So exactly what kind of local information should you be including? For some inspiration, let’s head over to Hawaii and check out bestofhawaiirealestate.com.

This website is making local information a key part of its strategy, having just announced the addition of new “top five things to consider” sections covering each area.

The section “top five things to consider when moving to Oahu”, for example, covers topics such as population, air travel options, and even the local surf scene. Browsing through the website, home hunters can also find information on topics such as:

- Schools and education

- Residents’ cultural backgrounds

- The local arts scene

- Shopping

- Nearby scenic spots

- Wildlife

- Local food

The website doesn’t go into huge amounts of detail, opting to sketch out the main features of each location in a few short sentences. Best of all, bestofhawaiirealestate.com didn’t have to spend hours researching every single topic – their information comes straight from residents who answered the simple question “What’s your favorite part of living here?”

So if you’re struggling with the idea of implementing local information into your website, take a leaf from bestofhawaiirealestate.com – keep it short, simple, and look to the locals for your ideas.

With almost every real estate agent claiming to be the best and most experienced in their area, choosing an agent can end up little more than a guessing game for buyers and sellers. So how do you make sure you stand out to these (often confused) potential customers?

To begin with, it pays to be original. Whether you’re writing a detailed online profile or simply filling out your Twitter bio, steer clear of overused phrases such as “one of the most experienced agents in Sydney” or “knows central London real estate.”

What potential customers want to know is, exactly how much experience does that Sydney agent have? What does that agent actually know about central London? Be precise and you will immediately encourage more confidence in your audience.

Being honest about your abilities goes hand in hand with being precise. After all, if you overstate your qualifications or experience level, chances are that will become obvious as soon as you start to work with a client.

An over-emphasis on resume details is another potential trap for agents promoting themselves online. You’ll naturally want to highlight your professional qualifications, and buyers and sellers are probably interested in them to a degree. But this interest pales in comparison with their need to be sure you understand their location. The trick is to balance out details about your professional life with just as much (or more) information about the area you cover.

As with any content you publish online, it’s worth having one or two people check over it before putting it on display. This will help you catch any spelling and grammar issues, and possibly prompt you to tweak your message to make it that much more appealing.

When website designers Vandelay Design put up their 27 of the best real estate websites list last week, we had to take a look at who made the cut. One website that stood out was jimolenbush.com - perhaps better known as Cantera Real Estate – which represents a boutique real estate company based in Austin, Texas.

Just as we saw with nestrealtygroup.com, this website immediately puts the emphasis on place with an enticing photo and details on Austin’s communities. At the same time, home hunters keen to get straight to the listings are catered for with a “quick search” box in prime position on the homepage.

The way jimolenbush.com presents its listings might well be the website’s best feature. Along with the quick search, home hunters can find listings by zip code, MLS number, and Google Maps. A menu down the left-hand side of the website also divides listings into three categories: luxury homes, downtown condos, and new home builds. With so many bases covered, jimolenbush.com is bound to please a large percentage of its user base.

Along with listings, jimolenbush.com provides a information on local schools, and its blog is regularly updated by each member of the agency’s team. The blog follows a formula we’ve been advocating for a while now – a mix of market information, listing highlights, and community news.

Finally, jimolenbush.com isn’t shy with its calls to action. The office phone numbers are listed twice on the homepage, and again on the contact page, which also presents a lead capture form. Just to be sure, these numbers are repeated at the top of each listing page. This might sound like overkill, but better that than miss out on a lead.

In a recent blog post, Inman News marketing manager Katie Lance pointed to nestrealtygroup.com as one of her favourite websites. Always on the lookout for good examples, we decided to look into what’s working for nestrealtygroup.com, with the aim of giving you some inspiration.

What’s immediately obvious when you open nestrealty.com is its emphasis on place rather than real estate agents. After a few seconds scrolling over the “Charlottesville area guides” links, users already have a sense of what the city is like.

