Shems Dunkiel Kassel & Saunders

Union Street Media has relaunched a site for Shems Dunkiel Kassel & Saunders Attorneys at Law. Based in Burlington, Vermont, SDKS has positioned itself as a leader in socially responsible and environmentally forward-thinking law. They give clients regulatory and compliance assistance, transactional and business counsel, litigation services, and counsel in environmental, energy and healthcare law. This site makes use of Union Street Media’s content management system for ease of maintaining and updating the site.

Allen Family Real Estate

Union Street Media is pleased to announce the launch of a site for Michael Allen of Allen Family Real Estate. Serving Durham New Hampshire and the surrounding towns, Michael specializes in homes for sale in the award-winning Oyster River School District and along the New Hampshire Seacoast. Check out his great one-click searches such as “walk to UNH”, “income properties” and “UNH Housing options”. His site makes use of Union Street Media’s semi-custom design services as well as Google Maps, MLS integration, and tools for clients that facilitate their home search: save to favorites and new listing notifications by email that are customized to the client’s search criteria.

Track your search engine ranking improvement with a plugin for Firefox

Search engine optimization (SEO) is typically a pillar of any internet marketing strategy. Yesterday, I posted information about how you can save time assessing the effectiveness of your SEO efforts by using the Rank Checker for Firefox plugin. Another fan of Rank Checker decided it was time to make the search rank data a bit more visually appealing by creating a second plugin called Site Rank Reporter. It’s a handy way to visualize things, especially if you are charged with reporting to someone about the effectiveness of all your efforts to optimize your real estate web site.

The tool is quick to install, but comes with a few caveats.

1. It’s only useful once you’ve collected multiple data sets. SeoBook suggests several days of data, but that would only be useful if you were tracking your work on a blog site that is indexed daily and therefore has a chance to improve daily. More realistic for a real estate web site would be monthly data. You can put Rank Checker on auto-pilot and then visit the data in a few months.
2. Your .csv data files need to be named carefully, with only the date as the file name in one of these file name formats: MM-DD-YY, M-D-YY, MM-D-YY, or M-DD-YY.
3. You can’t muck with the data that came from Rank Checker. Make a copy of the original file If you want to play with the data in Excel.
4. The .html format of the data that you can save is nicely styled and saves you time from formatting the raw data in Excel.
5. It’s not possible to save the graphed data unless you take a screen capture. And that graph is not labeled with the keyword — it’s displayed above in a list field. To make the visual representation more useful, I hope the developers will develop an output that is labeled and can be downloaded as a .gif file. That way, the file could be included quickly in a PowerPoint or other report to the folks who are footing the bill for all that search engine optimization!

Blue Water Realty Group

Union Street Media is pleased to announce the launch of a site for Blue Water Realty Group, a firm serving the New Hampshire Lakes Region. Based in Gilford, NH, owner Karen Beane has served the Lakes Region for 35 years in both real estate sales and in architectural design. Karen and her husband Doug Beane have developed Team Blue Water consisting of the Beane family and an extended group of talented craftsmen, engineers, project managers and sales agents who work with clients from every aspect of real estate from design to construction to sales.

Blue Water selected Union Street Media to develop a semi-custom site with all the bells and whistles their clients need: clear navigation, great search features, and tools to make their home search a breeze. These include saving favorites and receiving notifications by email of any new listings that meet their search criteria.

See how your real estate web site’s SEO is performing: use Rank Checker for FireFox

Are you tired of spending time typing in your preferred keywords on Google or Yahoo to see where your real estate web site is positioned on the search engine results page (SERP)? If you’re below page two, this can be a real time drain and take up a lot of your search engine optimization (SEO) time . If you have several keywords to check, it can be an even BIGGER hassle. Whenever you want to see if your efforts at SEO are paying off, simply use Rank Checker to get the data.

The folks at SeoBook have made our lives easier with a fantastic Firefox plugin called Rank Checker. I’ve been using this tool since July and couldn’t live without it. Even though it’s easy to install and use, SeoBook’s Aaron Wall has made it even easier by creating a 5-minute video to tech you how to install and use it. I highly recommend taking the 5 minutes to view it.

Five Tips to make Rank Checker even sweeter

1. You can cut and paste your list of keywords out of a spreadsheet and add them all at once, or you can type them one at a time.
2. Be sure to save your list of keywords to the preset folder. That way, you can run it any time you like with almost no effort.
3. You can simply view the results on-screen, but even better is to download the .csv (comma separated value) file.
4. Save that raw data file to it’s own folder as simply MM-DD-YY, M-D-YY, MM-D-YY, or M-DD-YY. (see tomorrow’s post to see why this is so important!) feel free to open the file in Excel and save it as a .xls file so that you can format and play with the information. Just don’t mess with the original CSV.
5. Plan to run this once a month for three or four months so that you can observe the impact of your SEO efforts (changes to content, meta data, and inbound link building).

This is the second in a series of five posts this week on cool FireFox plugins to assist in optimizing your real estate web site. Yesterday’s post featured a Firefox plugin for easily adding images to your real estate blog. Tomorrow’s post will examine a cool (but somewhat tricky) plugin that helps Realtors visualize and report on the data they get from Rank Checker.

