Real Estate Internet Technology

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Posting Real Estate Listings on Oodle

I know I haven't written in a while and the summer (and half the fall for that matter) got away from me. I notice though that my .net guru buddy hasn't written all summer either though, so I feel better.

I said that I would check out some more Listing Posting sites a while back, so I checked out oodle this morning. Here's what I found. It looks like they have an affiliation with Lycos so you can post to both places, but as far as I could tell, it looks like you have to enter the posting in both places also. The software is similar but not identical. The main problem I saw with oodle was that, once I registered it assumed that I was the contact for the listing, and wanted to use my email as the addrss to reply to. Something craigslist allowed for along time ago was no reply address, and you specify the contact info in the classified. The nearest city I could post too was Detroit, which is at least 75 miles from my folks real estate area in Southern Michigan. Backpage still has this downfall also, but Craigslist has added Ann Arbor, and more recently Jackson, which is very close. Also oodle didn't allow me to specify a half bath, I didn't like having to select "real Estate" twice in the screen clicking process. It did let me specify a website address for the listing, but then it didn't hyperlink it for me. They could hyperlink it with a nofollow. I might post more to oodle in the future but it wouldn't be my first choice.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

How do you add a hyperlink and other html to a craigslist listing ad

I have Google Analytics for a couple of my websites, and I finally added this reporting feature to my blog. For those of you that aren't familiar with Google Analytics, its a free service that allows you to view some amazingly diverse statistics for you website and all you have to do is put a small amount of javascript in your blog template or index file for your website. Anyway, as soon as I added this reporting capability I noticed that one search that brought someone to my blog was for "how to add hyperlink to craigslist ad". I thought that was interesting since I don't know that I had ever explained how to add a hyperlink, or any other html to a craigslist ad, even though I do this often. So here's a brief overview on how to add hyperlinks and other basic html to your craigslist.org post. These can also be applied to backpage.com. Some sites allow html and some don't so you'll have to experiment.

I always add my extra html markup to the description field. First, I'll explain the hyperlink, which I think is the most important since you can provide your own site with some nice inbound links this way.

here's an example of the syntax for a basic hyperlink for a listing:

<a href="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/lakeproperties.html">
South Central Michigan Lake Homes and Properties
</a>

note that that actual web page is specified, but the text that will show up as hyperlinked on the rendered craigslist or backpage webpage is South Central Michigan Lake Homes and Properties

For more on the correct syntax for hyperlinks see http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_links.asp

Here are some more simple examples of html tags for basic formatting,

to display this - type this
--------------------------
This is bold - This is bold
italic - italic
carriage return- 

Other examples of values of the style attribute for a span tag that you may want to read up on are:
color: blue;
font-size: medium;

Here's a larger example of what you can do.
It's some html that I inserted into a recent craigslist add. Note that some of these tags are deprecated, meaning that they may be obsolete in future versions of html, and you'll want to look into specifying them as style attribute values of span or div tags in the future. I'll leave that lesson out here for simplicity.



Remerica Somerset Realty


 
Somerset, MI 49281 
517-547-6525 
<img id="plain" src="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/rsr-email.bmp">
 

<table>
<tr bgcolor="#F0F5FF">
<td>
<a href="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/277.html" title="Click here for Details on 11125 Waldron Rd, Jerome, Michigan 49249">
<img src="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/images/listings/thmb_11125__Waldron_Rd-Jerome-MI-49249-437.jpg" width=150 alt="11125 Waldron Rd, Jerome, Michigan 49249" >
</a></td>
<td>
<a href="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/277.html" title="Click here for Details on 11125 Waldron Rd, Jerome, Michigan 49249">
CRYSTAL LAKE, MI LAKEFRONT WITH LAKE LEANN, MI ACCESS</a> THIS DISTINCTIVE CUSTOM DESIGNED HOME OFFERS A MEDITERRANEAN CONTEMPORARY STYLE HOME COMPLETE WITH A GATED COURT YARD TO THE ENTRANCE AND A PORTICO DE.....</td>

