RSS Feeds in the Real Estate World

Well, I've worked quite a bit more on both producing and receiving RSS Feeds as they relate to Real Estate, and I'll share a little of what I've learned. For those that may not know much about it, RSS is an XML based standard that allows websites to share content dynamically. Its a set of data format rules that allows websites to retrieve data from each other, and save it or redisplay it - typically in html. It can be a win-win situation for both senders and receivers because it allows poeple to offer their content to be posted elsewhere on the Internet along with links back to their site, and it provides content for people who would like additional content for their site.

First - and I hope you advanced rss guys don't laugh at me - when your trying to produce an rss feed and you look at an example in your browser, don't include the dash marks you see (IE. - ) in your actual output. Thats just your browsers way of displaying it. Also if your trying to write your own rss writer, and are using a reader program to test it, be sure that you force an execution of the writer code file by using the completely qualified domain name, even though the file is on your local machine. This will cause your browser to "serve" your file and force execution of your rss writer.

Assuming your rss writer program can receive a parm called contentkey to determine the content to output in rss formet, put the following entry in your .htaccess file (if your running apache* - as I discussed in a previous article)

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^someoutput.rss$ rss_writer.php?contentkey=outputindicatorstring

Next, you can type the following in your browser address bar:

http://www.domain.com/rss_reader.php?source=http://www.domain.com/someoutput.rss

as long as your rss reader program is set up to take a parm called source to identify the rss to be parsed.

Notice that I used the fully qualified domain name for the file someoutput.rss

Thats enough for now. I'll try to come up with a list of Real Estate related RSS Feeds later. I will say that you can go to Yahoo News, and type in the real estate trems your interested in, and then select RSS to tget the address of RSS formated Real Estate News.

*fyi I mis-stated previously and indicated that .htaccess and re-directs were a php feature, which isn't correct. It's actually a feature of apache web server

One other thing to keep in mind when setting up an RSS feed is the amounts of hits you might incur by over zealous rss sites that are looking for news updates every few minutes or so. Be sure to look into the and tags.

Website Directory Submissions

I found a site that gives a really good summary of websites where you can submit your site address to try to get more exposure on the internet. This is a good reference for folks trying to improve their rankings for a Real Estate site, or any other site. http://webseodesign.com/resources/free-directory-listings.htm

Beating the big Real Estate sites at SEO for geographic keywords

One thing I've noticed in trying to optimize my folks site for search engine results, its that there's a whole lot of competition out there when you search on a city and state along with other Real Estate terms. This is true even for towns near where I grew up with vey small populations and limited Real Estate opportunities. It seemes that some of the big players apparently utilize some "post office mailing address" type databases, and generate pages such that they appear to be your Real Estate solution in your loacl town for everything, even though they've never been there. One trick I've found is to focus on geographic terms that may not be available in such a database. When searching on area lake real estate, many of these players drop off, although there are some others that step up to the plate. In my case things like "Irish Hills", which is a geographic area, but the mailing addresses there appear to be local towns in the surrounding areas. Trying to get ranked for searches on county names can also be difficult, but townships appear a little less competitive as search terms. Of course, the trade off is that folks from further away that want to look in your area may only know villages, cities, and counties, so the battle goes on. Getting your site address included on other sites is still important, and having lots of good content too. Also, I found that when you can get links to your site posted, put descriptive words inside the link.

So Hillsdale County Michigan Lake Properties is a good bit of text to hyperlink in my case.

Hiding Ugly URLs

This isn't necessarily a Real Estate related tip, but I've seen a lot of sites that have pages with URLs that expose a lot of parameters, which makes the address hard to read and type, and also tends to make the URL less preferable to search engines, so I thought I'd pass on a tip that a friend gave me recently. I'll give the example for PHP/apache, but you can also do this in other environments, though the specifics might be different.

Lets say that you have an URL such as

www.yoursite.com/entrygenerator.php?id=42

In PHP you can edit the .htaccess file,

and put in the following:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([0-9][0-9]).html RewriteRule ^entrygenerator.php&id=$1
Now, you should be able to present the URL as simply www.yoursite.com/42.html

To also support 1 and 3 digit parms you'll need to add the following 2 entries:

RewriteRule ^([0-9]).html RewriteRule ^entrygenerator.php&id=$1
RewriteRule ^([0-9][0-9][0-9]).html RewriteRule ^entrygenerator.php&id=$1

This technique can also help to improve the security of your site by obscuring certain details such as the real name of the executable file.
Give it a try, and if you have trouble, research mod_rewrite (for PHP/apache at least)

An Overview and Rating of Free Real Estate Posting Sites

Since I first posted some listings for my folks on craigslist.org, it seems some other free posting sites have gotten ahold of my email and been so kind as to let me know about thier sites, so I thought I'd give a rundown of the pros and cons of these sites for folks.

craigslist.org - The presentation isn't real professional but ovverall I'd say it's still the best free Real Estate posting site I've found so far. The site functions very well, and it's intuitive. In addition, you can drill down to all the listings, which means that the search engines can find the listings. In addition, it seems to have some significant traffic, and it allows me to script my own html into the listing entry. Another nice feature of the site is that it doesn't make you register and then remember an ID/PW, but uses your email account for this type of purpose. You click the links in the emails sent to your email account to "confirm your identity". Who needs another password to remember. One of the real drawbacks is that it only lets you get as specific as the nearest major city, which leaves out a lot of geographic areas where Real Estate is concerned.
3 out of 4

craigsworld.org - This one had a real strange interface that I had trouble with. It seemd to want to keep refreshing. Also, when I posted, it came out strangley formatted and I couldn't figure out how to edit it. I did like that fact that it looked like they were trying to keep the posting simple, but I think this site needs work.
1 out of 4

myhouseinfo.com - This site had a real professional look butit assumes I'm the realtor, which creates some issues for me. It also doesn't appear to have any drill down capability, so its likely that the listings are hidden from the search engines. The other thing I noted was that when you search for listings, the resulting list gives no general description, so its hard to tell what you have untill you click on each one. This one might have some potential but I'm not sure of the traffic volume so far. It's worth keeping an eye on.
2 out of 4

local2local.org - This one also has some potential, but I think needs a lot of work. I posted, then had trouble finding my posting to view or edit it. I did find it to edit finally, but it wasn't real intuitive. The screen didn't seem to indicate my logged on/logged off status very well either. Still if they work on it this site might have some potential. It does have drill down capability, and this site also kept some stats on the number of views.
2 out of 4

One big drawback to all of these so far is that most of them that did have the drill down only catered to major urban cities.