WordPress Featured Listings Scenario

Posted on March 14, 2008
Filed Under Products, Real Estate News, Real Estate Websites |

Featured Real Estate Listings for SEO advantages

Lets look at a scenario for building SEF and SEO presentable content for your blog with real estate listings. In the previous post I outlined some of the basic issues we encountered with the beta versions and then went on to briefly explain some of those changes for this version 1.2.1 release.  One way to articulate the details for those changes would be to simply present a scenario for better understanding of why this method is so very important and beneficial. First lets do a little history about writing effective real estate blog marketing posts, and then examine the scenario

Marketing Real Estate Listings With Your Blog - Search Engine strategy proven to work.

One thing I’ve been telling many of my Realtor clients is that when using a blog, should they  discover that they have little time to contribute to the blog on a regular bases, they could consider extending an opportunity to their clients to write content for them.  How and why you might ask? The reasons and benefits may surprise you.

Back in October 2006 when I began using WordPress regularly on Realtor sites, I came up with the notion that no one really knows their home better than the owner of the home (as most agree) and the home owner would be better positioned for writing informative content.  MLS and many times website inclusion of an mls type feed present very little useful information to a prospective buyer  as much of it is rote bland summary points.  As such I came up with a solution that we decided to test out on a few real estate sites.  As said, mls data can be rote, boring and mundane and it stood to reason that if a Realtor could present better information about a property he / she would be in a better position to sell that property. Right?

So by extending an opportunity to home owners to write detailed information about their homes and provide photos, among other things, a Realtor could publish valuable details to their blogs therein providing a link back to the listing details for that property in a way that better markets the property.  Hence one of the motivating factors in building the WordPress Featured Listings plug-in.

Since testing this idea over the span of just over a year now, we discovered that everyone who employs this method reports back extremely favorable results.  Some devices being employed in addition to the home owner’s submitted content is the inclusion of things like charts and or maintenance schedules that have been logged over time by the home owner which can include remodel expenses, roofing, lawn care, patching the driveway and other things readers would be interested in.  I know that if I were shopping for a home, I’d be interested in knowing how often someone had performed home owner maintenance and I’m sure others would be too when shopping for a home. A blog presents a way to achieve this with home owner submitted content. As most of my Realtor clients use a format schedule I assembled for them, they can set the criteria of the types of things a home owner can or should cover in describing their home. More on this later in the post but for now, just keep the premise in mind as we look at this scenario.

Marking My Featured Real Estate Listing (scenario)

New listing by Realtor:  Some Luxury Home In Some Town, Some State
Following a common standard operating procedure the Realtor tasks his staff to add the listing to the local MLS, orders a yard sign, and sets about adding the property to their prescribed marketing efforts (website, printed magazines, news paper and other rag sheets etc…)

The Realtor decides that he is way to busy to write a blog post about the property and may opt instead to task an employee to write the post following some checklists and procedures for writing such content or the Realtor may outsource the content writing to a copywriter.  All said and done, the copy complete, property listed, now time will tell how effective those efforts are. But, why leave it at that?

This same Realtor is an educated Realtor with lots of marketing and psychology studies in his background so this Realtor knows that a more personable and heart felt the informative description is in the blogs copy, the longer a person will stay on the site and the more likely they contact the Realtor would be.  But who is to write about this property in such a way and wouldn’t it cost a great deal to have it professionally written with all the checks and balances of keyword density and link relevance?  This two part questions is one we can answer in two sentences.

The Realtor extends the opportunity to his client home owner to share as much detail as their heart desires and they can include video tours, photos and other media elements to be published on the world wide web.  Next the Realtor visits a site like The Brokers Edge and uses the online tools for checking the material for link relevance, keyword density, and other facets prior to publishing, which the Realtor does by using a pre-formatted method like the one included in our Professional WP Editor Plug-in. Now the post is ready for the next step.

The Realtor uses the WordPress Featured Listings plug-in and includes a single instance of this particular properties listing that rotates random images from those available with each refresh of the page. Then the Realtor adds a second featured listing inclusion using the WordPress Featured Listings plug-in showing an additional 3, 5, or say 10 listings from that very neighborhood which he / she includes just below the blog post.  Do you see where I’m going with this?

Who stands to know more, write more and inform more about a particular home than a home owner?  Who can write how they "feel" about their home, the neighborhood, the schools, and other facets of a home so effectively? Any Realtor would be hard pressed to provide such information in a cost effective way and even more hard pressed to justify such an expense of conducting research the home owner already knows.  write from their perspective for inclusion into the Real Estate blog for greater potential ranking and buyer interaction.

Now you might just say why not include hard coded links in the post to the listings details from photos you add to the post? Why use the Featured Listings WordPress plug-in for such a mundane task.?  The answer is simple. Speed and flexibility.  With this plug-in we have been able to create custom variants for clients that allow them to use it with products like the UltimateIDX, IDX Web Pro, vieleRETS and others. It has been recently tested with not only Open Realty 2.4.4 but the variant version called EZ Pro Realty and we have plans to port a version to EZRealty for Joomla this next week.

Please read the latest posts on this today.

Comments

Leave a Comment

If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Comments


TEMP CODE: GDHXCDX17249629
Close
E-mail It