A decent looking blog is a must for real estate agents. It should consist of a nice background color, photo and bio, decent graphics, good looking header and footer, generally a nice warm friendly look.
What’s even more important than looks is the content quality that your blog presents to the reader, I mean top-notch informative content that will compel the visitor to hang around longer in order to go over and consume what is being presented. A terrific way to add quality information to your blog is through the use of widgets.
Widgets are made up of a simple code that can be copied from a source website and pasted on to yours to provide the functionality for which it was designed.
Once the code has been placed on your property, preferably on a sidebar, the widget begins to display the intended content on your blog. The content being displayed streams automatically from the source website, and does not require you perform any additional actions aside from the initial pasting of the code.
Oh, and as an icing on the cake, Google favors websites whose visitors, on average, remain at the site for longer periods of time, it thinks that there’s value in the content being shown to readers and gives the web page a higher ranking, and thus giving you more traffic.
The following widgets are some of the most informative with respect to real estate information:
Eppraisal Widgets
- Home Values: This is an extremely useful widget for your visitors, a user can enter a street address and get area-specific information on home values.
- Home Affordability: Here your visitor types in a dollar figure that is within his or her price range for a home and the widget will show the market in which homes in that price range can be found.
- Most Expensive Zip Codes: Users who happen to be curious as to the location of the most expensive homes in a specific town, can enter a city name and the widget will return a list of the most expensive zip codes in that city.
- Least Expensive Zip Codes: Same as above for finding the cheapest areas.
Zillow
- Zillow My Listings: This is a very convenient widget that allows you to display all of your Zillow listings on your blog.
- Zillow Rent Valuation Widget: A widget for determining rents around a specific address.
- Live Streaming Rates Widget: Great widget that shows real-time mortgage rates for different U.S. cities, including the lowest rate and the lending institution that offers it.
- Newest For Sale Homes: Here you can show listings of homes that recently hit the market.
Trulia Widgets
- Trulia Calculator: A quick calculator to help visitors to your blog determine their would be monthly mortgage payments. All they need is purchase price, down payment, and interest rate, the calculator will return the monthly payment amount.
- Trulia Stats: This is a chart that shows the average price of listings in an area of the user’s choosing.
Local Market Explorer from WordPress
This is a cool WordPress plug-in that allows you to show a wealth of neighborhood-related data on your website such as real estate market stats and activity, information about schools, colleges, realtors and more.
Obviously, you can’t plaster all of of these widgets on your web pages, just pick 2 or 3 that best suit your style and add them to your sidebar.
There are more widgets out there, but these are the best and most useful to the real estate niche visitor. They are sure to provide value to your visitors as well as keep them on your site a little longer, earning your blog some Google love to boot.
About The Author: Kimberley Kelly is Realtor servicing buyers looking for PGA west homes in the many golf course communities in Southern California.
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