Frequently at the support desk I get the question “What do I do to get the most out of HomeQuest?”

1. Website: The first and biggest answer to that is a website.  Over 2 years ago we started offering WordPress based websites which are far more capable than the older websites we used to offer.

Our old websites were basically just a simple web page with some contact information and a way for clients to sign up for HomeQuest listing emails from you.  This was essentially just a lead capture to try to get listings into a clients hands.

The new websites are fully fledged WordPress websites.  You can blog on them, create pages with information and live listings from the MLS, add media including pictures and video and much more with it.  Because of the changes in search engines and web technology over time, upgrading to a WordPress site is imperative for your web presence.  Having an old website with the HomeQuest lead capture just doesn’t cut it for a website any longer.

The biggest and most noticeable difference between our old sites and our new is the way the listings are presented to the client.  With the old websites, clients had to signup and wait for the listings to come by email.

With the new websites, any visitor to your site can instantly see the listings by clicking on your Search Listings map.  No waiting for an email required, the search is available 24/7 for your existing clients and anyone who visits your site. See a quick tour vide of our new home search tool.

2. Unique Content on your site: The text and images of your website need to be something unique, not left as it was when you first setup the site.

A site without unique content is pretty much worthless.  If you setup a WordPress website and it still looks like the example image below, you are missing the point and missing out on an opportunity.  Default text is murder on a search engine ranking.  Not only does it look unprofessional to any real user, but when Google indexes a website that says “This is your default home page welcome text”, it knows that this is a crap website that has just been tossed together from a template and has no real value.

You need to change the wording on your pages, blog posts, and Agent Profile at the very least to get rid of that default text.

To take full advantage of your capabilities in WordPress:

Have useful pages up top with real information on them.  Your website needs to be a resource for the people who are going to be using it.  If your website is not a compelling resource of information, there is no reason for someone to return to it.  Likewise with the Google search engine, if your website is not full of information for it to read and index, how are you supposed to show up when someone searches?

Blogging is important too. If you add something to your blog regularly, there is more information for Google and the other search engines to crawl and look, more keywords that it will find and match you to.  One of the very best ways to move your site gradually up in the search ranking is to give Google exactly what it wants to find: new, fresh, relevant and unique content.  Being unique in your content is a big deal, Google will see copied content if it came from another site, and you will not receive credit for it.

3. Have a plan:  A website with a focus and a plan will make your web life easier.

Are you a neighborhood expert?  A short sale/REO specialist?  Your website needs to clearly reflect what you do.  If you are a selling agent you should write a great blog post about the home, and place the link to that blog post out there on the internet for people to find.  Click here to see how to write a good blog post about your listing. If you are a neighborhood expert your site should be full of listings, text, information and images from the neighborhoods that you serve.  Check out Jewel of the Pearl for an example of a good neighborhood expert site that is informational and unique.  Know what information you want to present to your audience before trying to decide what you need from your website.

4. Customization and SEO: Yes, it’s important; Yes, it costs more.

Another aspect of a good website is the customization.  Customization is completely optional, you don’t have to do it. A site that is customized is far more visually appealing to the visitors, and even the search engines can tell the difference between a template and a custom site which arguably would give it more weight in the search engine ranking.  Custom sites bring out a unique design based on what you and the designer came up with, and are built to match your needs rather than being bound by the limits of a template.  Click here to learn more about our custom sites.

The other important aspect to a truly effective site is your SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  For those who would like help with their SEO, HomeQuest recommends contacting Though Faucet.  Gahlord Dewald at Thought Faucet can help you with planning and executing the right SEO tools and techniques to improve your ranking with the search engines, and improve the website experience overall for both you and your clients.

Both customization and SEO are an additional investment into your website, but they also might just be the most important one you could make.

Future revisions will be based on feedback so please leave comments.

WordPress makes it easy to create a website within minutes that you can call your “online hub”.  But is it really that easy?  Of course not…  If it was, every agent under the sun would be creating a WordPress site, dumping some content into it, and carrying the sacks of cash it generates straight to the bank. Well, that’s not how it works.  There’s some work involved. Some strategy behind the work. Some thought behind the strategy.  But, if you’re willing to put in the work, we can help with the rest.

So, lets take a look at some of the strategies, and the thought processes behind them, in creating an online hub for your Real Estate business:

Strategy 1 – Design – Probably one of the more important strategies in creating a “successful” online presence is incorporating custom design work into the mix.   The design of your website should reflect you as an individual, your strengths as a Real Estate professional, the communities you’re involved in and the activities you do on a daily basis, all wrapped into a website you’re actually proud of.  The design should closely mirror the content you create, and even carry over into your other marketing and branding activities. (See: What Makes this Custom WordPress Real Estate Site an Instant Classic?)

