Does your real estate website provider supply you with prewritten content?
By Reggie · December 19, 2006
Thanks to the Blog Swap RSS Pieces put together, Stephen Jagger of Ubertor is our guest today. Ubertor serves the real estate industry with agent and broker software. I would like to thank Stephen! Here is his post:
Stephen Jagger, Ubertor - Many of real estate website providers supply prewritten canned content on the web sites they sell to real estate agents. This canned content comes in many forms:
- Free Reports
- Top Tips
- Buying Tips
- Selling Tips
- plus much more…
Google says “we try hard to index and show pages with distinct information“.
What does that mean?
Canned content, generic content and content provided to you is not helping you… but actually hurting you.
Write your own Free Reports, Top 10 Tips, Sellers Bonus Material, etc… be courageous, be opinionated, take a risk, tell people what you think and be UNIQUE.
Google, Yahoo and MSN are looking for unique, quality content that they can provide to their users. Someone searching for Vancouver Real Estate is looking to find the best website about that topic. The search engines are looking to find that website (actually the top 10 under than term). To get your website to come up under the keyword term you are trying to target start by reviewing these points:
- Start Blogging
- Google likes sites of at least 100 pages and pages of 300-500 words/page
- Get rid of your canned content and write your own
- Write about the term you want to be found under
- Write about the term you want to be found under again
- Comment on other blogs that compliment your industry
- Use WordTracker.com or a service like it to view actual searchers searching for that term
- Engage your visitors, request comments, feedback, questions
- Keep your solds within your website - never delete or hide them
- Blog, Blog, Blog and then do it again
Blogging has proven to be the most effective way to gain exposure within the search engines.
The real key: Write for your readers - then review for the search engines! - not the other way around. Google’s mantra is “Be Good Not Evil” Bloggers’ mantra is “Write for your Reader, Good will follow”
Take a look at what the other real estate bloggers had to say that participated?
Transparent Real Estate’s Pat Kitano vs. Zillow’s Drew Meyers
RSS Pieces’ Mary McKnight vs. Future of Real Estate Marketing’s Joel Burslem
St Paul Real Estate Blog’s Teresa Boardman vs. Phoenix Real Estate Guy’s Jay Thompson
3 Ocean Real Estate’s Kevin Boer vs. SLC Real Estate’s Nigel Swaby
Issaquah Undressed’s Larry Cragun vs. Maury Properties’ Andrew Maury
Chicago Home Weblog’s Geno Petroche vs. NY Houses 4 Sales’ Christine Forgione
Jonathan Dalton’s Phoenix Arizona Real Estate Blog Jonathan Dalton vs. Bonnie Erickson’s Real Estate Snippets Bonnie Erickson
The boys of Sellsius vs. Real Estate Tomato’s Jim Cronin
ML Podcast’s Michael Price vs. FamousAgents.com’s Elise Wright
My Tech Opinion’s Reggie Nicolay vs. Ubertor’s Steve Jagger
Redfin’s Glenn Kelman vs Rain City’s Ardell DellaLoggia
CondoDomain’s Anthony Longo vs. miOaklandCounty’s Maureen Francis
The San Diego Home Blog’s Kris Berg vs. Urban Dig’s Noah Rosenblatt
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Tags: real estate marketing, blogs, Google, MyTechOpinion, real estate agent, real estate agents
Great post Steve. I’ve got a template site, but there’s not one word of the “canned” content (or what is there has been set to “no index”).
Template sites can work, and work very well. But effort must be put forth (one could argue the same for a fully custom site as well.)
I agree template sites work. I happen to sell them.
I just don’t like all of the canned content that fills these websites. Even our sites come with basic canned content but we push hard for our agents to customize, blog, add biographies, etc to their site. A good quality website takes work.. but it is very worth it in the end.
I’m with you Steve, canned content is the kiss of death.
1. Google is notorious for not obeying the “no follow” tag
2. Once duplicate content filters are rolled back out, G will drop duplicated pages from index. (yes, I am letting you in the big SEO secret, dup filters are NOT in production- they had to be rolled back because the algorithms had some probs) That being said, they are thought to be rolled back into production in mid to late 07.
3. Canned content is boring- there is no authentic voice to it- so readers ignore it.
Authentic post with value, I love reading blogs who practice what they preach. Good Job!
OK Reggie - you’ve been tagged!
http://www.altosresearch.com/blog/archives/180-Escher-as-Marketer,-Tag-Im-it.html
Great post! Those same template websites sold to real estate agenst are also sold to mortgage brokers…my industry.
And at outrageous prices…$255 a month for a flash site with total duplicate content…who are they kidding.
You are dead on with your post! Keep ‘em coming.
I’m going to link back when I write a similar post on my Mortgage Insider Blog
http://themortgageinsider.net/blog/
Bye for now…I’ll be checking back often.
Rob K. Blake