Alternatively, you can view the discussion on TwapperKeeper under the #retechchat hashtag.

Lastly, if you’d like to vote for next week’s topic – that can be done here. Hope to see you next week!

• Yoast – WordPress SEO
• dsIDXpress
• Gravity Forms
• IDX Broker

Here is the text transcript that I saved for those who want to read through the entire discussion: Download it HERE (best to use TextEdit on a Mac from what I hear).

Alternatively, you can view the discussion on TwapperKeeper under the #retechchat hashtag.

Lastly, if you’d like to vote for next week’s topic – that can be done here. Hope to see you next week!

On the subject of standing out in the crowd, I’m curious if anyone is using some sort of custom “thanks for commenting” page as a way to increase engagement with those visitors that go through the process of leaving a comment on your blog?

I left a comment on Alexis Grant’s blog the other day and was redirected to this page that included a humorous photo of her.

That strategy of engagement brought me one step closer to her because it was a different and unique approach I don’t see employed on blogs very often (and I comment quite a bit). If you like that tactic and want to try it, are using WordPress, you can use the comment redirect plugin.

What are you doing to stand out? How are you and your website unique?

• 14.7% of the entire web (top 1 million sites) are running on WordPress
• 22 of every 100 new active domains are running on WordPress

If you’re still on a proprietary platform build in the 1990′s — are the latest figures enough proof that WordPress is the future? There is simply no more cost effective platform to be on.

I created a landing page on Virtual Results detailing why it makes sense to migrate to WordPress that you can check out if you’re still not convinced.

For more stats and background, you can read this post or watch Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word 2011 presentation at WordCamp San Francisco.

Here are two potential strategies for a real estate brokerage to take advantage of WordPress:

1. A full website platform for agents – For a large brokerage with thousands of agents, a website platform of your own may make sense. A custom platform would enable a brokerage to offer agents broker branded themes, automatically direct leads generated to your CRM, easily stream company news to agent dashboards, etc. Depending on how your brokerage operates, you could either provide all blogs for free to your agents if they remain on the brokerage domain (SEO juice for broker), or charge agents if they want their website on their own domain name (SEO juice for agents). Or of course you could charge agents to have a blog on the broker’s domain name, but I’m guessing you won’t get much traction if you take that approach.
2. Hyper local blog network – a small, mid-sized, or large brokerage could create a network of hyper local sites that covers every neighborhood, city, and MSA they cover – with broker branding on all of them. All of the content from the hyper local blogs could be surfaced on the high level domain for the MSA. With a WordPress multi-site install, it’s fairly straight forward to create a number of blogs driven off the same instance. With each site having paginated IDX from Diverse Solutions and unique, relevant content being somewhat added, it’s likely the high level domain could build SEO juice relatively quickly. The hyper local sites could be an SEO investment and free for agents to use as part of being an agent with “Example Broker Northwest” or “rented” to agents on a monthly basis in which case they would be entitled to all the leads generated on that particular site.

I wrote a similar post right when WordPress 3.0 came out, but haven’t seen any brokerage innovation in the space since. Are there brokers out there that have built WordPress platforms for their agents? Why hasn’t a large brokerage blanketed their entire coverage area with hyper local blogs for each city/neighborhood — or have they and I just haven’t seen it?

If I look at the very top agents in the company most aren’t using WP for main site, why should I?

I received this question from John Ziemba on Twitter last week and wanted to address it here. It’s a question that I can’t answer in 140 characters on Twitter (yes, there are still some questions that Twitter can’t answer).

First, there are multiple ways to become a high producing agent. And you don’t NEED WordPress to do it. Traditional marketing and sphere building is obviously a proven strategy. Keep in mind that most high producing agents today have built their business prior to the internet becoming to go to source for real estate information.

For example, there is a RE/MAX team that dominates lakefront property on Lake Sammamish where I grew up. Judy Layton and her daughter Sundi Mathewson have built their business over the course of the last two decades via traditional marketing and word of mouth. Ever since I can remember, their team has sponsored a fireworks show on the lake on the 4th of July; each year’s investment probably north of $20,000 in fireworks. Everyone around the lake saw the show every year, and everyone knew that the real estate agent Judy Layton sponsored it. One of my neighbors just put their house on the market. And guess who the listing agents are? Yup, Judy and Sundi.

Their site is not on WordPress, but I would be willing to bet a pretty penny the only leads their site generates are from individuals who see their signs around the lake and Google their specific names. They have clearly not invested in their web presence.

But times are changing. The internet NOW IS the place where buyers go to find real estate information. They don’t immediately call an agent the first chance they get; they do months of research prior to that point. It’s my firm belief that to become a high producing agent for the next 5, 10, 15 years, you need an amazing web presence that can turn traffic into leads as the foundation of your marketing efforts.

So, why WordPress?

Here are a few reasons to start with. The primary reasons I usually give agents/brokers are SEO (WP gives you about 70% of what Google is looking for in onsite architecture out of the box with zero modifications), data portability, flexibility, ease of use, and support. There is simply no more cost effective way than WordPress to build your business online in today’s environment. Even though it’s still not dirt cheap for a high quality real estate WordPress website/blog, the cost of a WordPress site (here is more info about your WordPress setup options and costs) is lower than a proprietary platform simply because the maintenance of the core WordPress software is effectively outsourced to the WordPress community. Add the thousands of plugins, themes, and support — and you have a clear winner in terms of cost. Contrast that with a proprietary platform where every last piece of code has to be paid for by the website provider.

