GerryThomasen's Blog: All Categories

Here on the Real Estate Webmasters writing/SEO team, we have a standard way of setting up our "area" pages. It is proven to be effective, when the goal for the page is conversion of traffic into leads.

What's an "Area Page"?

This is a term we use loosely to refer to a page that describes a relevant, name-able real estate market that is worked by the agency that runs the website. Sometimes it describes a certain property type ("Phoenix condos"), and sometimes it has a broader scope ("Tempe real estate").

Such a page will need to have the following characteristics:

• It must be optimized, to attract relevant traffic (people Googling "phoenix condos")
• It must have relevant listings (or a visible link to them), to elicit registration
• It…

Are you tired of writing long emails to your designer or programmer, only to receive a reply that looks like this?:

"It looks fine on my end."
or
"I'm not sure what you're referring to."

Well, no longer! Just read my amazing fourth blog post (below) and you'll swear you're sitting in the same office as your development team!

That's right - NO more wasting time and money on billable emails back and forth! NO more surly one-line responses from kids half your age!

Tip #1 - Clearing Your Browser's Cache

Often, your web developer will have made a change on your site and you can't see the change, so you complain that they are a quack and a charlatan, a bogus designer, and you want to talk to their production manager. Then they politely tell you to…

Ever place an image on your page and have it look like this in relation to the text?: (ignore my border)

Not only is it towering over the text (instead of "floating" within it like in a magazine), but there should be a margin separating it from the text (see the word "As" almost getting ink on it?).

If you're familiar with inline CSS, you can do something like this: <img src="/images/lab.jpg" style="width:200; float:left; margin-right:6px; margin-bottom: 6px;" />

But in case that doesn't work, read on...

REW Shortcuts

There are two options for easy image formatting in our Content Management System.

In the WYSIWYG (the page editor buttons)

Login to your backend and go to the page you want to add a photo to. See the square icon that looks like…

Your content will look prettier, better organized, and more professional if you can put calls to action (or other distinct units of text) into their own boxes within the body, like this:

Your Real Estate Webmasters site, whether it's a templated design or fully custom, comes pre-installed with at least 3 options for this kind of callout box. There are two CSS classes ("highlight" and "important") and the HTML "blockquote".

Blockquote

This markup should create an effect on any html page, indenting the text contained within it. REW sites format blockquotes as a box with a thin black border and a quotation mark graphic, like this:

To put text in a blockquote, just surround it with the blockquote tags:

       <blockquote>Your text…

Everyone knows that search engines like to see a sitemap on your website. The sitemap should be linked-to from the homepage and, ideally, from every page. The easiest way to make this happen would be to put the sitemap link in your side-navigation, but, the sitemap is insignificant to 99% of your users, so it shouldn't waste space in your side-navigation.

So, how can you have a sitemap that's linked to from every page, but isn't in your navigation? You could paste the link into the body of every page, but that's lame (time-consuming and unreliable, I mean).

Just add the link to your footer, at the bottom of every page. It's easy, and I'm going to tell you how to do it, because I twitch every time I see an REW site without a link to the sitemap in the…