Out-of-town house hunters can then follow the “life in Charlottesville” link to find out more about what the city has to offer. With a simple mix of photos, video, and well-written copy, nestrealtygroup.com does a great job of communicating Charlottesville and positioning themselves as the local experts.

The website’s blog only adds to the sense that Nest Realty know their area, promising information on “all of the great things Charlottesville, Albemarle County, and Central Virginia have to offer.” It seems they’ve also taken a leaf from clarkcountryrealestateguide.com with their own “365 things to do” series. These posts are interspersed with market information, reinforcing the brokerage’s authority on the area.

Of course, the website also offers a listing search that invites users to “search for your nest”. House hunters who know what they want can search either by criteria or via the map, while those looking for more inspiration can scroll down to find out more about popular neighbourhoods, where they also see featured listings. Nothing too fancy here, and nothing that will overwhelm users.

There are two more things this website does well throughout: colour scheme and fonts. These might sound like afterthoughts, but it’s clear a lot of effort has gone into choosing the muted tones and classical typeface nestrealty.com uses. The result is a relaxing user experience.

Remember, you don’t have to have a huge budget, or be the winner of Inman’s most innovative brokerage award, to put these principles into practice on your own website. The nestrealtygroup.com formula boils down to:

- An emphasis on place,
- Proof they know their area,
- Simplicity in design and search.

Of course, we’re keen to hear your take on nestrealtygroup.com, along with any other agent websites you think are working well. Let us know your thoughts in our comments.

Today we’re going back to basics with a look at the essential elements for all good agency websites. Everyone knows you need a website for your agency, but it’s no longer good enough to have just any old website. It needs to be fabulous with the latest gizmos and tricks. Or does it? Here’s our list of the most important things to include in – and leave out of – your agency website.

Must Haves:

Good domain name. The name of the website should accurately reflect your business name so it will be more easily found by those using search engines. It is also simply good practice to have the domain mirror your business name – an obscure domain name just raises questions.

Email addresses. Your email addresses should be reflective of your website’s domain name, eg: www.abc.com as the domain name and mary@abc.com as the email address. These email addresses should be used on the website as contact details.

SEO ready. The website should be built with SEO in mind. That is, meta data, keywords, heading tags and content should all be optimised so that the site can be easily indexed by search engines and therefore found by users. For more information on SEO, see our guest series here.

Content management system. Your site should be easily editable via some sort of back-end system that only certain users can access. Your designer should provide a way to update and add content on certain parts of your website so that you can alter things as your business changes.

Clear contact information. A user should not have to go searching for ways to contact your business. After all, the idea is that you entice people to contact you! Make sure you have email addresses and phone numbers clearly visible on multiple pages of the site and that someone actually monitors these contact requests.

Clear navigation. Don’t force people to guess where information is found on your site. Make it easy for them with clearly and sensibly labelled sections. Have the most important information and functions (ie. the search functionality) available up front so users are not having to navigate through multiple pages to get to it.

Search functionality. This should be available from the home page as well as in a For Sale or For Lease section. Most users going to an agency website are there to look at the listings. Make it easy for them.

Additional relevant content. It is a good idea to included relevant local content on your site for buyers, sellers, renters, landlords and those interested in the property market. Things such as buying guides, government grants, legal and financial information as well as local services are all positive inclusions. This sort of content is good for SEO purposes and also helps engage and re-engage users with your website. To be able to provide more than just listings is a great service for those interested in property, particularly if it is local news or market commentary that changes regularly.

Good photos. Your listings should all contain multiple high-quality images. The web is a visual medium and browsers like nothing more than to look at lots of pictures of their new potential home. Other images on the site should likewise be of high quality and well positioned to capture attention and be relevant to surrounding content.

Portal feeds. The website’s content management system should allow for multiple uploads to other sites, namely portal websites that your agency advertises on. You don’t want to have to load up listings on to your own website and then do it again for the portals.

Maps. Mapping tools have become faster and more intelligent in recent times and provide a great service to those searching for property. In an industry where it’s all about location, having a map to plot properties on, and even one that includes local services and relative distances, is an integral part of modern property searching.

