WordPress gains in popularity with real estate pros

By now, real estate agents have gotten the message about networking with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

These sites have really become part of the mainstream, I guess you could say, media or marketing.

You have something to say – you put it up on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

But there are some new platforms rising as well.

One of those is WordPress and it’s rising like a space shuttle.

For example, in a recent study, more than 15% of real estate agents now market themselves using WordPress. More than YouTube at 12%.

The same study said 79% use Facebook, 48% use Twitter and 29% use LinkedIn.

You know why, because the big 900-pound gorilla on the web is still Google.

And WordPress, to put it simply, is an easy way to get the Google gorilla’s attention.

HJWebsites creates WordPress sites for real estate agents and brokers.

The service was developed by Home Junction Inc., the developers of the SpatialMatch IDX and Lifestyle search engine tool.

Why did Home Junction venture into offering WordPress?

“We create web sites for real estate professionals,” says John Perkins, CEO of Home Junction. “And we couldn’t help but notice how easy the WordPress tool made it for a broker and agent to update and manage their own site.”

We’ll cut to the chase.

In your busy circles, you may have heard the expression on the web, “Content is King.” That’s old school. Because what happened is people start piling on content on their site that was meaningless, repeated or just plain old.

Then they created sites and put on the same meaningless, repeated or just plain old content and linked back to their site.

Google’s algorithms originally thought, “Hmm, this site has a lot of relevant content to the search and some similar sites linking to it. It must be a good choice to appear in the search results.”

(Sorry, got carried away, algorithms are just pieces of data that can’t think. At least not yet).

But so many people were gaming Google that the PhDs there said, what a minute, we need to tighten things up.

So they revised their algorithms. Called them Google Panda – but it turned out to be a bear for many web developers.

Overnight, their high rankings disappeared. Gone. Ouch.

Which brings us back to WordPress.

Because now, if “Content was King,” “Great Content is the Emperor.”

What’s great content – content that is current, updated regularly, not a copy from somewhere else, makes sense and attracts links.

WordPress is the tool that allows real estate pros to constantly update their content on their own.

That’s why it is moving up in the ranks. That’s why the next time you open your online marketing toolbox and pull out Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, think seriously about adding WordPress.

The big gorilla will like you more. And considering that the majority of real estate searches start on Google,  that’s a good thing.

For more information on WordPress for real estate, click here.

To see the graphic on how real estate pros are using these various tools, click here.