Strategy 2 – Capture – Another important strategy that you have to work into the overall design of your online hub is some sort of lead capture, like the HomeQuest WordPress IDX platform provides.  Now I know there’s been this uprising of thought over the last few years in the Real Estate blogging community that we should stop using words like “leads” and “capture” and “conversion”.  I’ve often wondered if those behind this way of thinking even had leads to convert in the first place.  Regardless, capturing and converting leads is how we in the online Real Estate space get clients.

Strategy 3 – Content - Possibly the most important strategy, and where the real work comes into play in the building of a successful online hub is the creation of good content.  Good content helps in two ways; first with keeping your readers engaged and secondly by providing something for the search engines to find you.  Content can be in the form of writing, video, pictures and any combination of the three.  Once you nail the design and capture elements, this should be your main focus.  Your content should also reflect you, your strengths, activities and communities you’re involved in. It should basically mirror your design in that if you’ve got a site that’s designed around “modern homes” you shouldn’t create (much) content around anything else.  Here’s an idea for creating good neighborhood level content.

Strategies 4 and 4.5 – Promotion - Promotion can actually fall into two categories, which is why this post is labeled 4.5 strategies…  Basically you have promotion of others, and self promotion of your own content.  Promotion of others is a great way to catch the attention of local residents, businesses, etc. and also a great way to generate relevant links back as people return the favor.  Self promotion is the “art” of showing others what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, possibly leveraging some of the social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter along the way.

Like I mentioned above, putting together a successful online hub requires a bit of work.  Most of the heavy lifting revolves around the creation of content and then promoting that content to your communities.

HomeQuest can help by designing you a WordPress website custom tailored to you and your business, along with providing the top of the line IDX/CRM platform needed to get your online hub working at its full potential.  Contact us today if you’d like more information on how we can help.

There’s no better way to support this activity than to build a killer landing page for the neighborhood you’ve chosen. This landing page can become a great resource for clients searching for neighborhood information online, and a perfect place to direct visitors to land with your supporting marketing materials if you choose to do so. Plus, there are several other benefits that come along with doing this that may not be apparent right from the beginning. By actually doing the research to build the landing page, you’ll get to know the neighborhood better. Depending on the type of information you choose to include on the page, you may also want to get out and meet members of the community (ie: restaurant and store owners) which can possibly lead to creating a working business relationship and in some cases, great friendships.

For the purposes of this post, we’ll be looking at an example page that we created which focuses on Portland’s “Alberta Arts District”. So, let’s dive into the 5 tips that you can use to create a killer landing page for the neighborhood you’re focusing on.

Tip #1 – Keep your eyes on the prize.
When creating a static page like this, there should always be a goal in mind for when the visitor hits this page. It’s probably safe to assume that in most cases, you want the visitor to eventually register in your IDX lead capture system. So, it’s good to always keep that in mind and basically sculpt your content around accomplishing that goal.

Tip #2 – Include relevant pictures and video.
Don’t just tell your visitors about all the cool things to do in your neighborhood, show them. Photo and video galleries are a great way to display the true look and feel of the neighborhood. Focus on things that visitors to the neighborhood may find interesting, odd, or unique. In our example page, we’ve used a couple WordPress plugins that allow us to include a photo gallery and a gallery of related videos. This avoids having to embed all the photos and videos separately, which can turn you page into lengthy display, that would most likely be very ineffective. This leads directly into the next tip…

Tip #3 – Keep it short and sweet.
A good neighborhood page should also contain info on schools, shopping, restaurants, and other fun things about the neighborhood. That means you’re going to have A TON of info to try to squeeze into this page. Not to mention fitting any photos and videos you want to include. You definitely don’t want visitors to have to scroll through all this info. So, how do you solve this problem? Well, we use another WordPress plugin called TabsSlides (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-tabs-slides/). This plugin allows you to create a set of tabs, each of which behaves almost like a whole new page with it’s own content. You can see this in action on the example page.

Tip #4 – Include some sort of lead capture device (preferably HomeQuest’s WordPress IDX plugin).
You’ll notice on our example page, that there are several ways we’ve done this. We’ve linked to the interactive map (which can include your neighborhood specific blog posts) using both a text link for SEO purposes and a graphic image. Once users are on the map and clicking around through the listings, they will be asked to register after viewing a certain number of listings (based on a number you choose). We’ve also included the neighborhood’s active listings at the bottom of the page, in list format. These listings are automatically updated so your page will always show the most recent listings available in that neighborhood.

Tip #5 – Link back to this page in future blog posts.
This is similar to tip #1 above but more for the overall strategy of your website. Using blog content to drive traffic back to your neighborhood pages can be a great strategy for converting visitors into leads, and eventually into clients. There are also some benefits in doing this when it comes to search engine optimization, but that could be a whole post in itself. We’ll save that for a later date. For now, just know that linking back to your content in this way is a good thing.

So, there you have the 5 tips that we think should help you create a great looking neighborhood landing page that actually performs well when it comes to converting traffic. If you have any other tips that have been working for you that you’d like to share, we’d love to hear them. Feel free to leave tips and ideas in the comments below.

