourites - Users can save properties they are interested in and quickly switch between favourites and search results.
- Distinct Call to Action Options - The user has a number of options available to contact the agent. These include email, call their mobile and through their land line, making it extremely easy for the user to make that next step.
Any improvements needed? The application could pinpoint the users location through the phone’s GPS so the initial search can more quickly be performed. They could also include the property location on a map, an option to email a property to a friend and some way to email your favourites to yourself or another person.
There are a few teething issues. On a few searches it returned zero results, whereas I searched the same fields on my PC and I received 23 results. From my preliminary investigations this seems to be because of a property type issue as they are grouping types. This needs to be sorted out ASAP.
I really like how Domain have focused on the user’s experience rather than whats best for generating advertising revenue, resulting in an application which is a pleasure for the consumer to use. Lets hope they transfer some of this technology over to their mobile phone website!
In a recent press release, RE/MAX boast 99.9% of the national share of voice in TV advertising in the US for the first quarter of the year, but RE/MAX & other real estate franchises should take a close look at how ineffective their marketing of these TV commercials has been over the internet.
RE/MAX claims:
“While many of the real estate industry’s biggest players are scaling back their TV buys due to economic realities, the RE/MAX share of voice for national TV advertising jumped from 50% in 2008 to 99.9% in the first quarter of 2009.”
RE/MAX have done a good job with their new straight talking TV ads, but I can’t help but think that they could increase their audience by leveraging their video content across the internet via their huge network of agents/staff, databases of clients and via social media.
Whilst it was great to see that RE/MAX have taken the initiative & leveraged their video content by uploading the commercials onto YouTube, unfortunately that’s where their effective use of the internet for these videos seems to grind to a halt.
The collective online marketing power of a franchise like RE/MAX is enormous.
They have something like 100,000 Associates working within their company & their LeadStreet campaign successfully created a database of a Million More Leads in Six Months for US Agents, yet upon writing this post the Kick – 2009 RE/MAX Commercial is the video that appears to be their most popular out of their 2009 commercials uploaded onto YouTube so far, but it’s had less than 10,000 views over the past 4 months.
How to Promote Your Real Estate Videos Online
Here’s just a few ways that real estate franchises & independent offices could use the power of their existing network to help promote their brand, generate lots of Free traffic to their videos & enhance their online marketing presence.
- Embed the YouTube video within a short blog post.
- Include a link to the video within email marketing campaigns.
- Tweet about the video on Twitter.
Imagine the power of marketing that 100,000 RE/MAX Associates could have if they used some of these strategies to promote these professionally created TV Commercials out to their network of clients & associates via the internet.
If each Associate only got 10 people in a month to view the commercial, that would equate to approx. 1 million viewers per month for FREE.
In fact, if RE/MAX franchise really wanted to, they could get 10’s of millions of viewers to their videos each month at almost no cost. Now that’s what I’d call a powerful message.
Finally, there are over 100 alternative video sites other than YouTube. Real estate franchises should be uploading their videos/TV commercials onto some of these other sites as well to help generate even more FREE traffic & exposure of their brand.
Someone at REA has paid attention to the blogs around Australia and the recent improvements by Domain. As REA have just published a press release highlighting current updates to their site.
The new features include:
- Cleaner home page and site design: The realestate.com.au site has been refreshed to give it a cleaner look and feel.
- Improved navigation: The navigation menu has been simplified to drive more people to search your OFI and Auction times
- New page layout for OFI and Auction Times (beta): The new page layout appears in a list format, making it even easier for potential buyers and sellers to see all the upcoming OFI’s and Auctions in their selected suburbs.
- New ‘view results by inspection times’ (beta): The search results page can now be easily filtered by OFI time – property seekers can quickly sort the search results page to order the listings by the date and time of the next Open for Inspection.
The homepage looks a lot crisper with smaller text used for less important areas and JavaScript to control links. It appears they are trying to more easily allow the user to navigate to property pages rather than the non real estate and marketing pages. Adding OFI and Auction Times as an option in property results pages is great for property seekers as they can easily print or short list properties they are interested in viewing.
As indicated in their press release we can expect further updates over the next 12 months. It has been a long time between website updates at REA, which should make the next 12 months a very interesting time.
I have seen so many mobile applications in the past few years come across my desk, all accompanied by grandiose claims on how it will revolutionise the way we search for property.
However, maybe, just maybe, someone might be into something here. It is called Layar and it has been developed by an innovative team of Dutch developers at www.sprxmobile.com
How it works
Layar is derived from location based services and works on mobile phones that include a camera, GPS and a compass. Layar is first avaliable for handsets with the Android operating system (the G1 and HTC Magic). It works as follows: Starting up the Layar application automatically activates the camera. The embedded GPS automatically knows the location of the phone and the compass determines in which direction the phone is facing. Each partner provides a set of location coordinates with relevant information which forms a digital layer. By tapping the side of the screen the user easily switches between layers. This makes Layar a new type of browser which combines digital and reality, which offers an augmented view of the world.
Can it work as a standalone tool? I don’t know, but I would say Google, MSN and Yahoo would be very interested in the technology. Maybe the technology could work integrated into a mobile browser or tool. I just love the innovation though. Just imagine the uses for it!
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