There are basically 3 main web properties you should consider for your Real Estate Agent Business:

Facebook – Undeniably the most popular of the 3 Social Media sites. It is not without controversy as some have objected to their changing and confusing privacy policy. But for a realty business you are probably quite public with your image, your properties, and the details like price, availability etc. Of course if you have a business profile you won’t be posting pictures of your last visit to the local bar, or the beach.

If you would like some assistance in this matter we can setup a profile, upload images, business details, and even integrate it so your latest properties posted to your website are posted on Facebook. With the right details like address, city and house description this could bring a nice surge in traffic to your profile and your website.

Twitter – This is close second in popularity and you might like its minimalistic approach. Posts can’t be any longer than 140 characters, which is only about 20 words and a link. It takes a slight rethink to be this brief. Easy to update from your computer or mobile phone while you have a minute or two downtime. It can be used to link to properties, articles you write, or real estate news that you find interesting.

Linkedin – This is another good site and has a more businesslike professional image than Facebook and tends to be a way for business people to exchange contacts and to interact with each other’s network of contacts. Everyone on it usually lists their company and job position where on Facebook there are many profiles that mention neither. You can friend business acquaintances or customers of yours past or present. You can write recommendations for them and hopefully they will do the same for you.

We can start a Linkedin profile for your company or yourself personally and enter your information in a search engine friendly and attractive way. When you want you can take over this or any other social Media account we setup for you. Or you can have us maintain it and post occasionally in a fashion that is comfortable for you.

All of these sites have some basic common courtesies that should be observed. Try to think of your role on them as being part of a conversation, not just repeating what you are selling. Try not to just broadcast news about yourself this can seem very one-sided. Try to be helpful with knowledge that you have acquired or experiences you have had. I like to think of it as a great way to get peoples real feelings about markets, properties, or situations.

Website Templates make sense for Realtors as they:

• Lower your upfront costs and maintenance costs
• Reduce the time to implement a new design and create a predictable plan to completion.
• Help you follow local rules and standards like showing phone numbers and Realtor Logos on all pages.
• Give you a standard place for colors, fonts, designs, and sidebar elements so changes work across the whole site.
• Allows portions of the website to be upgraded without affecting the rest of the site.

Since website templates and themes seem to have so many benefits we have looked at and used many of the available themes and settled on one for the majority of our Real Estate Web Design and Redesigns. That theme is AgentPress, which is new, only coming out March 17th, 2010, is made especially for Realtors, integrates with the best IDX plugins, and is made for the most popular Content Management System in the World, WordPress.

Some people have an aversion to using WordPress as they think it is just a blogging platform or they are sick of the standard WordPress theme and can’t imagine using that for their company. It has amazing flexibility when modded, and we have standard mods that we do to both it and the Agentpress theme. This site you are looking at now is on WordPress. Here is a WordPress site on the Agentpress theme.

When you have Realty Web Design setup Agent Press you get:

• A beautiful slideshow showing the front house picture showcasing your properties.
• Links that work automatically on all pages, categories, and sections of your site.
• A gallery of as many more exterior and interior pictures as you want for each property.
• A slick framing of additional images when they are clicked for maximum effect.
• A preformatted form for realty specifics like Square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms, MLS number, price and other details for each property. Easy to enter and makes for a neat tidy listing for each property.
• Categories that allow you to organize your website and show excerpts the home page.
• Home page regions that are ideal for blog postings, real estate articles, or whatever you want that automatically pulls stories from new posts made.

The best part of Agentpress is because the development costs are shared you can get all this for $99.95. If you are considering having us setting up WordPress, Agentpress and your content you can ask us to include a license in your development costs since we have a developers License for all Studiopress themes.

At the current time we are strongly recommending all our clients use Agentpress, for its amazing ability to be simple to use, yet powerful and customizable. Additionally it is built on WordPress and the Genesis Framework so the underlying core components can be upgraded without changing any of our modifications.

Got a property listing that really needs an extra attention? Or a famous buyer that is looking for a property in an area where nothing seems to be for sale? A well written Press Release might just get this project (and your business) the attention it needs.

Our expert writers have written dozens of Press Releases for many markets getting attention to the people that need to notice them.
News, magazines, and newspaper writers have to come up with countless stories every month and often getting attention can be as easy as showing them how interesting your story is.

We can write professional Press Releases, publicize them, and hand email from lists developed by us.

Real Estate Public Relations
If you have an older or larger real estate business you may have some incidents that have occurred or are occurring that could be less damaging to your business if their affect was evaluated and work was done to lessen the impact.

As soon as possible you should contact your public relations company to evaluate the situation. Work should be done to understand the other parties opinion, and how well founded it is. The issue may be legal in areas and we may suggest an Internet or offline Corporate Attorney to assist us in the matter.

But the cost and timeframe of legal matters may take some time and there may be actions that we should be doing while these are decided or are in process.

