Today, we’re going to run through how to put together nice, optimized Craigslist real estate ads and link them to your Realzi site.  Using Craigslist can draw real users to the pages you link to, users that can then navigate to other areas of your site.  What’s more, inbound links from Craigslist may have a positive effect on your ranking across search engines.  Neither benefit alone is small potatoes; when put together, you have a potent weapon in the war against a traffic-less web presence.  (That war is a  tough one, but Realzi and Craigslist can help in spectacular ways.)

Eventually, we’re going to go over two types of Craigslist ads.  The first, which we’ll deal with in this post, will be a posting featuring a specific property listing.  The second, which we’ll address at a future date, will be more general, focusing on a specific area of a city.  We’ll break down each type with some typically gorgeous screenshots and some typically heady expert analysis.  Ready?  Here goes!

Postings about specific listings are generally posted in the “real estate – by broker” section of Craigslist.  (A brief note: When posting ads about specific properties, it’s best to stick with properties that you yourself have actually listed.  Things may get hairy from an ethical and legal perspective if you post someone else’s listings, so don’t do it!)  Here’s what an optimized post will look like (click to enlarge):

As you can see, I’ve gone ahead and taken the liberty of pointing out some elements that I’d like to mention.  They’re numbered, and here are the corresponding explanations.

1. Here, you put the entire address, which consists of the first two lines on the property page of the listing.  It’s important to do this, since this is also the title of the property page, which means search engines will associate the Craigslist post with the property page more effectively.

2. Put an accurate area that’s also something people will search for.  More people will be looking for “North Austin real estate” than “Majestico real estate” (especially since Majestico Lane doesn’t even exist), so opt for the former.  Make your area too broad, however, and you’ll be missing out on an opportunity to have a relevant keyphrase associated with your post.

3. Put an email address that you check here; however, make sure you anonymize it so that people don’t harvest your email address and spam you to high heaven.

4. Here, put the same address you used in the “Posting Title” field in <h1> tags.  For those of you who are HTML neophytes, this will make a nice heading out of whatever you put in there.  It will look big and assertive, and is a real attention-grabber (both for people and search engines).  Copy it exactly like how it’s written and you’ll be golden.

5. This is the HTML for the link we’re going to have in here.  If you’re starting to get scared because you don’t know anything about HTML, don’t worry!  This is all you’ll ever have to need for Craigslist ads, and I’ll show you exactly what all of this means.  Here’s a breakdown of what is going on here:

• The <a part lets Craigslist know that a link is about to be put in.
• The href= part indicates that the link immediately follows.
• The “http://www.vvvvvvvvvvvvvv.com/texas/austin/78723/5928-majestico-ln?id=1394294586″ part is the URL, copied and pasted from the address bar of my browser, in quotes.  Be sure to remember to add the quotes.
• The > part means the link is going to be named with whatever words follow.
• The 5928 Majestico Ln Austin, TX 78723 part represents the part of the link you click on.  That’s called the “anchor text” of the link.  For example, when considering the link real estate websites, the anchor text is “real estate websites.”
• The </a> part lets Craigslist know that the link is done being put in, and we’re about to resume our regular writing.

Fancy, huh?

6. Here’s a description of the property!  Get as lyrical and poetic as you want.  This is just to entice people to click that snazzy link you just made all by yourself.

7. This is some legalese at the bottom of your listing on the property page.  Each Board of REALTORS® may have its own legalese you’ll need to affix to the bottom of a Craigslist post.  This is ABOR’s version.  Be sure to copy it directly  from the bottom of the page, because the date changes daily.

8. The address of the property in question again, this time without the city, state, and zip, since that would be redundant in this field.

Aaaaaaand that’s it!  Pretty neat stuff.  This Craigslist ad will look like this, once it’s all published (again, click to enlarge):

Not too shabby!  Note how all that stuff into explanation #5 went into making that link (the one indicated by the “Huzzah!” arrow).  You could have just simply entered the URL there, but search engines like links with relevant anchor text much more, and we gave them one there.  Go us!

This post is wonderful.  It gives people searching Craigslist information about where the house is, who’s listing it, and directs them to our website, where they can find out (much, much) more information about this property.  It also gives search engines information about what website they should associate the keyphrase “5928 Majestico Ln Austin, TX 78723,” which, we’ll go ahead and say, should be our website, thank you very much.  Both associations prove to be incredibly useful.

Next time, we’ll break down the ins and outs of making a Craigslist ad featuring zip codes, neighborhoods, and cities.  Until then, so long, and happy home-selling!

Indexable IDX solutions are the latest in a long line of hot innovations for real estate websites.  Though they’ve been around for a while, their appeal is really starting to catch on, and they’re getting blogged about left and right these days.

Also known as spiderable IDX, an indexable IDX solution builds out pages on your site that correspond to listings in the MLS.  (Sounds kind of like Realzi, doesn’t it?)  The resulting benefit is that you have a massive, easily indexable and searchable site that Google can crawl repeatedly.  This translates to results for more keyphrases, which means more traffic.

Prior to the advent of indexable IDX, a typical approach to the display of MLS data involved a framed solution that was hosted elsewhere.  An organization would buy access rights to RETS data feeds, build out a frame displaying that data, and offer it to real estate agents to put up on their personal websites for a fee.  The frame usually featured a searchable list of properties taken from the relevant MLS.  A map search was often included as well.  Prospective buyers could retreive MLS data for residences that interested them, which left them more well-suited to the difficult task of home searching.

The good old days might seem just fine at first glance, but if you noticed, there’s a little sentence we slipped in there that drives home the relative uselessness of framed, non-indexable IDX solutions: “This sort of solution worked well for users who stumbled across such sites.”  The fact of the matter is, many of these old sites, despite displaying an easy-to-use, searchable, framed IDX solution, were buried in Google search results for short-tail keyphrases and were completely absent for many longer-tail keyphrases.  That’s because the MLS data—those reams of fresh, up-to-date, relevant data that Googlebot craves—is actually nowhere to be found on the site displaying the frame, so the resulting SEO benefit of displaying it is virtually nil.  This can’t be underestimated, either, because the attractiveness/ease of use/utility of your site is worthless if nobody can ever find it.  You could plan what would be the best party in the world, but if you don’t supply directions, you’ll end up eating cheese and crackers alone when the big day comes.  And that’s just not very fun.

Contrast this rather somber picture with the benefits of an indexable IDX.  Think about it: with the frequently updated, extremely relevant, keyword-rich data that an indexable IDX brings, you’ll have a fantastic competitive edge over other real estate websites.