Merrill Bartlett Group

Merrill Bartlett Group Real Estate has launched their brand and their business this week with the assistance of Union Street Media. With a focus on Kingston NH Homes, MBGRE has reconstituted a long-standing family business under this new brand. Bill Bartlett originally established the Kingston Real Estate Company in 1955. In addition to his long career in Real Estate, Bill served 5 terms in the New Hampshire Senate, leading major economic and business initiatives.  The “Merrill” in this new brand is Bill’s daughter, Lynne Merrill. After a 25-year career in marketing and public relations, Lynne has “returned to her roots to partner with her family as a real estate team”. The breadth of knowledge on their team and the depth of their group’s more than half-a-century connection to the Southeastern New Hampshire community makes this new site and company feel like a reunion rather than a launch!

The MBG site makes great use of Union Street Media’s semi-custom graphic design services, featured listings, integrated IDX search, one-click searches, and more. In particular, note the highly differentiated one-click searches that showcase their market knowledge and insights into local architecture and lifestyles.

Home Field Realtors

Union Street Media is proud to announce the launch of a site for Home Field Realtors, a Naperville real estate firm located in the Western suburbs of Chicago. David J. Field, Associate Broker with RE/Max Naperville launches a new real estate venture and this site simultaneously — recently relocating from Seattle, where he built a a highly successfull real estate brokerage. David has returned to his roots as a fourth generation native Chicagoan and calls the Western Suburbs his “home”. David has unique, in depth, and first-hand knowledge of the Western Suburbs communities of Naperville, Oakbrook, Elmhurst, Downers Grove, Clarendon Hills, and Hinsdale.

Real Estate Agents – Time to Refocus Your Ad Budget

If you’re a Realtor looking to justify the investment of time and money that you’ve made into your website and/or blog, this article from RISMedia about Yahoo!’s recent study of real estate consumers’ online behavior should give you some reassurance. It might have you considering shifting your budget even further towards support of your site and/or Pay-Per-Click campaigns.

In a recent study of 500 consumers, Yahoo! confirmed that people use the Web to ensure that the selected agent will best meet their specific needs.

Key findings include:

• Home buyers and sellers consider approximately two agents on average before making a final decision
• The Internet impacts consumer trust. Forty percent of respondents credited a site in increasing their trust in the agent
• 74% of people who accessed an agent website got there with the help of a search engine
• The online research process is quick and intense: consumers spent an average of 12 hours online researching agents and 75% selected an agent within one week of starting their search

Online resources provided introduction to new agents as well as promotional deals:

• 45% of respondents used the Internet to learn about agents they didn’t know existed
• 41% discovered special deals and promotions offered from an agent through the Internet

However, there is a disconnect between advertising dollars and consumer behavior. Based on Yahoo!’s study, 77% of respondents used an online source for information during their research process compared to 34% for print. But, according to a recent analysis by Borrell Associates, Realtor advertising dollars have yet to catch up to where home buyers are going – the Internet. While this year’s online media spend did in fact double from 2005, capturing 32% of the overall advertising spend, newspapers continue to get more share of dollars with 40%.

So, if you’ve been struggling with where to focus your advertising budget, these numbers should help resolve the debate. While print-advertising will always be demanded by your sellers, you’ll find your buyers via a well-optimized web site that is found easily on search engines. If you want some support, Union Street Media’s Internet Marketing Team is here to help. You can choose from a variety of services that suit your budget.

Take Matt’s Advice. 5 Tips Your Real Estate Site Needs.

In case you missed the recent video interview with Matt Cutts at USA Today, it’s a must-watch . I’m happy to report that the advice our Internet Marketing Team has been offering to our clients is right on track. So, don’t just take our word for it, take Google’s search guru’s word:

1. Spotlight your search term on the page.

That’s right. Your keywords have to be prominently placed, but not over-stuffed. They should occur naturally in the content of the page. What Matt doesn’t say is that you want to make sure that keyword or keyword phrase is in your page’s headline, also known as an H1 Tag. Read more

Paid Search vs Organic Search for Realtors

If you’re a Realtor who has been hesitant to dive into Google AdWords, today is the day to get started.

First, you’ll want to be clear about the difference between “organic search” and “paid search.” Organic search results are a product of a Search Engine’s algorithm (a fancy word for method), rather than paid advertisements. Search engine algorithms are a bit of a mystery and always changing – and Google and Yahoo like to keep it that way. Until you’ve spent some time (and perhaps money) to optimize your site content and understand the variety of elements that contribute to the algorithm, ranking high on a Google search engine results page (SERP) with “organic” search can be frustrating and challenging.

Another way to get traffic to your site is by setting up a “paid search” campaign with a tool such as Google AdWords to generate more traffic to your site. If you’ve done a good job delivering those people to the right part of your site for their search terms (known as a landing page), those new visitors will hopefully “convert” by contacting you and/or registering on your site to make best use of the search tools the next time they return. You can also use what you learn from your advertising successes to help inform decisions on your site content, but that’s a topic for a different post.

You can get started with online advertising on your own or get in touch with the Internet Marketing Team at Union Street Media. You can also keep following this blog for more information about internet marketing for Realtors. In particular, follow G. Dewald’s series on Website Optimization for Real Estate.