Silentbits.com has had a great editorial up on some impressive blog designs. I feel that these designs can be used as fuel for your creative mind when started your own real estate blog. Blogs can be a great way to demonstrate for your particular area that you are the expert by providing insight into the daily news for your city’s real estate market. In the future, you will definately want to take advantage of this rapidly growing trend among real estate agents.
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To all my readers I’d like to wish you all a happy 4th of July! I hope that you get to spend this Independence Day with your family and friends. While you are visiting with family, be sure to share this prominent quote of today’s history:
“Thus may the 4th of July, that glorious and ever memorable day, be celebrated through America, by the sons of freedom, from age to age till time shall be no more. Amen and Amen.” - Virginia Gazette on July 18th, 1977
You can read about this wonderful day in history in full detail here.
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I was excited to login to Mapquest.com today and notice that they’ve implemented a feature that is an absolute necessity for real estate agents. Mapquest is known for providing accurate maps and detailed explanations on driving directions to your destinations. Now, you can create a route using their “beta” route planner to input more than one destination.
The first thing you will notice is that Mapquest is now implementing Ajax technology to create a seamless user experience. You can add up to 10 destinations with ease using saved history or direct input. You’ll also find useful that you may select to avoid highways or avoid tolls. This comes in really handy when planning routes for your clients on showing tours. Simply take a printed copy of your final route with you and being lost becomes a rarity. You can even feel safe to provide a copy for your clients if they are following you; in Houston I have yet to get lost using the Mapquest turn by turn directions.
There is one key feature that I enjoyed about Ask.com Maps multi-route planning tool that Mapquest has yet to implement. With Mapquest, you are not able to drag or rearrange the destinations based on the proximity with one another. I found this tool to be really handy on Ask.com Maps as I always didn’t know which was faster to get to each route. One way to work around this caveat with Mapquest is to simply enter the address where it becomes saved in your history. If you need to delete the destination on your list are re-insert it elsewhere, it’s quite simple after the initial input. Simply click on the “saved and recent” butt next to the address input box and a list will come up showing all your past searches for address. Click the desired address and your are done.
Mapping software has really been taking giant leaps forward. Through nearly everyday use, I’ve self-discovered that Mapquest has the most accurate directions that it’s competitors. Now that Mapquest allows for multi-route planning, which saves me from printing directions to and from each property, I am confident that all my mapping needs are now taken care of by Mapquest.
I wonder what the next improvement will be?
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I am always on the lookout for tools that can be used by real estate agents to increase the traffic to their site. One such tool that I ran across about a couple of months ago is named Internet Business Promoter.
This piece of software made by Axandra offers a vast array of tools to use by the beginner or avid web developer. It also enables it’s users to bypass tedious tasks, such as directory submissions. By far my favorite is a tool is the “Top 10 Web Page Optimizer”.
The optimizer will initially ask you for a target keyword or phrase. In this example, let’s use “Houston Real Estate”. What this software from Axandra will do is analyze the top ten pages that appear when browsing that keyword phrase via any major search engine such as Google, then compare their pages to yours!
You must first enter your URL, or web page address. Let’s go ahead an use my site as an example: MyHomeHouston.com. After inputting your URL, it will then ask you which search engine would you like to optimize for. I suggest you start with Google, since they currently have the largest market share among Internet users.
Moving forward, it will then ask for your keywords phrase where I have entered “Houston Real Estate”, and it then shows you the top 10 pages that come up when typing in “Houston Real Estate” into Google.com. This is more along the lines of a verification, just to make sure you want your site compared to all 10, or maybe just a few. You also have various other options to choose from which we can get into at later date.
After it’s searching process you are left with a nifty report, analyzing the keyword usage, title descriptions, keyword density on all the top 10 pages for “Houston Real Estate”! You can obviously see how this tool can come in very handy, as all you must do is simply mimic the top 10 sites as a foundation, then begin to input quality content to rise in the rankings.
Perhaps you do not know what keywords phrases to use. Internet Business Promoter also has that covered. They are also providing a nice keyword generator that uses the content from your site to suggest keywords that appear often in your articles or pages. This tool can stumble upon frequent used words that you may not catch off hand.
The Internet Business Promoter software is available as a demo for free. Many of the useful features are still able to be used in the demo. I suggest that in time, however, you take the investment in your business and purchase the full version which gives you the best web page optimization tools.
The only negative side is that their software is quite expensive. You are looking at a hefty $250 investment. I suggest that you first make sure that you are ready to invest in this part of your business before purchasing the full version, as the demo is pretty sufficient if you are new to SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
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