Real estate agents can forge connections with potential home buyers and sellers by adding QR codes to business cards, flyers, newspaper ads, direct mail, online property listings and lawn signs, using different QR codes to direct consumers to different sites or information. Different QR codes can be imbedded in different marketing vehicles to help track their effectiveness. QR codes are also proving effective in building social media relationships between real estate agents and potential clients. QR codes are still novel enough to generate excitement and curiosity. People can’t seem to resist scanning QR codes when they appear in Facebook posts and Twitter tweets. Their popularity and convenience are making real estate QR codes the preferred method of linking to detailed information and video tours of new property listings.

As smartphone become the new communication standard and consumer interaction becomes increasingly mobile, QR codes are expected to become the go-to method of imparting information to real estate consumers. PropertiesOnline.com can help you add this powerful mobile marketing tool to your real estate tool bag. Free real estate QR code generation is included with all Properties Online website products.

Use Real Estate QR Codes to Boost Website Traffic is a post from: Properties Online Blog

Adding video to your agent site also allows you to reach out and connect with more potential clients. While a text-rich website is important from an SEO point of view, adding video to your site enhances the user experience, which is an important factor in the success of any website.

Real estate websites are sometimes “dry,” even a little boring. By adding video to your site you can add an entertainment factor that your visitors would appreciate. As a result, your website will be more “sticky” and visitors will stay around longer, browsing.

Since we believe video can greatly enhance realtor websites, our real estate websites are equipped with a YouTube plug-in that enables you to easily place a YouTube video on any page of your website. Our built-in YouTube player allows you to add video to your website either in the media panel or in the body of any website page.

Adding video to your website using our YouTube plugin is easy, and it makes your website interactive and fun for your visitors. Take advantage of this free tool – it’s a great way to improve your agent website.

Agents – Engage your Visitors with Video is a post from: Properties Online Blog

SEO, or search engine optimization, is important for any website, and this is true for real estate websites as well. Essentially, SEO helps to make sure that your website will be found on the Internet.

Optimizing your web site itself, or on-page optimization, is just part of your efforts to build a web presence, but it’s certainly a major part.

If a search engine bot crawls your web pages but your web pages don’t “tell” it what your site is all about, then the search engine will not be able to index your web site correctly, and people who search online for what you offer will not be able to find you.

For example, if you sell real estate in Austin, Texas, your site’s title tags and copy need to include related keywords such as “Austin real estate,” “homes for sale in Austin” etc.

Another important factor in determining whether your website will rank well for your main keywords is inbound links. Search engines show strong preference to websites who have links from other websites pointing at them. High quality agent site companies have tools in place to help your agent website get links.

Engaging in social media will also bring you links over time, because the people you connect with will learn about your site, and if you provide useful material, they may link to it.

Another important aspect of on-page search engine optimization is to add a blog to your real estate site. A blog, unlike a static site, tends to be rich in text. If you write it correctly and include your main keywords throughout the text, a blog can give your SEO efforts a significant boost.

Real Estate Websites: Why SEO is Important is a post from: Properties Online Blog

You probably already know that having a real estate website is a necessity rather than a luxury. We simply can’t imagine not having a website these days! Any business that doesn’t have a website seems dated and unprofessional – and this is true for the business of real estate too.

But having a website is not enough. Your realtor website should be optimized for search engines, to make it easier for prospects to find you. While the vast majority of clients still find their realtor via referrals from friends, a growing number of people start their search for a home online, typing certain keywords into the search engine search box. If their search results include your real estate site, and if your site is professional and filled with relevant information, they just might contact you and turn into leads, and maybe clients.

That’s why it’s important to choose a few main keywords for your site, and to optimize your site for those keywords. Optimizing means that ideally, your main keyword should appear in your realtor website URL, in your site’s title tags, and sprinkled generously into your website copy. Don’t overdo it though! Just write naturally, as you would write for a human reader. Writing for search engine bots is never a good idea.

For example, if you specialize in San Francisco real estate, a wonderful URL for your site would be SanFranciscoHomes.com (keep in mind that the best URLs are already taken, so you might need to compromise); your homepage’s title tag should say something like “San Francisco Real Estate | San Francisco Homes For Sale | Your Name” and your website copy should include these keywords too.

Optimizing your real estate website for search engines is pretty straightforward. Take the time to learn the basics of search engine optimization and do it. It could bring you clients down the road and will certainly help you to establish yourself as an expert in your area.

Real Estate Websites: Choosing the Best Keywords is a post from: Properties Online Blog

Having your own agent website is incredibly important. It’s a great way to build credibility, to demonstrate your expertise to prospects, and to help people find you online. A good agent website that is filled with content and photos and gets updated frequently will help set you apart from the crowd.

But before you start building your agent website, you will need to pick a good domain name for your site. A domain name is your website’s unique address on the Internet. Here are a few tips for picking a good domain name.

Keep it Short!

A good domain name is a name that would be friendly to both human visitors and search engines. When it comes to humans, you definitely want a short, memorable domain name – something that would be easy for people to remember and to type. You also want a name that you’ll be able to print on business cards – so a long domain name, again, is not a good idea.

