Real Estate Blogs – How To Correctly Use Permalinks And Why

Real Estate Blogs – How To Correctly Use Permalinks And Why

Permalinks – short form for permanent links – are another integral part of real estate blogs (or as I like to call them, “21st century websites”) that will not only assist in gaining the attention of the search engines, but of your specific niche market too.

Ok, so first of all, what are Permalinks?

Permalinks are fixed urls (or domain LINKS) that will never change (ie., PERMANENT) which are created for each post and page that we create within our blogs.

permalinks - how and why they are important in real estate blogsWhy are they so important?

Imagine there’s a puzzle which consists of three pieces.  If one of them is missing then the puzzle is not complete and, therefore, unfinished.  Your permalinks is one of those puzzle pieces.  The other two are your

  • Blog Post Titles, and your
  • Keyword Phrases

All three of these pieces of the puzzle are intertwined and affect each other in a very unique way.  Here’s how:

  1. When writing your new real estate blog post, make sure that when POSSIBLE and SENSIBLE (or in otherwords, natural), you use one of your keyword phrases within the 70 characters allowed within the title.  Don’t add them just to keyword stuff – it probably will sound ridiculous and completely unnatural – the opposite of a well-written blog post.
  2. Since the title may contain one of your keyword phrases, you should also use it within the first sentence (or 160 characters) of your blog post content and/or derivatives of the keyword phrase – for example if “real estate blogs” is your phrase, a derivaties may be another keyword phrase you are trying to be found on (the almighty) page one of Google, such as “real estate blogging“.
  3. Your blog title will determine what your permalink will be (if set up correctly – see video below!), which is what your readers will be directed to via backlinks of the post you add to your social networking sites, and bookmarked for future reading (for example).

How do I correctly set up my Permalinks?

Here’s the important part – how to make sure you have your permalinks set up properly. There are many tasks you have to complete when setting up a new self-hosted blog, one of which is getting your custom-structured permalinks in place.  Here’s a short how-to guide on completing this task in about 30 seconds:

As mentioned in the video, you can read more about the details behind permalinks, the difference between “ugly”, “almost pretty” and “pretty” permalinks, and how they are created on wordpress.org‘s website. Was this information new to you?  Let us know in the comments below!

Facebook’s New Social Plugins For Real Estate Blogs and Websites

Facebook’s New Social Plugins For Real Estate Blogs and Websites

The new social media plugins that Facebook introduced just one week ago have already taken their quest to become the central nexus of the world wide web to a whole new level! At a rate of more than 300 websites per hour (that’s over 50,000 websites in one week!) adding the new social plugins to their websites and blogs, along with Facebook taking over Google as the number one trafficked website, Real Estate agents should definitely take note and get on board today too!

New Facebook Social Plugins for Realtors Blogs

During last week’s Facebook’s F8 Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, the release of the new Open Graph API and social plugins, including the new “Like” and “Recommendation” plugins, were launched and took hold like wildfire. You can see the “Like” plugin at the bottom of this post – this allows visitors of your real estate website or blog to promote your content to their Facebook page with a single click (no sign in required!). This plugin can be easily incorporated into your site by using the html code provided at the bottom of this post.

After you have added this code into your real estate blog or various website pages, you can then also incorporate additional Facebook social plugins such as the “Activity Feed” and “Recommendations” plugins. By adding these plugins to your blog, you will allow your visitors to have a more engaging experience on your site, giving your website or blog a definite social aspect to it, plus increase the time they are on your site, which in turn will increase your blog ranking in the search engines.

Facebook Open Graph API

The Open Graph API is what allows all this to take place. By incorporating a relationship between websites and Facebook (much like Facebook Connect does), information is now shared all over the web, through these plugins. Some (including Government agencies) may find this to be too close for comfort and crossing lines with privacy control, however, if you don’t want to be social, then what are you doing on Facebook 7 hours a month (which is the average of the 400+ million users time spent)?!

There is also a more detailed analytics (called Insights) that Facebook has incorporated with the new Open Graph and social plugins. Described by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and newly appointed director of product (formally CEO of FriendFeed), Bret Taylor, Open Graph as being both useful to businesses and services. “On Facebook, users are connected to people they know, as well as public figures, services and products they like; Facebook’s new platform will allow websites and apps to share this information with each other.

Ready to get even more social with your real estate blog? Here’s the direct link to Facebook’s new social plugins.

Here’s the html code to add the “Like” Plugin to your blog too:

Facebook Like Plugin Code

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