When you’re developing a real estate website plan, there are a great many things to consider.  From a very broad perspective, there are two major areas of concern.

The ultimate success of your business will probably be tied closely to your success on the Internet.  Your website or blog is your storefront in a very big world.  It’s easy to get a dry cleaning customer if they pass your store every day on their way home from work.  It’s a lot harder to capture a real estate lead from an armchair buyer or seller clicking around the World Wide Web.

As real estate professionals who want to make a success of our Internet presence, we should know some of the terminology.  But, we should also know how to concentrate our time and efforts on what’s important when it comes to tracking visits to, and activity on, our websites.  These two goals go hand-in-hand when it comes to sorting out website traffic statistics.  Let’s look at some terms and see how we want to use these site traffic statistics.

Actually, we’re not just talking about “social networks,” but business networking as well.  The Internet has made dramatic changes in the way the world shops, locates information, and in how they communicate with each other.  Of course, email is the elephant in the room.  But, as we become ever more mobile and in a hurry, networking will become a many-faceted activity.

It’s been written around the Web that 90+% of real estate websites and blogs are not effective at their intended purpose.  This is assuming that your goal for your site is the actual direct generation of business.  If all you want is a billboard to place your listings and show to your listing clients, then most any site will do, and you really don’t need to get into lead capture as a strategy.

The most competition-intensive thing you can do with your website is to develop all of your content around keywords and phrases that are generic real estate, as “YourTown real estate.”  Virtually 95+% of your competition is doing the very same thing.  Far from a negative, this opens up a great opportunity for you.

It would be difficult to find a real estate professional who doesn’t understand the value of a website, and the need to have some type of MLS search displayed on it. Yet, a great many of them also complain that they get few or no leads from their websites.

Real estate is “location, location, location!”  And, website or blog search engine visibility is “content, content, content.”  Don’t get caught up in hiring SEO (Search Engine Optimization) “Gurus” who promise top search engine positions in a hurry.  A few may be able to do some good, but the tactics used are almost always discovered by the search engines, and your positions suffer quickly.

Just when you think you’re catching up with technology with a website or blog, you find that there is now a requirement for video on your site.  It’s not a legal requirement, but one of demand from the consumer and your site visitors.  Video on the Web has mushroomed, with YouTube alone hosting almost 100 million videos from 3.75 million user channels.  Then there is Google Video, Yahoo Video, Vimeo, and a dozen others in the mainstream.

The Internet is changing the way that Realtors do business and market themselves to such an extent that some will just not be around in a few short years.  Survival of the fittest is the way of the world, and the fittest in real estate will be those agents and brokers who understand the new Internet consumer and how to engage them from first contact through a commission.