Keywords Are Important

When it comes to search engines, you should include – if possible – your main keywords in your domain name. This would enable search engines to properly index your agent site. This often means that you want to include your location in your domain name. For example, if you’re a realtor in Austin, Texas, your ideal doman name would be:

AustinHomes.com or AustinRealEstate.com

While the inclusion of keywords often creates a slightly longer domain name, the SEO benefits are generally worth it, as long as the domain name isn’t too long. As a general rule, don’t include more than 2-3 keywords in your domain name.

Dot Com Is Still The Gold Standard

Of course, most good domain names are already taken – especially the .com names! So you’ll need to be creative and search for the best domain name still available to you.

If you absolutely can’t get a good .com domain name, .net and .info are acceptable alternatives.

Should You Use Your Own Name?

Probably not. Although using your name would help establish your personal brand and help clients find your site, it won’t do much in terms of search engine optimization. After all,  buyers who are starting their search for a home on the Internet will type keywords, not your name, into the search engine search box.

Finding A Name

The website NameBoy.com is a great tool for finding domain names based on keywords. Going back to our previous example, a quick search for the keywords “Austin Realty” shows that AustinRealty.info is available (at least at the time of writing this article).

Once you decide on a domain for your site, you will need to register it with a provider such as godaddy.com, and then renew your registration every year.

SEO Tips: Choosing The Right Domain Name is a post from: Properties Online Blog

Think about it: as more and more people are starting their search for a home online, and as more and more people expect professionals to have a web presence, you simply can’t afford NOT to have a website.

If you don’t have a website, or if you have a poorly designed agent site, many potential clients will immediately dismiss you as “not serious,” “unprofessional” or as a non-savvy realtor.

In fact, this is true for any small business these days. Regardless of how small a business is, it should have a website if it is to be taken seriously by customers.

The good news: creating a website today is much easier, and certainly more affordable, than it used to be just a decade ago. Reputable real estate website providers such as Properties Online enable you to create a professionally designed, affordable agent website with all the tools you need in today’s technology driven market, including SEO tools, social media tools and more.

Think about your real estate site as your digital business card, or your online portfolio. An agent site provides you with an excellent way to prove to prospects that you are everything they’ve been looking for in an agent – that you are savvy, experienced, knowledgeable, and not afraid of leveraging technology as a marketing tool.

Why You Need an Agent Website is a post from: Properties Online Blog

A few email tips for realtors:

1. Add a link to your website and to your social networks to your email signature. You probably send out many emails per day. Each such email can serve to effortlessly market your agent site if you simply include a link in your email signature.

2. Use email to stay in touch with prospects and with clients. Having someone in your database is worthless if you never communicate with them. Send your contacts periodic updates on the real estate market, tips on home buying and selling, and even personal notes on birthdays and anniversaries.

3. Don’t overdo it. While staying in touch is important, you should remember that your clients and prospects are just as busy as you are and space out your communications with them so that they are never seen as spam. Keep your messages short and clear, avoid attachments, and write short, catchy email titles that will entice your recipients to click through and read your email.

4. Automate your email marketing. If your contact list contains more than a handful of emails, keeping in touch with all of them can be very time consuming. Invest in an affordable email drip marketing system that would enable you to effortlessly keep in touch and stay top of mind with your contacts.

E-mail Tips for Real Estate Agents is a post from: Properties Online Blog

We are excited to tell you about a new feature upgrade for your agent website. We have just added Listing Syndication to our growing list of website features for our.

We have just completed beta testing our new Listing Syndication tool that will allow you to feed your listing data to the major property website portals like Trulia, Zillow, Yahoo Real Estate and several others.

To take advantage of this free service, login to your account and click on the new “Syndication” tool located on the Main Menu. This is the page you see first when you login.

Listing Syndication – now a free feature with RealEstateSites.com is a post from: Properties Online Blog

Since one of your main goals as a real estate professional is to make your website as “sticky” as possible – to make people stay longer on your site and return for future visits, adding market reports and recently sold properties to your agent website makes a lot of sense.

Market reports also have the added benefit of adding depth to your website. The more interactive your real estate site is, the more you fill it with relevant tools and information, the more attractive it becomes to clients and to prospects.

Our real estate sites include built-in market reports (except for non-disclosure states and counties, where this service is not available). Using tax record information and graphs provided by Zillow, your clients can run an instant report showing them all of the recent home sales in their neighborhood.

If this tool is available in your state, do remember to take advantage of it. It is one of the best tools we offer for keeping clients engaged and interested in your real estate website.

Enhance your Agent Website with Market Reports is a post from: Properties Online Blog

Once you have captured a real estate web lead, it is crucial that you immediately follow up on that lead if you want to close a transaction. Many real estate professionals find that with good online real estate marketing campaigns, lead generation is not that hard anymore, but you still face the challenge of turning those leads into lifelong customers.

The most important thing you can do to turn real estate leads into customers is to follow up, and the sooner, the better. Imagine being able to contact a lead while they are still browsing your real estate site – that would be the ultimate in capturing leads!

Our Real Estate Sites enable you to do just that. When you use our agent site, you receive instant leads by a text message. With our LEADS2TEXT service, you can have your website leads sent immediately to your text-enabled cell phone.

If someone fills out a form on your website, our program will convert their message to text and transmit it to your cell phone, so you can follow up while your prospect is still viewing your website! This is one of the best ways to turn such a prospect into a customer, so make sure you take advantage of this free service.

Real Estate Leads: The Importance of Quick Follow Up is a post from: Properties Online Blog