Sold properties. A list of recently sold properties with sale prices and asking prices is a great tool for both buyers and sellers considering using your agency. Results speak volumes and if you are proud of your efforts you have nothing to lose by publishing these results.

Don’t Need:

Picture of the principal/owner on the home page. This was once the mainstay of all agency websites, but is now considered a real no-no. It is unnecessary and can be seen as narcissistic! The About Us section is the perfect place to include photos and bios of the staff that make the agency so great.

Reams of information about the business. Whilst some information about the business is essential for selling the services and benefits, you don’t need to go overboard here. Most users know what an estate agency offers. Some select testimonials and a succinct list of services offered will suffice. The best way to differentiate yourself from your competitors is to offer market intelligence or commentary and provide regular updates to your readers in a news-style section.

May Want:

You may want to include some other widgets on your site such as currency converters, language converters, short-term rental calendars, and hotlist management tools.

It’s now official: website speed matters, particularly if you’re concerned with where you rank in Google’s search results.

In a blog post last Friday, Google Fellow Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer of Google’s Search Quality Team, explained that website speed is now included in Google’s search ranking algorithms.

“Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users,” the post explains. “Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.”

This research, which looked at how users responded to delays on Google itself, shows just how easily potential customers can be thrown off by a slow website. Google explains:

“All other things being equal, more usage, as measured by number of searches, reflects more satisfied users. Our experiments demonstrate that slowing down the search results page by 100 to 400 milliseconds has a measurable impact on the number of searches per user of -0.2% to -0.6% (averaged over four or six weeks depending on the experiment). That’s 0.2% to 0.6% fewer searches for changes under half a second!”

So even if you’re not particularly worried about where you rank in Google search results, this new emphasis on speed might prompt you to double check how your website is performing. But how do you go about doing this?

Anticipating this question, Google have come up with suggestions of free tools you can use to evaluate and improve your website’s speed, including their own Page Speed, YSlow from Yahoo!, and WebPagetest.

Most web users would agree that website speed is important, but if you’re worried that this new addition to Google’s algorithms is going to relegate your website to page 10, don’t be. Google’s blog post emphasises that less than 1 percent of search queries are affected by the site speed signal, and that it only applies for visitors searching in English on google.com at the moment. “If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site,” Google says.

Australian real estate agents wishing they had widgets like those available in the US and UK are in luck: pricefinder.com.au has just released a range of its own.

According to pricefinder.com.au chief operating officer Kent Lardner, the widgets were inspired by offerings from zillow.com and trulia.com in the US.

The “SalesMatch” widget allows users to find and map matching comparable sales for any property. “RentMatch” does the same for rentals, while the “Stats” widget allows agents to embed suburb, postcode, and local government area sales statistics and charts into their website.

The main difference between these offerings and those available to US agents is that they aren’t free. The widgets are available at no extra cost to those on pricefinder.com.au’s “pro” and “solo” memberships, which start at AUD$95 per month. Banners and logos are also available.

The results are in from our first poll of 2010, with the overwhelming majority of respondents saying they plan to spend big on online marketing this year.

For those of you planning to invest significantly more – or even a little more – in your online marketing strategy in 2010, you’ve come to the right place. Here are five articles to help you create your best online marketing campaign yet:

Fine-tuning Your Ad Strategy

Know Where Your Leads are Coming From

Maximising Leads from Portal Sites

Top 10 Tips for Marketing Your Brand on a Budget

Print Advertising is Obsolete – The Case for Online

This month, we want to know what you have found to be the most successful element on your website in terms of generating business. Is it the fact that you give people the ability to search for listings? Do your audience numbers spike each time you provide detailed information about the local area?

Perhaps the social media side of the website is working the hardest, or you’re finding most of your customers through the mobile website option you provide. What about those email newsletters your readers subscribe to – are they bringing in the customers?

Of course, in an ideal scenario, most or all of these elements would be bringing in plenty of leads. But if you only had time to focus your efforts on one area, which would you choose for maximum business success? Go to the poll on our homepage to let us know what you think, and feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments.