<td align="right">$669,000</td>
<td align="right">5,566</td>
<td align="right">5.08</td>
<td>Hillsdale</td>
</tr>
<tr bgcolor="#FFF5F0">
<td>
<a href="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/230.html" title="Click here for Details on 10500 Somerset Rd, Somerset, Michigan 49281">
<img src="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/images/listings/thmb_10500_Somerset_Rd-Somerset -MI-49281-138.jpg" width=150 alt="10500 Somerset Rd, Somerset, Michigan 49281" >

</a></td>
<td>
<a href="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/230.html" title="Click here for Details on 10500 Somerset Rd, Somerset, Michigan 49281">
LAKEFRONT HOME 50 MINUTES FROM ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN</a> THIS SPECTACULAR WATER FRONT HOME IS SECLUDED FROM THE ROAD BY A RIDGE OF PINE TREES AND HAS STUNNING VIEWS LOOKING OUT TO THE MAIN LAKE FROM A QUIET .....</td>
<td align="right">$288,000</td>
<td align="right">2,424</td>
<td align="right">0.19</td>
<td>Hillsdale</td>

</tr>
<tr bgcolor="#F0F5FF">
<td>
<a href="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/252.html" title="Click here for Details on 10650 Glendalough Ln, Somerset, Michigan 49281">
<img src="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/images/listings/thmb_10650_Glendalough-Somerset-MI-49281-259.jpg" width=150 alt="10650 Glendalough Ln, Somerset, Michigan 49281" >
</a></td>
<td>
<a href="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/252.html" title="Click here for Details on 10650 Glendalough Ln, Somerset, Michigan 49281">
WATER FRONT HOME FOR SALE 50 MINUTES WEST OF ANN ARBOR, MI</a> EXCEPTIONAL 1.29 ACRE YARD WITH 62 FEET OF SANDY BEACH ON THE LAKE IN A QUIET BAY WITH MAIN LAKE VIEWS. MATURE AND TREE SHADED YARD WITH SCREENED GAZ.....</td>
<td align="right">$254,000</td>
<td align="right">2,080</td>

<td align="right">1.29</td>
<td>Hillsdale</td>
</tr>
<tr bgcolor="#FFF5F0">
<td>
<a href="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/241.html" title="Click here for Details on 10770 Arrowhead Circle, Jerome, Michigan 49249">
<img src="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/images/listings/thmb_10770_Arrowhead_Circle-Jerome-MI-49249-345.jpg" width=150 alt="10770 Arrowhead Circle, Jerome, Michigan 49249" >
</a></td>
<td>
<a href="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/241.html" title="Click here for Details on 10770 Arrowhead Circle, Jerome, Michigan 49249">
WATER FRONT HOUSE FOR SALE IN SOMERSET CENTER, MICHIGAN</a> SPECTACULAR VIEWS. RANCH STYLE HOME WITH FULLY FINISHED WALKOUT AND FRONTAGE ON PRIVATE ALL SPORTS SOUTH LAKE LEANN. DOCK YOUR BOAT AND ENJOY THE FA.....</td>

<td align="right">$199,000</td>
<td align="right">2,240</td>
<td align="right">0.26</td>
<td>Hillsdale</td>
</tr>
<tr bgcolor="#F0F5FF">
<td>
<a href="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/181.html" title="Click here for Details on 14175 Tralee Dr, Somerset, Michigan 49233">
<img src="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/images/listings/thmb_14175_Tralee_Dr-Somerset-MI-49233-153.jpg" width=150 alt="14175 Tralee Dr, Somerset, Michigan 49233" >

</a></td>
<td>
<a href="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/181.html" title="Click here for Details on 14175 Tralee Dr, Somerset, Michigan 49233">
LAKE ACCESS HOME NEAR PARK, 20 MINUTES SOUTH OF JACKSON</a> THIS SUPERB HOUSE IS BUILT INTO THE SIDE OF A SMALL HILL AND REACHES SKYWARD WITH A TWO STORY ENTRANCE AND FOYER. NEAR MAIN PARK AND HAS OUTSTANDING V.....</td>
<td align="right">$164,000</td>
<td align="right">2,003</td>
<td align="right">0.34</td>
<td>Hillsdale</td>

</tr>
</table>

The rendered ad then looks something like this:

