Real Estate Websites

At the end of 2004 I began playing with the creation of real estate websites.  There was not a very good choice of platforms. One choice was to put up a less than ideal .html site on my ISP subdomain and the other was to get a Realtor.com site.  One was cheap and cheesy and the other was expensive and cheesy.  I elected to go the expensive and cheesy route and got no results from it.  I am sure I am not the only Real Estate Agent that has made that mistake - I had an expensive electronic business card that no one ever saw.

Point2agent

While sitting around during the Christmas Holidays of 2004, I ventured on to the Keller Williams Intranet and was browsing through the approved vendors.  Yes, a special website area for those selling REALTORS their services and products for only $39.00 per month.  Let's see what new monthly expense would I want to incur!  But there it was, a real estate website platform available to me for free!  Wow, a free website, what a substantial amount of savings, but how cheesy would it be?

I logged on to Point2agent and signed up for the free site.  It was cool, everything I needed including a backend office with drip e-mails, a fantastic listing application, and a means of sharing listings with other agents.  Later would come a blogging application and syndication of listings to prominant highly trafficked national real estate sites.

This was way cool!  I began to customize the website and became proficient with the use of all the tools that were included.  But the really cool part was the forums that let you discuss problems and learn from others that were in the know.  That is where I first became familiar with the names Bob Crain, John Sabia, Jim Sparrow, and Judy Orr.  Their primary focus was getting good search results for their websites on Google.  And they were kind enough to share their insight as to how things worked and what did not work or even worse what was a definite search engine no-no.

My findings were that with lots of effort creating unique and relevant content that applied to the search result I wanted led to website traffic.  No, no search engine was going to lead visitors to my site unless there was content relvant to their search criteria.  Easy enough, create relevant content and get relevant traffic - how elementary, this wasn't rocket science. It was work and those that worked hard and dedicated many hours to the effort reaped the reward of visitors, not sales, visitors.  The next step in the process is to learn how to touch these visitors without alienating them.  A well thought out drip e-mail campaign would do the trick.  But wait, it took almost six months for the first buyer to show up!  That's right, the person looking for real estate on the internet is going to start his research long before making the decision to buy, you had better have a site that keeps them coming back for more information so that when they do get ready it is you they contact. 

I created hundreds of unique pages and the visitors started to pile in, and better yet the return visitor numbers rocketed up also.  Things were getting good and we got very busy.  Then disaster - The Big Daddy Update on Google!  Google had changed the algorithm for it's search and was penalizing for duplicate content.  What duplicate content?  Well try the duplicate content from canonical issues!  What?  Well it seems that the Point2 sites were getting indexed as www.sitename.com and as sitename.com, two identical websites - and in to the Google abyss for domains serving duplicate content!

Real Estate Webmasters

A new forum had started called Real Estate Webmasters and there was information on there about using 301 redirects to solve the G issues.  Since the website traffic had essentially evaporated, I had plenty of time to sit around and browse this new forum.  After Big Daddy hit, Crain, Sabia, Sparrow, and Orr had pretty much disappeared from the Point2 forums and I wasn't learning anything new without them there.

Soon I was learning all kinds of new things from a bunch of very tech savvy agents at REW and began to hang out there regularly.  My old Point2 friends were fed up enough with the canonical issue that they made the transition to REW websites.  Being the loyal one I am (and the site was free), I stuck it out with Point2.  After several months the Point2site recovered from the Big Daddy penalties after some 301 redirects were finally put in place.  My rankings finally got back where they were and then exceeded where they were due to site aging and the G algorithm.  We again got busy and I dropped off the radar at REW as a participant but still lurked around from time to time.

Making a change

I had wanted to move to the Gulf Coast and in anticipation began aging a URL for the search engines so that when I made the move I would have a web address that would not be sandboxed.  I used a Mambo and then a Joomla CMS with information about the Alabama Gulf Coast and more specifically the communities of Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, and Fort Morgan, Alabama.  This Content Management System was really cool and created dynamic web pages instead of static ones, the versatility was really cool and powerful.  I immediately started ranking very highly for all kinds of local terms barring the real estate ones that were part of the sandbox formula.

After my move I obtained my Alabama Real Estate License and went nuts creating a new Point2 site that the aged URL would be pointed to and abandoned the Joomla CMS.  The Point2 site was doing really well and I ranked for hundreds of terms but the site was slow serving pages to the public and the creation of the content I wanted was tedious and cumbersome - the results were great, but a dynamic application would be oh so much better.  I had admired the REW sites for years now and my old friends that had gone with REW sites following the Big Daddy update now were doing extremely well in their areas.  The new norm became go after that big search result "City Real Estate", but get the majority of your visitors from the "long tails".  The "long tails" were easy enough to figure out how to get, but the static pages and the framed in IDX searches meant long boring sessions of creating content, optimizing it, creating a special IDX search, and framing it in.  In addition, I had started using a special menu that necessitated additional steps every time I wanted to add a page.  It was time to get back to a Content Management System and I could go the Joomla route and have to maintain my server, relearn using MySQL and php, as well as designing the site to display properties.  Going this route would not give me a drip e-mail application nor a lead management application.  I could go try to reinvent the wheel or I could finally go the REW route and get the best of the best in Real Estate CMS's.  If I valued my time at all, then the REW route was the only way to go.  The Point2 site was great and still is great for beginners, but it was time to pay the piper and get some bang out of the buck.