[Image: sawse.com]

Now that we’ve had a general discussion on some of the principles and pitfalls of blogging, let’s take a closer look at some specific ways to keep your blog in the “good” category and out of the other two.

Track what’s working, and change things accordingly. There’s no point signing up for a web analytics service if all you do is paste in the code and forget about it. Figure out what kinds of posts draw in the most visitors, and what keeps people on your website for more than a few seconds. Your website’s click-stream – the way people move around the website – should also be something you’re familiar with. Using all this information to constantly modify the content on your blog is the key to gaining traffic.

Look at the search terms people are using to find you. Some results will be slightly off-the-wall, but in amongst those will be some gems that tell you exactly what your readers were hoping for when they clicked through to your blog. The next question you have to ask yourself is, did you deliver? If not, what can you add that might satisfy those readers next time?

Colour is important. It is easy to lose a lot of time playing around with themes and colour settings, but at the same time, poor choices here can drive people away. This is where honest feedback from friends and colleagues can go a long way, as well as a survey of your favourite blogs to see what works for them.

Explain who you are up front. Ideally, the description under your blog’s title will tell people who you are and what they can expect to find. Information in your sidebar should expand on this with facts about your business, location, and an option for people to contact you. The more you say here, the more likely people will be to think of this blog as an extension of a real-world business.

Try not to leave people hanging in your comments section. If your readers have a question, answer it. Even if someone else has jumped in while you’ve been away from the computer, take the time to acknowledge the question and throw in your two cents. This helps to remind people that there really is someone on the other side of the posts.

Of course, these suggestions only scratch the surface of good blogging. There are plenty of other ways to improve your blog, and we’re looking forward to your own suggestions in the comments.

The benefits of agents running their own real estate blogs are many: they can position you as a local expert in your neighbourhood, enhance your credibility as a businessperson, and attract leads that might otherwise have overlooked you entirely.

At least, that’s the theory. In practice, an agent’s blog can have the opposite effect, driving away leads by presenting an image that’s far from professional. It’s an understandable by-product of the accessibility of blogging – everyone can do it, but not everyone can do it well.

So what are some of the pitfalls to avoid with your blog, and what are some attributes to aspire to? We don’t intend to name and shame, but after scouring the web for agent website examples, we have come up with a few hot tips:

The writing has to be up to scratch. You might be a wonderful communicator “in real life”, but the online environment is less forgiving, as typos and poor grammar sit around until you correct them. The trick is to write as if you were speaking to a friend, keeping your sentences as natural and conversational as possible.

Closely linked to the way you write is what you write about. And here’s where you ask that all-important question: who is my audience? Would potential customers really be interested in the latest industry news? Or would they be more attracted by content that discusses movements in the local community – new shops opening, business successes, perhaps even an interview with the local mayor or council member? Put yourself in your readers shoes and consider what you’d be searching for in your online home hunt.

Speaking of mayors, keep this in mind: politicising your content, while tempting, is a sure-fire way to alienate those readers who don’t see things your way. Of course, it makes sense to discuss local issues and the way government is addressing these, but by taking a hard-line stance you’re sure to upset someone, and that someone could potentially have been a new client.

The basics aren’t enough when it comes to blog design. Of course, not everyone can begin with a perfectly designed blog – at first a basic theme will probably have to do. But as time goes on, readers will expect improvements. A poll, more pictures, updated links, a few more pages – anything to make things more interesting for return visitors beyond the daily or weekly posts.

If you give up, take it offline, at least until you’re ready to re-start. If your blog is your only online presence, consider stripping it back to a basic contact and information page. Then, when you’re less run off your feet, bring back the posts. Nothing will bring doubt into the mind of a potential client more quickly than the top post being dated “September 4, 2008″.

Tune in next time for part two of our tips for real estate bloggers. In the meantime, of course, share your own tips and thoughts in our comments.

Click here for Blogs: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly – Part 2.