8 Reasons Smart Realtors Use Wordpress for Their Real Estate Website

I'm so tired of looking at bad websites.  So many Realtors pay thousands and thousands of dollars for poorly designed template websites that get them little or no traffic and no converted sales.  What's worse is that some of these sites actually DO get them traffic but scare prospects off when they get to the site.  Well, times, they are a' changin'.  Wordpress has become the open source content management system of choice for web developers, designers, and professionals from every industry.  It's perfectly suited to Real Estate for about twelve thousand reasons.  I'll try to keep it to 8 Reasons Why Smart Realtors Use Wordpress for Their Real Estate Website.

1.  Wordpress is the the most versatile, powerful web publishing platform on earth.  Period.

If you can think it, Wordpress can probably do it.  You can modify everything about the front end and back end to suit your individual needs, tastes, and desires.  You can do a lot with almost no knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP, or Javascript.  Put those programming languages together, and your imagination becomes the limit.  But forget all those silly programming languages.  You can have an amazing functional wordpress site for a hundred bucks up front and ten bucks a month... seriously.

2.  Wordpress is made for Search Engines to Find.

Paying advertising dollars to drive people to your website is just plain mad.  I understand there are reasons to do it but free traffic is the best traffic.  And since you've carved out your niche and the content of your site is specific to the marketplace you work, it's even easier to get targeted traffic.  Wordpress does this very well by default but you can use plugins like All-In-One SEO, Google XML Sitemaps, and themes like Headway Themes (which we use) to provide you SEO additional punch without having to be an expert.

3.  Wordpress is tailor made for real estate.

Why?  Because it allows Realtors to easily crank out good content in a timely fashion and be rewarded with visitors, leads, and conversions into sales.  If a premium theme like Headway or StudioPress is too much for you check out some of these other themes on wpzoom.

4.  There's a plugin for that.

Plugins extend the functionality of wordpress through additional coding.  You can add SEO benefits, calendars, IDX searches, all kinds of widgets, embeddable videos, embeddable documents, you name it.  There are even plugins for content protection (read members only) like DAP, Digital Access Pass (the one we use and love).  Then you've got plugins to give you links to related posts, popular posts, user reviews, the list goes on.

5.  WordPress can be a lead generating MACHINE.

No website has, "If you build it, they will come." Status.  Wordpress is close though.  Now that some of the rules about scraping have changed The likes of the Real Estate Tomato and Diverse Solutions have churned out amazing products like Listing Press and dsIDXpress.  These plugins allow Google (and other search engines, but who really cares about anyone else?) to index listings on your website as original listings and push your search rankings through the roof with a flood of original, area and industry specific content.  Take advantage of these two plugins before Google and NAR decide to change their rules.

6.  For Now... Wordpress sets you apart.

Even though Wordpress is one of the most popular platforms for web development in the world... our technologically backward industry still has yet to embrace it as a group, separating those few who do use it from the pack.  I would HIGHLY recommend using the wordpress.org (the self-hosted version) of wordpress instead of just getting a free blog at Wordpress.com.  Set up is very easy.  Check out our videos for a series of screen casts with step-by-step instructions on how to create your own self-hosted website with Wordpress.

7.  Got a Marketing Idea?  Wordpress can Help.

Create landing pages till the cows come home for Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Neighborhoods, and more.  Make a custom 404 page (that's the page people see when they type in the wrong thing or hit a bad link) to reinforce your marketing plan.  Create your own private FSBO listing page.  Your time and imagination are your only limit.

8.  There's support out the wazoo..

There's nothing worse that a program, platform, or system with bad support.  That's another reason Wordpress rocks.  There are literally hundreds of websites the offer suggestions and support for anything you could want to do with Wordpress.  You can also view the original Codex (boring documentation) if you can't find what you're looking for anywhere else.  There are oodles of designers and people like myself online that can always help as well. There's 8 Reasons smart realtors use wordpress.  Still not sure?  Think you can't handle it?  Hire someone to do it for you.  Your site will be 100 times better than some z57 or point2 website.  I'm not even going to grace those two companies with a link. View the original article here