Supported Browsers:

• Internet Explorer 7 or higher
• Mozilla Firefox 2 or higher
• Safari 2 or higher
• Google Chrome 1 or higher

Browsers all work differently, even though they all surf the same internet.  This means that some browsers will work better than others.   With our speed tests we have found Google Chrome to be the fastest, followed by Safari and Firefox.  Internet Explorer 7 is old and has poorer performance, so Internet Explorer 8 is preferred.

Please note that if you have your site hosted with us you do not need to worry about these items.  We have already done them for you.

Caching:

The HomeQuest IDX uses caching to speed up its actions by storing several things from Google and HomeQuest on your local WordPress installation.  Inside of the HQ IDX plugin directory is a “cache” folder.  Make sure that the cache folder has write permissions.

Themes:

You can use almost any modern template with the HomeQuest IDX, but please be aware of the following to help you choose the best fitting theme.  The map takes up as much room as it can without forcing the user to scroll down.  This means that  if you have a tall header, your map will be pushed down and will be smaller.  This means that people using small laptops will not have too much room on their map to move around.    Use a template that does not have a huge header for the best results.  Your mileage may vary with different themes, but most modern themes will look great with the plugin.  We also have several Page Templates available to help with integration with your site.

Page Templates:

A Page Template makes a page look or act differently depending on the one that is used.  The standard WordPress template is used if you are just going to have a page of content.  However, the HomeQuest IDX map needs a special page template installed in order to let your site know not to include the widget sidebars.  This must be done because the IDX map should be fullscreen left to right to be useful and easy.  You don’t want a squished skinny little map that nobody can see or use.  The map_template.php file in the HQ IDX plugin directory can be copied to your current theme’s directory in order to add our HomeQuest Map Template to your WordPress system.

Why have custom icons?  As an agent, you find yourself selling a neighborhood to a family just as much as you have to sell the house.  To sell a neighborhood, just blog about it and your map posts will do the talking for you to any website visitor.

How do I get started?:

To use the special mapping icons, you must have specially named Categories added to your system.  Any post included in one of these categories will display with a special icon.

Adding the Categories (Do this step once)

Note: You must add these Categories, they do not exist by default.  Make sure to keep the exact name or the special icon will not display.

Special Category Names:

• Listing
• Miscellaneous blog post (anything that the system does not recognize)
• Coffee shop
• Shopping
• Happy hour
• Restaurants
• Schools
• Events
• Parks

Categorizing a post (Do this everytime you want a post to show on your map):

Add a post (from Write > Post) like a normal blog post.  (Note: Make sure to geocode the post, only geocoded posts appear on your map.)

When you categorize the post, make sure to use one of the pre-defined special categories listed above.

Example:

Blogging is not required on your IDX site.  You can “hide” the blog related pages if you would still like a great looking IDX site, but you do not wish to use the blogging functionality.  Click here to see how to hide pages.

What are the advantages of blogging?  I am already busy being a realtor, why should I spend my time being a blogger too?

Search Engine Optimization: One of the first reasons to blog is to increase your ranking with search engines.  A site that remains stagnant for long periods of time without any changes ranks much lower on a Google search than a site that has a lot of content and gets updated on a regular basis.   You will also receive more traffic from Google for non real estate related terms.  For example, if I post a blog on Washington Park, my blog post is eventually indexed by Google and website visitors can then find my site if they were searching for “Washington Park”.  Without that blog post, my site would never have been found by this visitor.

Make your website a resource: Internet visitors to your website are looking for information, not just a home search.  They might be looking for information on public schools for their children, they might be looking for information on a particular neighborhood, or they might even be looking at the local music scene.  If your website is a great resource for community information, you are more likely to get visitors on your IDX search, and therefore more likely to gain a potential client.  Your website is not just about you as an agent, your website is a tool that visitors will use on their home search journey.

Show what you know: Who knows the area neighborhoods better than your friendly local realtor?  Prove what you know about your community and the local schools, restaurants, events, attractions, and everything a potential client would want to know by filling out your website with content, content, and more content.

Connect with your audience: Be personal, be funny, there is nothing wrong with a non work related post on the blog.  Keep a balance though, your blog should be personal yet still completely informative and topic driven.  Remember, appropriateness and professionalism are still important even if you are making non work related commentary about a sports game with a bad ref, or a restaurant you didn’t particularly care for.

Finding your Twitter link:

Your Twitter link is the easiest link to get, its just: www.twitter.com/YOURUSERNAME

(Example: www.twitter.com/garrons)

Finding your Facebook profile link:

Once you are logged into Facebook, right click the “Profile” link at the top.  Select “Copy Link Address” from the menu.  Your link is in the clipboard and ready to be pasted.

Finding your LinkedIn profile link:

When you are writing a standard static page, you do not need to change the Page Template.  However, if you need to create a special page like a Daily Email signup page, a Recent Posts page, or an Archives page you will use their special page template.