Real Estate Agent Reputation Management

Offending pages, blogposts, reviews, or videos may be evaluated for the lifespan of popularity they are expected to have. If it is considered that these pages will have lasting power in search engines we could be consulted to create new positive pages and to strengthen pages that are online now. This will create a likelihood that positive pages about your company are high in the search engines like Google, and hopefully higher than the offending page. Once this is managed it is simply a matter of pushing the bad pages off the first page with their top ten listings and then continuing to push the page down past the second and possibly third page.

Then a natural thing will happen, where those pages get less traffic, links, and attention and your positive pages get more. This will continue the process of making a positive image for your company.

These online Reputation Management Projects can be started when there is a problem story, article or video or there could be an ongoing project to make sure positive stories are surrounding your trademarks, company name, and key executives.

Some facts about IDX / MLS Integration:

The act of having IDX data on websites is becoming much more popular and you are probably seeing other Realtors with some sort of IDX data on their website. Also large real estate portals have a variety of data and allow people to search by a variety of criteria. If you do not offer IDX of some sort your site is likely to be less sticky and people will leave sooner.

Your local Realtor Board often will supply some data and this requires some approval process. You might want to contact them to see what they offer and the cost as soon as possible. Usually their approval will take a few days. We can help you implement their solution and often it is the cheapest data you can get.

Iframed solutions are web pages within web pages, which pull data from an outside source, while the local page they are on does not change. This is the easiest to implement, often free data from your Realty Board, and a fairly clean solution. The problem is that there are not many different types of results that can be done with the framed page and there is little, to no, SEO benefit to your site with iframes.

Pages with IDX data coded into them – The best way to integrate IDX data is to pull all the data from a master database and set filters for location, house type, or price to create complete coded pages on properties that fit your criteria. This creates pages that show like normal pages and Google reads as normal text. Your new pages can be some of the first in the search engines and more likely to be found by searchers. We can create these types of pages with WordPress backed sites or traditional html sites.

Custom Coded RETS/ MLS/IDX Solutions – Although not our first recommendation we can code custom solutions in some circumstances or modify existing solutions. This can be used for large real estate portals or multi agent solutions. Time to implement depends on the project scope and website plans.

Search Engine Marketing usually refers to advertising on websites to bring your website more traffic. This can be done in a variety of ways but the best ways would involve showing your message to people that are good prospects for your business. We think Google Adwords is one of the best places to advertise for Realtors for a variety of reasons.

5 Reasons why Google Adwords works well with Real Estate

Google is the most popular search engine in the world with over 70% of the market
If you have an account with Google Adwords you have access to the largest advertising network online and can have ads showing where most people search. Your account could be sending traffic within 24 hours and can show on Google Search or any site that shows Google Ads.

Target keywords for property types you show or have listings for
You can and should be selective about what keywords are targeted for. When we setup accounts for clients we make the keywords as selective as possible and look for likely people close to the buying or selling decision and avoid sideline words that are not good for you.

Turn the campaigns off and on as you need leads
If you have plenty of listings, plenty of leads, or are just going on vacation you can pause your campaigns or just email us and tell us to do it for you.

Prevent ads from showing for some words
There is also a powerful function of Google Adwords that is not found on other advertising solutions – Negative Keywords. We can enter keywords that are likely to be part of a bad search for a customer. If all you sell or show is traditional homes we can enter words like “manufactured” “premade” “trailer” to prevent you from paying for this traffic. Also if you want to make sure you are not paying for traffic on financing queries we could enter words like “loan” loans” “qualify” “mortgage” which are in this niche but poor converting and very expensive. We can setup your account so you are not paying for these words.

Target only the exact area where you are likely to have customers
This is one of the most powerful ways to control your spend on Adwords. Not only can you select states and cities, but can select portions of towns or an adjustable area around a point on a map. We often set clients accounts to show ads a number of miles around an real estate agents office or favorite community.

We have over 8 years of experience managing Google Adwords, Yahoo, Bing, and MSN Search Engine advertising campaigns. We primarily work with Google since it has most of the market and their ad platform has such power and flexibility. All our employees that setup and manage Google Adwords campaigns are Google Adwords Certified Professionals. Google Adwords management has a bit of learning curve and practice is the key. Our years of experience get you more traffic, at a better cost per click, and that is more likely to convert to leads for your real estate agency.

But the real strength in having a good real estate website is that it can bring you new leads that you would not have likely gotten any other way. This can be from Social Media, Paid Search Engine Marketing, or Search Engine Optimization.

Having Your Realtor website effective with all of these methods of traffic generation is vital to taking your business to the next level. More leads, means more listings, more showings, and being able to work with customers you want to, on property transactions you want to is what SEO can do for you.

Search Engine Optimization is the act of optimizing and tweaking onpage content and offpage links to show higher in Search Engine Listings. This can be accomplished through careful selections and modification of website content and making sure the website structure does not create any problems to the content being read by search engines.

