Why Realtors Should Blog

In the following articles, I am going to discuss specific features I mentioned in my last article. Today, I am going to discuss why it is important for realtors to blog.

For new real estate websites, it is hard to drive traffic to your site from search engine results. Some realtors may not see search engine traffic for several months to a year. So what can you do in the meantime? Blog!

First, search engine crawlers love new content. So if you blog often, the crawlers will keep coming back on a daily basis. Fresh content usually causes your rankings to rise.

Second, blogs can increase traffic greatly. But how? We already said that nobody was coming to your site because it is new. Well, that is what RSS feeds are for.

RSS feeds are for frequently updated content. These feeds can be submitted to RSS directories all around the internet. To find some of these directories, just do a google search for "RSS feed directories". I am sure you will find some as there are thousands out there.

People visit these directories often. Some people may even subscribe to your blog if you have great content. When you add a new blog message, your subscribers are notified and they come back to your website to see it.

So what does a RSS feed look like? Well, let me give you a few examples:

1. http://www.lukebouman.com/rss/blogFeed.cfm

This feed does not have much in it currently. However, it is updated whenever Luke Bouman's West Michigan Real Estate Blog is updated.

2. http://www.lukebouman.com/rss/propertyFeed.cfm?cityID=52

This is a feed of holland michigan real estate. The top 500 most expensive properties in holland are shown in this feed, and it is updated on a weekly basis.

3. http://www.lukebouman.com/rss/newsFeed.cfm

This is a news feed for west michigan real estate. A news section is another great way to drive traffic to your website.

Before I get too far off topic, let's go back to the blog issues.

First, let me present a blog to you:

http://www.lukebouman.com/blog.cfm

So what does this blog have that would benefit this particular website?

1. It has different threads. Topics are organized into thread names. Most blogs today are very spammy. They discuss everything in one long thread that seems to go on forever. In this blog, people are able to see what they want to read by the thread name.

2. When you click a thread name, it shows all blog messages related to that thread. It is all about organization.

3. Now, how do people add messages and thread to this blog? Yes, it is open to the public, but you have to register as a member to add to it. Members are restricted in that they can not add HTML and javascript to their messages. This is a security issue that most blogs have.

4. Administrative users have full control over the blog. They can edit messages, delete message, and even add photos to the messages.

The bottom line is blogs drive traffic to real estate websites. They are also spider food because web crawlers love them because of the fresh content.

If you want to drive traffic to your website, get your own blog today!