Drive more traffic to your real estate website with your Sequoia Blog! 9/2/2010

Why Blog?

Blogging is an important aspect of establishing a web presence for you and your website. Not only does it pump your real estate website design with keyword rich content that allows leads to find you through search engines, but it also helps you establish your brand identity and can color your business with a personal touch.

You’ll now be writing for potential clients and people interested in real estate, so think about topics that you think they could find useful, or what you’d like to read about. For real estate SEO purposes, it is also helpful to center most of your blog posts around some of your keywords that you’ve identified with your real estate website.

Lastly, blogging is about being active. Read other blogs within your industry, have guest bloggers, and comment frequently. You’ll be surprised how these things can increase your website traffic, and how you will become part of an online community!

Outlined below are some of the basics of your blog’s toolbar. Feel free to experiment and explore other tools and capabilities that your blog has!

If you don’t already have a blog integrated with your website, contact us and we can set you up with one for only $20 per month!

To write your first blog post, follow these steps:
1.    Log in to your website, this will give you the ability to create, edit and delete blogs.
2.    Go to Settings > Bloggers in the backend to add the users you would like to have blogging capability

3.    To blog, stay logged into your system and go to your blog (www.yourdomain.com/posts)

4.    As a blogger, a link will be available at the top of your blog to “Create Post”

5.    Now you are ready to start writing. Choose an accurate title that describes the text, and hopefully contains a keyword.
6.    In the large white section, you will type your blog text.

Note: If you have already typed up your first post in Word or you are copying and pasting text from an email, be sure to highlight the text you paste into the blog, and then click the small eraser icon in the toolbar. This gets rid of unwanted code and formatting, and will keep your blog’s font consistent.

7.    To insert a link into the text of your post, simply highlight the selected text you’d like the link to be. Next, click the globe with the chain (i.e., “link”) icon in the toolbar, and a window will pop up and prompt you to enter the URL for link. You can type this out or copy and paste it.

Note: Search engines love blog posts that have lots of outbound links. Be sure to link to other sites of interest or relevance when you can. It’s also a great opportunity for you to create internal links to pages on your own site, like Town Pages if you are writing about a featured listing or neighborhood.

8.   To insert an image, click on the yellow icon with the mountain in the foreground. From here, an “Image Properties” window will pop up.

a.    Click on the “Browse Server” button to be re-directed to your website’s image server, called the FCK Editor.
b.    Click “Browse”, then select the image you’d like to insert into your blog post.
c.    Your image is now uploaded to the server. Locate the file name in the list of images, click it, and hit “Upload”.
d.    Your image is uploaded into the “Image Properties” window. Click “OK”, and your image is now inserted into your blog post!

9.    You can also adjust the size of the image by double clicking it, and then clicking on any of the corners (which should have a white square) to drag your image to the desired size.

10.    To change the image’s alignment, (centering an image is recommended) click the image, then click any of the 3 alignment options on the toolbar.

These are the basics of your blog’s toolbar. Feel free to experiment and explore other tools and capabilities that your blog has!

Okay, so you have a blog and are ready to start writing: now what do you write about? Or maybe you have been blogging for a while but now you are stumped? Here are some suggestions to get you started!

·    Featured property listings. This is a great way to hand-select and talk more about certain apartments that you have, and potential leads love reading additional info on a listing.

·    Attend a real estate conference or networking event and write about your experience

·    Write a book review that can provide relevant insight to the real estate industry

· Browse through real estate blogs that you find interesting, and think about how you can take the aspects that you like and make them your own.

You can also visit our real estate SEO blog to read more about real estate blog post suggestions. And browse through real estate blogs that you find interesting, and think about how you can take the aspects that you like and make them your own.