Remerica Somerset Realty
Somerset, MI 49281
517-547-6525

CRYSTAL LAKE, MI LAKEFRONT WITH LAKE LEANN, MI ACCESS THIS DISTINCTIVE CUSTOM DESIGNED HOME OFFERS A MEDITERRANEAN CONTEMPORARY STYLE HOME COMPLETE WITH A GATED COURT YARD TO THE ENTRANCE AND A PORTICO DE.....	$669,000	5,566	5.08	Hillsdale
LAKEFRONT HOME 50 MINUTES FROM ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN THIS SPECTACULAR WATER FRONT HOME IS SECLUDED FROM THE ROAD BY A RIDGE OF PINE TREES AND HAS STUNNING VIEWS LOOKING OUT TO THE MAIN LAKE FROM A QUIET .....	$288,000	2,424	0.19	Hillsdale
WATER FRONT HOME FOR SALE 50 MINUTES WEST OF ANN ARBOR, MI EXCEPTIONAL 1.29 ACRE YARD WITH 62 FEET OF SANDY BEACH ON THE LAKE IN A QUIET BAY WITH MAIN LAKE VIEWS. MATURE AND TREE SHADED YARD WITH SCREENED GAZ.....	$254,000	2,080	1.29	Hillsdale
WATER FRONT HOUSE FOR SALE IN SOMERSET CENTER, MICHIGAN SPECTACULAR VIEWS. RANCH STYLE HOME WITH FULLY FINISHED WALKOUT AND FRONTAGE ON PRIVATE ALL SPORTS SOUTH LAKE LEANN. DOCK YOUR BOAT AND ENJOY THE FA.....	$199,000	2,240	0.26	Hillsdale
LAKE ACCESS HOME NEAR PARK, 20 MINUTES SOUTH OF JACKSON THIS SUPERB HOUSE IS BUILT INTO THE SIDE OF A SMALL HILL AND REACHES SKYWARD WITH A TWO STORY ENTRANCE AND FOYER. NEAR MAIN PARK AND HAS OUTSTANDING V.....	$164,000	2,003	0.34	Hillsdale

Click Here to see this ad in it's natural habitat, but keep in mind that the ad expires in 45 days.

Monday, May 21, 2007

How much do Search Engines remember old keywords and links?

This article isn't about Real Estate necessarily, as the ideas discussed can really apply to any web page, and optimizing it for search engines, but I'll use examples and lessons that I've learned from working on my folks Real Estate website to illustrate my theory.

When reading about Search Engine Optimization - methods for making web pages do better in search results - I've come across alot of comments that indicate that you should refresh, and otherwise update your content frequently. In response to this, I began to update the page titles for my folks listings on a regular basis, changing the keyword "house" to "home", "acres" to "acreage", and "lake front" to "water front" for example. Now I figured also that, since the search engines don't crawl and process at exactly the same time, that it might increase the odds of coming up in results for a wider variety of keywords. For example, if Yahoo crawls a listing when it says "Lakefront Home 30 Minutes South Of Jackson, MI", and then I change the title to "Water Front Property 60 Minutes West of Ann Arbor Michigan", and Google crawls the page, then between two search engines I've just associated the page for that listing with the following key words:

Lakefront
Home
South
Jackson, MI
Water
Property
West
Ann Arbor Michigan

Cache Keyword Smearing

Now have you ever noticed when you get search engine results in Google and you click on the cache instead of the actual website link, it shows you keywords on the page highlighted, but also words that don't even appear on the page, but rather are present in links that point to the page. Well that got me thinking that if Google is keeping track of keywords for that page that aren't even on the page, then aren't keywords that used to be on the page also data about the page that isn't on the page? In other words, just because I take the term "Real Estate" out of the title, possibly that history still helps Google weight the page - at least for a while - a little stronger for the term "Real Estate", even after the word is gone, especially when the page still says "Real Estate" in three other places.

Admittedly this "sticky history" idea is just a theory of mine, but as well as my folks humble website has done locally against many bigger players, it's one of my theories as to why. Since I haven't seen any reference to this idea out there yet, I'll call this Cache Keyword Smearing. I may be behind as I haven't had much time to read lately, so if anyone has read any other articles on it let me know.

Natural Link Smearing

Now if you like to learn about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) like I do, then your probably familiar with the term "Natural Link", which means that you put a hyperlink behind some text, but also typically the text of a paragraph, or some other larger stream of thought or communication. When you link that way, search engines - assuming everything is above board - tend to associate those keywords that are linked with the web page that they point to. So, if for example, I say I have one sponsor on one of my websites that has a really cool tool for helping people with arthritis open pill bottles , then the keywords tool, helping, people, arthritis, open, pill, and bottles all become associated with that site in any search engine that finds that inbound link.

