Owning a real estate website doesn’t automatically entitle you to access to the millions of internet users out there. The hard truth about the situation is that you will need to use various real estate website promotional tools to help you drive traffic to your site. This article will outline what those tools are and how to use them.

Let’s begin by talking about the first and the most important tool: your website. Your real estate website needs to be clean, professional, lead generating, search engine friendly and interactive. We live in a time where online relationship building is a must, and your site visitors will quickly hit the back button if all you offer is a few outdated listings, your picture and a phone number. Your real estate website needs to allow your site visitors to bookmark listings, sign up for newsletters, receive email notifications when new properties are added that meet their search criteria and so on. They also want to see an extensive list of properties listed on your site. The bottom line is that over 70% of all home renters and buyers now start their search online and they don’t contact every agent who’s site they come across. They only contact the agents who’s site meet their needs, have the properties they want, and who they feel they can trust.

So your website needs to be built on a strong foundation. If you do not yet have a real estate website or your website is outdated, take a look at our real estate website solutions that could have you generating more leads in no time.

But having a real estate website is not enough, you will also need traffic to your website. Here are the most important tools for driving traffic to your real estate site.

Extensive back-linking campaing: you will need to get as many links as you possible can poining to your website. You do this by contacting other webmasters who have similar sites and would be willing to put a link to you on their site. You can also sign up for linking communities such as Link Partners, or post link exchange requests under the approprieate category in real estate or webmaster forums. If  you are looking for an extensive database of link partners, take a look at our database of real estate link partners. Or if you want someone to manage your link campaign for you take a look at our link campaign management solutions here.

Writing content, and lots of it: We have years of experience in promoting real estate websites and we see the same trends with all top performing sites. They have a lot of content, and they regularly add new content. Years ago, we had a real estate website and it wasn’t performing as well as we wanted it to compared to our competitors. We had more backlinks that our main page competitors and our keyword density was also fine. We realized the in order to get on the main page of Google, Yahoo or MSN we needed to add more content to make our site more information rich. We added 100 new unique articles, and during the next search engine update we found ourselves on page one, right where we wanted to be. Search engines love information, so give it to them.

Offer a free ebook or newsletter: You absolutely need to have an opt in mechanism of some sort on your website. Most website visitors won’t participate in any sales behavior until they have some experience dealing with your website and establishing a relationship with you, even if that relationship is just through your website. In fact, it will take the average person 3-7 visits to your site before they will participate in any call to action (such as clicking on a “buy” button or calling you). Therefore if you don’t have mechanisms to keep people coming back, you are loosing out on the majority of your leads. Our real estate websites have countless tools to keep your website visitors coming back including a great ebook or newsletter opt in tool. Likeside we offer a free newsletter for real estate webmasters to re-distribute. Click here to learn more.

Automatic “New Property” Emails: Real estate shoppers don’t always want to go back to your site and search for new properties all of the time. Just like the rest of us, they also have limited time resources. They would like a little bit of help on your end to free up their valuable time. So as a real estate webmaster, it’s your obligation to offer this to them. You need to let them sign up as members of your site to receive email alerts when new properties are posted that meet their search criteria. This is a great way to build a solid traffic base and to ensure that site visitors keep returning to your site time and time again. This is how you develop a relationship with people through your website.

Bookmarking and Printing Capabilities: Your site users will want to sign up as members and bookmark their favorite properties. This way they don’t need to write down the particulars of each property they like. They can simply save all their favorite properties to their individual account page, and print them all up at once when they have time. This also means that your website will need to have a “print this listing” tool to allow your users to simply click the print button and have all the information they want available to them right away. Our Real estate websites have both “print this listing” and “bookmark this listing” tool.

Implement the recommendations above and watch your real estate website traffic go through the roof!

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