We offer a variety of Real Estate SEO services:

Work on your current Realtor Website Design
Whether it’s our design with our partner’s template AgentPress, another WordPress theme, or some other website technology we can help you get more traffic with better content and more links. We can backup your current design, review the content and code, and plan for better content and higher ranking pages. We can then tell you what we are planning and you can approve, amend, or decline the changes. We then implement the changes and track as the new content is read by the search engines. At this point you should be ranking for more keywords and getting more traffic.

Switch your Realty Website to Our System
Our Real Estate Web Designs look good, are easy to manage, but even more importantly they rank well for a variety of keywords. SEO is in our blood, in fact we were SEO developers before we were web designers. When you have us redesign your website everything we do will be to get the best results from the project we are working on. Whether its category names, tags, titles of articles, or how we setup WordPress it always has SEO in mind.

Our technology partners, WordPress, Agentpress, and DSIDXPRESS all are known for good SEO capabilities out of the box. Our web developers and these web solutions create a strong internet presence for your company.

Integrate MLS IDX data for fast, valuable, and automatically updated content
This is a fairly new possibility now in the reach of most Realtors. Before it required RETS data from your local Realtor Board and to have a web design team develop you a solution to organize this data and pull it into your website in a variety of different ways. This took time, development costs, and created a custom proprietary system that tied you to a developer, and switching developers incurred more time and expense.
But now we are using WordPress as a standard immensely popular, Content Management System that has the ability to use plugins to add functionality. One we suggest is using a plugin that pulls in IDX property data, and we know of several that work well. One is DSIDXpress and the other is IDX Broker.

With Fresh IDX data on your website it becomes a hub that seems like an important website to bookmark and to come back to in the future. It also brings you new traffic of people that are taking an active interest in newly listed properties in your hometown. They search for addresses, neighborhoods, or MLS numbers and if your site is one of the best SEO’d sites with this data you will be towards the top of the search results.
The implementation should be accurate, attractive, and have key data in several parts of the listing to rank highly. It should also remove listings when they expire or are sold. To not do this is a violation of most IDX and MLS procedures.

IDX Integration can bring you new customers for both buyers and sellers. People Google properties they are interested in and might need a Realtor to see the property or to sell the property they are currently in.

A Good Real Estate Web Design Should:

• Match the goals of the agent or company. Whether that is finding sellers, buyers, or investors.
• Be easy to start, maintain, add properties and grow with the business
• Be fairly easy to host on our server or yours. No special requirements, installation procedures, or server demands.
• Be quick to implement and have a system for uploading images, showing text, and getting Search Engine Traffic.
• Well supported and not proprietary so that you have to stay with one web design company past the time you want to be with them for their benefits to your business.

We have compiled the webdesign and Realty technologies looking for the best solutions for your business to give you maximum flexibility and lasting value in systems that should last for years if not decades.

This has through our extensive use of WordPress, the fine Real Estate Agent theme Agentpress, and various IDX integration tools like DSIDXpress and IDX Broker to show local properties that other agents are showing.

We have 4 kinds of website designs for real estate agents, which are listed below. You can progress through the options as your business changes and know that new agents or properties can be accommodated easily.

Modifications or Adding Real Estate Properties to an Existing Website Design

If you already have a website but are not yet ready to make the jump to a new design or gathering pictures and property data together we can keep your website working, add new properties, and fix broken elements. We can also have our designers look through the code of your site and tell you what a new design could do for you. This is sometimes done in the months before the move to a new template or design.

Website Template Site for One Agent

Realtor Web Design’s Template websites are our core product and give you a great looking website that is easy to update yourself with content and listings. Many of the most successful agents started with a Realtor Web Design template and have simply updated them over time, move things in the sidebar, changing phone numbers and email addresses themselves, and adding properties as they get added. We are currently using WordPress and the Agentpress theme as our backend and it is the most popular Content Management System in the world. Your ability to have a secure, well supported website for years managed by us or some other company is assured! We will also add a local IDX/MLS property search function probably in an iframed solution from your local realty board. This option also includes 1 unique professional written article on your choice of topics. We email you a list of 20 topic choices and you pick the one you want based on your client focus and beliefs. We would like you to supply 2 or 3 more articles to give your website more content that visitors want to read and link to.

Custom Modded Template Site For Agents

This is a great option when you want more options, more custom work and integration with Search Engine Optimized MLS IDX data. This option also builds on the beautiful and powerful Agentpress Theme with WordPress as the administrative backend. This includes integration with your choice of iframed or Separate page IDX solutions for maximum user experience and traffic opportunities. This option also includes 3 unique professional written articles on your choice of topics. We email you a list of 20 topic choices and you pick the ones you want based on your client focus and beliefs.

Custom Websites For Agents

When you want a site that is 100% unique, for branding, company image, or to create a user experience they wont get anywhere else we can accommodate this. We recommend trying to keep the exceptional platform and backend technologies of WordPress (content management, lead management, IDX management), but completely eliminate any trace of a visible template from our other solutions or even WordPress. With our completely custom real estate websites, we work with you through several stage of design planning before the website is ever coded and work to make the backend as functional and easy to manage as possible.