Well back to Real Estate. I created an RSS feed for our listings, and this is what made me realize that I needed a "title" since title and article body tend to be two key fields in rss, and atom for that matter. For those people not familiar, rss and atom are two xml based standards for sharing data across the Internet. Anyway, I decided while I was at it that I might as well create two "titles" instead of one, since it wouldn't be much harder. Then I could use one title on the actual listing page, and in the page title, and use the other title for the rss feed. Now when most rss sites display an rss item, its typical (and courtesy) to hyperlink the title back to the actual page on the original site. So now I have some natural linked keywords out there on some rss feed sites with extra keywords that may or may not overlap the keywords in the page title. Finally, I go in to the listings every so often and swap the titles once in a while. I think of this as Natural Link Smearing.

What does a search engine do when title keywords and link leywords keep disappearing and reappearing? Would a search engine like Google actually remember the old title and link keywords and continue to weight your page on them to some extent, even after it's read the new keywords? What does it do when it sees these link and title keywords being swapped? Only the folks at Google know for sure, but with all the talk about the sand box - and the delayed effect getting stuff into Google, why would the logic work any different at getting stuff out?

Thursday, May 03, 2007

My Favorite Real Estate Listing Posting Sites

Well, I've been meaning to write more about great sites to post listings on, and rate them, but in order to do it you have to do some homework and it takes a little time to post on a bunch of different sites. Well, my folks recently received a really nice luxury lake home and I really wanted to help them promote it, so I was out hoofing it in cyberspace as it were, trying to help them promote this particular listing. In the process, I revisited quite a few real estate posting sites, and I thought that I'd better do my critique now while they were fresh in my mind. I've tried to list them as much as possible in order from most favorite to least favorite, and list what I like about them and/or didn't like. All of the basic services on the sites below is free.

craigslist.org - Well, for a while craigslist was on my back burner list as I'd had some problems with them, but I tried them out again the other day and the listing I put in was fairly easy to do an worked quite well. Great features of craigslist include:
- They get lots of traffic
- They don't require a userid or password, just your email address
- Their listings are all exposed to the search engines
- They allow for some html in your description, including links to your listing on your own
site, and you can use natural linking , which mean you can hyperlink keywords, which
is important.
- craigslist also has an rss output feed, further increasing the potential for the distribution of your listing, but it only provides titles, no detail. craigslist isn't specific to Real Estate.

backpage.com - backpage is fairly similar to craigslist in most ways except that they probably don't have quite as much traffic as craigslist. Also they don't have quite as many Michigan cities as craigslist, and really only list major metropolitan areas. One thing that is better about backpage though is that they send email renewals allowing you to renew your listings, where they expire on craigslist and you'd have to repost. Also their rss output feed appears to have a bit more content than craigslist. backpage isn't specific to real estate.

trulia.com - I haven't really tied to post to trulia manually, but fortunately they specify an xml format that they will accept, so if you can write a routine to output the data in the proper xml format, you can load your listings to trulia automatically. Whats even better is that, once they have the address of the xml page on your website, they will hit the page regularly and automatically update you listtings on their site based on whats on your site. My hats off to trulia for this setup. With more of this going on on the Internet, traditional MLS systems beware. Trulia also has a strong mapping system. Trulia is a Real Estate only site, and also has an rss output feed.

edgeio.com - edgeio, like trulia also allows you to provide a web address of an edgeio custom xml version of your listing content, and also automatically refreshes it. I had some trouble getting this working recently, and couldn't find the support link on their site, but when I posted her on my blog they read it the next day (gee, someone reads my blog) and helped me right away the next day. edgeio isn't specific to Real Estate.

base.google.com - google base is another site that allows you to load all your listings via a custom xml feed. Unlike trulia and edgeio however, google will expire your listings every 31 days and forces you to manually reload them. If you have the software written to produce the xml file then its only 10 minutes work a month to reload your listings to google base. If you forget to do it they'll still expire and dissappear though. I wish they set thiers up like trulia and edgeio and refresh it from my website directly. One cool thing about google base is that it will give you stats on how often your listings arte being displayed and viewed. trulia and edgeio may have that feature and I just haven't noticed yet.

