Recently finished work on Blackbird Homes, a real estate company in St. Petersburg, Florida.   I used WordPress as the Content Management System  and the Homeowner Theme by Gorilla Themes. 

The theme design is very clean and organized, but I was mainly impressed with how well the theme integrated with WordPress.  You can add a listing as easily as you can add a blog post.  The categories are used heavily to create search functionality, organize properties and distinguish between listings and blog posts.

The theme is user-friendly, including several useful plugins and 5 different color templates to choose from.

I could have built the entire site without any coding, but did tweak a few things on the sidebar, cascading style sheet and header.

The support forum at Gorilla themes has a lot of good information, the documentation available was easy to read and they responded to questions quickly.

The theme is scalable to allow multiple agents to have their own logins, post their own listings and have them displayed along with their agent profile.

I recommend this as a powerful, functional solution to a real estate website.

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Do one thing and do it better than anyone – Orville Redenbacher

In The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk!, law #5 is the law of Focus.  It states the most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect’s mind.  Narrow the focus to a single word or concept. It is always better to focus on one benefit, rather than two or three.  Examples are FedEx - overnight delivery and Domino’s Pizza -home delivery.

Companies trying to offer too many services spread themselves too thin.  They can easily be beaten by companies who specialize in just one service.

I applied this law to marketing my wife’s property management company.  We noticed most of the competition were not just property managers, but also realtors.  By focusing only on property management, we gained an advantage over the realtor/property management companies.

Most of our clients say they chose us because we are not realtors.  If you are looking for a property manager, why would you hire a realtor?

The targeted anti-realtor message is on all of the marketing for the company.  We have branded ourselves as an alternative to the realtor/property management companies, and occasionally take a few jabs at the competition.

Now that the company has grown to a significant size, it is tempting to add realtors, mortgage, title or other services to create new revenue streams, but this would weaken our message and we would just blend in with everyone else.

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Keep It Simple, Stupid. One of the definitive characteristics of Web 2.0 is its simplicity of design.  The less is more approach applies in designing websites to compete in today’s market.

The old way was to fill up your pages with as much content as you could, letting people know that you were online and legitimate.  With the amount of websites and competition increasing exponentially today, your website has a limited amount of time to grab attention and accomplish a goal.

How long do you give a website before you go somewhere else?  2 seconds, 5 seconds, 10 seconds,  longer?  Seriously?

Forget the flash intros, background music, Adsense, widgets, gadgets and random pictures.   Keep your website  and posts minimal and clutter-free. A prospect should be able to look at your website and in 5 seconds know how to contact you or purchase a product.  Make sure you have a clear Call To Action.

A quick read, (really, I read it in under 2 hours)  is Seth Godin’s The Big Red Fez: How To Make Any Web Site Better.  His take is surfing on the web is like a monkey looking for a banana. Websites should be kept simple and easy for anyone to immediately identify what the site is about and quickly grab the banana.

For small business website design, contact thereferralgeneration

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I once read an e-book from an internet marketing company that said they created 50 different pages for a local business website.  The idea was to have a targeted page for each town in the coverage area to increase search engine rankings. 

I thought this was a great idea, so I went to work on it immediately.  I mapped out the local towns and created a couple of pages, but soon abandoned the project because it was boring, time-consuming and I was creating ‘hidden pages’ with ‘duplicate content.’ 

But after converting my wife’s property management website to WordPress, I had an alternate strategy.

With WordPress I am able to add a new blog post for each town in our coverage area.  This creates a new page for the search engines to index, with keyword rich URLs.  The content of each post includes zip codes, keywords and links.

This improves our search engine rankings by adding new, relevant content to the site. For smaller, more obscure searches, we are able to dominate the rankings.  If there is a certain area that we want to focus on to get more leads, we can simply write more posts about those particular areas. 

In our case we created Property Management Perspective which is a series of local reports on the towns and neighborhoods in our coverage area.  We give quality insider information on the area and current rental market. 

This strategy can be applied to any type of local business.  The posts should not be hard to write since you already know the area and can give some expert advice.

 For more local search tactics and small business online marketing tips, subscribe by email or RSS Feed

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Keywords are basic necessities for websites. You do some research, find the right ones and add the keywords to your content, title and tags.

On-page optimization and your internal linking structure are very important to any post .  This is easily completed by using WordPress.

What you need to know in your SEO campaign is…..

the harder a link is to get, the better your search rankings will be.

Having one quality link could be worth more than 1,000 garbage links.  Focus on quality over quantity.  If you can easily add your link to the site, then it probably is not going to do much for you.  In some cases, easy sites could be viewed as link farms or bad neighborhoods. These links could negatively affect your search engine rankings.

Is it easy to get a link from a .gov or .edu domain?  No. A .gov or .edu are seen by search engine companies as trusted sites.  In order to have a link to your business from trusted sites, you have to be involved with an organization, have a membership or make donations to trusted organizations.

Businesses are not going to join the local chamber of commerce just to get a link. Join the chamber or any organization because you believe in it.

The 80/20 rule comes into effect, where 20% of your links will create 80% of your traffic.  Focus 80% of your time on:

Getting Creative – Think of ways to help other websites, review their products, write a guest article or link to them.

Writing Great Content- If it is unique and interesting, you will naturally attract quality links.

Being an expert- getting links from Yahoo! Answers, Wikipedia and reviews on Amazon will increase your rankings.  Focus on contributing to these sites by being a trusted advisor in your field.

Contributing to Conversations-  Find high ranking blogs and forums and don’t just write, “great post” and add your link.  Share some of your expertise and insight, write comments that will contribute to the readers experience.

Don’t  spam websites and add to the noise.

photo by viZZZual

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