The process

I contacted Morgan at REW and they began a mock up of what they envisioned from talking with me and from perusing the vacation guides that I had sent them for the Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, and Fort Morgan area.  These guides gave them a good feel for the area and the type of real estate that we are dealing with which is mostly beach front, bay front, and canal front condominiums and houses on or near the Gulf of Mexico.

Morgan suggested I just let his team have a go of it.  He knew how much I liked specialized searches, map searches, the ability to search by complex or subdivision, as well as by city and my propensity for creating pages for specific property types.  I had been around REW long enough to go for the gusto and how to do it.  The custom design took several weeks to get mocked up and made functional.  Then the IDX team went to work and implemented the special IDX application into the site.  I already understood the page creation process and the optimization of meta tags, keywords, and descriptions.  The new learning curve was to figure out how to use snippets - php language that would be inserted within the .html of the webpages to generate the special menu blocks and IDX searches that were specific to the pages that were being created.

I spent several weeks creating special pages that kept the same type of relevance as my old site, optimized them, and added snippets that would serve special menus on the pages as well as specialized search results for the pages.  This isn't for sissys - the work is tedious and time consuming, but much easier than a static site and the results are very satisfying.  You must be able to think in three dimensions to nest the lists properly to give you the "siloing effect" that will benefit the special pages with PR juice, relvance, and importance.

The end result

The results of all this effort are now in place.  It is time to fish or cut bait!  Since there is quite a large investment in a custom site you better be ready to go fishing and have someone with you to cut the bait.  The page creation, optimization, and search and menu snippets, and page content are the chum slick to atract the fish.  The search engines are the fishing lines, the drip e-mails are the reels, and we the Real Estate Webmasters are the fishermen utilizing all of these tools to land the big ones.

Going live

Going live is the casting of all the trolling lines into the water.  I used my seasoned URL and pointed it from my old Point2 site to the new REW custom site. When the spiders come through the chum will be cast overboard and hopefully the attracting slick will pull in fish from all directions.  The difficult part is that you are taking a given - the present site and all of the great inbound links that were worked for so diligently - and casting it aside in belief that the new results will be even better.  It is no time to lose faith in one's self, the platform, or the provider.  But just as in so much of life, your faith can be challenged by supposed or imagined difficulties that may or may not come true - going live will test that faith.  Here I sit nine days into the transition watching old results disappear and new results appear.  Old links remain and are redirected to new URL's.  The flux is taking place and traffic drops.  New results appear and visitors for unimagined terms arrive.  Fear jumps in and you wonder why no one is coming in on that old reliable term.  You show up in this search now and don't in that one.  The page is perfected for one term and you don't show and unperfected in another and you do.  Old links show - new links show - phase in - phase out - "Boy I am smart", "How stupid I am, I should have redirected "X".  Emotions and pride roller coaster.  Gee I hope my competitors see that result!  Eeek, I hope nobody noticed I fluxed out of that one! 

How long does it take to get completely indexed when pointing an old URL to a new site?  It seems that in these days it would be pretty quickly.  Yet, I have provided a G sitemap, a sitemap page, and very thorough interlinking but nine days into this only about a third of the pages have been indexed and of the SERP's many of my results are for the old pages.  Patience Son!  The time is going to come.  You have done a good job, you know what the site needs, you know what the page needs, be patient and take the day off.  Don't go make stupid changes because you are impatient.  Time is the only factor here and it will be well worth it.

Keep the Faith

I mutter to myself keep your faith in practicing what you know, in short order you will dominate the Alabama Gulf Coast for searches of beach front, bay front, and canal front property.  Beach Real Estate will probably not be a number one term for your site, but that was not your intent.  You still rank well for Gulf Shores, Orange Beach, and Fort Morgan and you will soon rank well for Ono Island, the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay, Point Clear, Fairhope, Daphne, Spanish Fort, Foley, and Robertsdale, Alabama Real Estate.

Note to self - Next time you decide to redirect your URL, take a 10 day vacation and then check your SERP's - if you aren't fully indexed by then, add some more content or take another 10 days off.  Keep the faith, practice your trade, get the results!

Thanks to all you guys on REW for a great way to practice our trade!

Please stop by and review the new www.gulfshoreslife.com and compare to the old one calcarter1.point2agent.com and be sure to leave a comment you may have experienced when redirecting URL's to new sites.  I assure you there will be some people in the future that will appreciate this post and your comments!

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