expo.live.com - I tried expo a couple times recently and had pretty good luck with it in terms of ease of posting. expo live is microsofts answer to the classified website market. They don't appear to allow for any bulk xml uploading just yet, but I did insert a listing manually and it was quite easy. They allow listings to be marked as "cool"similar to Digg, have some interface to facebook, and they show recent posts on the main page. They also show you recent listings you've view after you log on. I don't think they allowed me to put in any link to the actual listing though. I'll have to check out expo live further before I can say too much more about it, but its worth a look.

re-list4free.com - This was another site that I had good success at putting in a listing manually. It did allow me to put in a natural link back to the original listing, but didn't seem to have search engine exposure, meaning I had to submit a form to see my listings. I couldn't get to them just by clicking.

A few sites that I didn't have good luck with were propsmart.com, cytadia.us, and abetterway.com. propsmart seems to hold alot of promise, and has a strong mapping system, and I've posted there before, but I couldn't get a listing submitted because I was having problems with the zip code, and the latitude and longtitude. It was required, and I lost patience trying to figure it out. cytadia and abetterway just seemed to have to many data fields for me.

Stay tuned next time when I review oodle.com, geebo.com, and more.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Auto publishing listings to Trulia, Google Base, and Edgeio

I had set up xml based publishing feeds some time ago in order to submit listings from Remerica Somerset to Trulia and Google Base. While neither worked like magic, I recall having more trouble with the Google Base format (lots more) than Trulia. Trulia also automatically hits the address that you give them periodically to refresh your listings. Google on the other hand, makes you load a file from your desktop (as far as I can tell) and then expires all you listings and forces you to manulally reload them every 30 or 45 days or something like that. So, needless to say, I like the way Trulia is set up better.

Anyway, I digress from what spurred me to this article. I was surfing around Edgeio the other day and realized, or remembered, that at one time I had worked on feeding listings to that site also, I believe using rss, but I recalled that the info was spartan with basic rss. It looks like what they have now allows for more data, so I set up a listing feed and tryed to load it. The two main errors that I get that I don't understand are

[error #104.010] error: Published time of the listing was not defined
[error #110.212] error: Unable to determine listing's location

I used the tag and followed the RFC2822 format by using the date('r') fnction from PHP, but it still doesn't like it. I'm not sure what it wants for location, as I followed the category tags for city, state, country, and zip that they specified.

What really surprized me about Edgeio though, was that I could find no way to contact them on the site in order to get assistance with the problem. There appeared to be administrators, but their email was hidden. So I guess for now I'm stuck in my quest to add listings to Edgeio

Monday, March 12, 2007

Oh what a tangled web... of Real Estate Listings we weave

In working on listings for my folks site, I came across trulia.com some time ago. This is a site where you can automatically provide a feed in xml format, and assuming that your site is capable of dynamically refreshing the feed when trulia hits it, your listings will always be on Trulia, and always be up to date. Google has a similar xml input feed you can provide to their Google Base, but unfortunately they expire your input every 30 days or so and you have to go and give them a new file manually, so it's not quite as nice as Trulia from my perspective.

Anyway, while working to load listings to Trulia, I noticed that some of our listings were already there from a site called point2homes. This is a site that's done by the same company (I think - don't quote me on this) that does the Remerica Corporate website, and will give agents a personal page in point2homes for an additional $10 per year, and load their listings in.

Now my mother had already mentioned to me sometime back that she had problems with duplicate listings at realtor.com. That's because being at the corner of three counties we put our listings into three separate MLS systems, all of which feed into realtor.com. I'm not sure if realtor.com fixed this problem yet or not, but all of this got me to thinking about all the different places I've seen these listings being sent to and from. I wondered if other realtors were experiencing similar spaghetti journeys with their listings, or even knew where their listings were headed in cyberspace.

I thought I'd leave you with the following graphic to emphasize this crazy interconnection of listing sites. If this is the future of Real Estate Listings on the Internet, then two questions come to mind.
1.) How are we going to prevent duplicates?
and
2.) what will be the future of the MLS sites if the listings are so freely available everywhere?

Food for thought, or something like that.