Blogging and online lead generation is a long term strategy. It’s not something that’s likely to prove immediate dividends in the first year. Somewhere between 2-3 years is the tipping point of blogging lead generation in my opinion. If you can stick it out that long (and not many people make it), you’ll be rewarded heavily with leads resulting from the 2-3 years of past content you’ve built up over time. The greatest website on the planet is worthless without traffic. And traffic is hard work regardless of what platform you are on, but I think blogging consistently on a WordPress platform is the best strategy to drive organic SEO traffic over time.

Lastly, remember there is NO silver bullet when it comes to building a business. WordPress by itself won’t do it for you (I know, bummer, huh?).

Head over to the Virtual Results Blog and follow along for some good learnings from Jim.

So, you’ve decided to switch and want to make sure you don’t lose your SEO juice? This question came from my friend Conrad Saams from Avvo:

If I’m transitioning a static site to WordPress for CMS functionality and to add blogging functionality to my site, what are the top things to consider to ensure I don’t lose existing SEO value? Are there any ways to automate this conversion?

There are two components to handle during a website migration from an SEO standpoint.

Content and links.

Content: Content migration obviously depends on what platform you are coming from and how much existing content you have. If you only have a few pages on your static site, you’re probably best served to just manually copy and paste that content over to new pages on your WordPress site. If you have dozens, hundreds, or thousands — well then you should probably hire someone to do a mass data import. Who to hire or what tool to use all depends on what sort of static website you have currently and what it uses as it’s central content management system.

Links: There are two types of links; internal and external.

Internal links are links from within specific pages to other specific pages on your site. For instance, you may have a landing page for “Tuscon short sales” that you link from the text on your main “Tuscon” community page. Or, in the text of your “about” page, you link to your primary “contact page”. You get the picture. You have two options here. The first is to change all your internal links to point to the correct pages on your new site. The second is to actually put 301 redirects into place that will redirect your old pages to their new locations and leave all the links you have within the content you import to WordPress the exact same.

External links are the most powerful factor in the overall SEO of your site, so it’s important to maintain their value by ensuring they don’t point at non existent pages. With that said, most external links to any website are to the home page. And luckily, if you are not changing domain names (ie you are replacing your static site with a WordPress site on the same domain), whatever home page links you had previously are going to transfer over and you won’t lose any SEO juice. Now, deep links are another story. A deep link is a link to a specific page deep within your site (basically a link to anywhere other than the home page) – such as example.com/short-sales-in-tuscon.html. 301 Redirects need to be used to redirect any old pages that have external links pointing to them to the new page – such as example.com/tuscon-short-sales/. You’ll lose the value of an external deep link if it’s pointing at a page URL that doesn’t exist on your new site (resulting in a 404 page at the other end of the link).

Regarding 301 redirects, you can use the Redirection plugin to handle that for a small number of pages. However, if you’ve got hundreds or thousands of pages to redirect, you’ll probably want to pay someone to do a database script and map them to your new pages in an automated fashion.

Hope that helps. If not, leave a comment explaining where I lost you

Do you want to be a blog webmaster or a blog editor?

For those that wish to be a blog webmaster, here are some of those secret tasks that go along with being your own webmaster you might want to be aware of:

• Finding an implementing a theme — and preferably one that is optimized for conversion
• Finding & dealing with a graphic designer to get whatever custom buttons and graphics completed (or doing this yourself if you are a photoshop/illustrator whiz)
• Upgrading plugins
• Upgrading the core WordPress software when security patches and new versions are released
• Ensuring that all your plugins work with both your theme and with the WordPress core after each WordPress upgrade
• Fixing your site should it get hacked (I know from experience this is a royal pain in the a** if/when it happens)
• A/B testing to increase your website conversion rate
• Getting your site back online should your web host have problems
• Making sure your content is consistently backed up
• Working with a freelance developer to make changes and fixes that are beyond your skillset
• Scouring the web for answers to your questions

Versus if you outsource your WordPress development and maintenance, you can spend your time where it’s best spent — as a blog editor doing two primary tasks:

• Writing consistent unique content to drive organic traffic
• Networking with other bloggers to build links

So, are you a webmaster or a publisher? Or both?

The first question we often get is “Will my site be at the top of Google?” (or some slight variation of the same question)

Those that understand the ins and outs of SEO know that’s an extremely loaded question with no simple answer. If only it were that easy, we’d all have lead after lead arriving in our inbox daily. But, it’s not easy, and there is only one number 1 for any given search term. Depending on how competitive your desired keyword is, it can be difficult to gain that coveted top ranking.

As I’ve mentioned before, SEO comes down to onsite SEO and offsite SEO. Offsite SEO is all about attracting links (and Tweets/Likes) from others. Onsite SEO is everything on your site such as title tags, permalinks, h1 tags, alt tags, and internal linking — among other things. Onsite SEO is something you have a bit more direct control over, but not quite as important as the offsite components in terms of getting your website to rank highly for your desire keyword(s).

To help agents and brokers better understand SEO as it relates to WordPress blogs, we’re starting a new weekly video series at Virtual Results — “10 Minute SEO with Your WordPress Blog“.

The 1st edition, posted on Friday, covered Keyword Research. Jim talks about how to use Google keyword research tool to research keywords you should be targeting and how to quickly optimize your post for that keyword. Head over the Virtual Results and watch the whole video, and leave your feedback in the comments.

What SEO questions do you have that you want us to cover in future installments of “10 Minute SEO for your WordPress Blog”?

*Note: If you wish to receive email updates from Virtual Results (which will include all editions of 10 Minute SEO), you can subscribe here.