Every real estate agent who has flirted with blogging needs to pick up a copy of Hugh Hewitt's book Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World. Better yet, read it, and see how it impacts your strategies for real estate marketing. I'm adding the book to my homeschooled kids' required reading list. It's that important.

Why would I recommend a book by a nationally known political commentator to a readership of real estate agents across the political spectrum? That could be dangerous, as I certainly don't want to lose readers over politics.

How much time did you spend writing your bio for your real estate website? Five minutes? Maybe even less? Uh oh. Dig it out right now!

Writing a persuasive bio for your real estate agent website is very important, because you're selling yourself long before you're selling a house. You won't convert a single lead to a client unless you sell them on who you are and what you do, first and foremost. Only then do you have the opportunity to list their home, or help them buy a new home.

Ever heard of drip marketing or drip newsletters? It's method of sending newsletters to leads and clients in a more personalized way. In fact, this this article you're reading right now will be delivered on day 28 of my own drip e-mail system (also called an autoresponder).

There are several reasons a drip marketing system is superior over a standard broadcast newsletter system. First and foremost is the ability to dramatically boost your conversion rate of leads to listings or leads to sales.

As a search engine optimization consultant, my job is to build sites that Google loves to crawl, index, and rank well in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

But what do I do if my SEO efforts are so successful that Googlebot loves my site too much? What happens when Google's crawler robot spikes my server load so high that I get load warnings from my webhosting provider?

That's the problem that led me to develop Googlebot Scheduler.

1. The Googlebot server load problem
2. What about Google's Webmaster Tools?
3. How Googlebot Scheduler solves the server load problem
4. Can you use Googlebot Scheduler to regulate other robots?
5. How Googlebot Scheduler can save you over $1000 in hosting fees per year.

The Googlebot server load problem

Googlebot can be a mixed blessing. You want Google to crawl your site, but sometimes Google gets carried away and becomes a resource hog. From an SEO perspective, this seems like a good problem to have. After all, this means Google loves your site.

But if Google is over-crawling your site on a shared hosting account, you can quickly go above your load limit and get your account suspended. That's not good! That's why I wrote Googlebot Scheduler.

(NOTE: If you have a site that Google is NOT crawling heavily, maybe you need some SEO consulting help. ;-)
  

What about Google's Webmaster Tools?

Yes, I know that Google Webmaster's Tools allows you to reduce your crawl rate from Normal to Slower for a fixed period of time, but there are two problem's I've experienced with this:

1. It didn't cut back enough to reduce my server load warnings. Not by a long shot.
2. The setting expires, so if you forget to renew the setting, Google will start crawling at the faster rate again.

How Googlebot Scheduler solves the server load problem

My Googlebot Scheduler script was born of necessity for one of my own sites with over 33,000 URLs that Google loves to death. I needed a way to limit Googlebot's daily access so it could only crawl within a specific window of time each day, thus reducing the load Googlebot was putting on my server.

There are two easy time settings to make in the script: The allowed time and the disallowed time. When activated on your server through a cron job (or cron simulator, like JCron Scheduler for Joomla), Googlebot Scheduler will change the contents of your robots.txt file at the times specified to either turn on Google's access or turn it off. 

Can You Use Googlebot Scheduler to regulate other Robots?

Absolutely!

You can easily use Googlebot Scheduler to limit the access of other robots through your robots.txt file.

The only reason I've named this script Googlebot Scheduler is that Googlebot seems to be the worst (best?) offender when it comes to drinking bandwidth. But if you have other robots overloading your server, all you have to do is enter them as another user agent in your "allowed" and "disallowed" robots.txt files, and they can easily be controlled.

How Googlebot Scheduler can save you over $1000 in hosting fees per year

Now, you don't have to decide between being Google friendly and running a large website on a shared hosting account. Because you can scale back Googlebot's access to as little as one hour per day, you have complete control over how much bandwidth you give to Google (or any other robot).

This means Googlebot Scheduler is a big money-saver, because Semi-Dedicated Servers can run from $60 to $90 per month on up. And a Dedicated Server can be more than that.

With Googlebot Scheduler, you won't be forced onto a Virtual Private Server, Semi-Dedicated Server, or Dedicated Server unless your human-generated traffic demands it.

God bless,

Kevin Harper

P.s. - For more information on robtots.txt usage, see:
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

P.p.s. - You can check your Google Webmaster's Tools area to verify if your robots.txt syntax is correct.

P.p.p.s. - If your webhosting plan doesn't allow cron jobs, try ResultsInternet.net. For Joomla sites, you can download the free JCron Scheduler component to simulate cron scheduling.

When a visitor goes from one real estate website to another, participants in the Alexa program allow that information to be collected and analyzed for "related links" and traffic estimates.

Here's why this can be beneficial for website owners. You spend a lot of time on your own site, right? (If not, you probably need to talk to me about your website!) With Alexa, you can add your own traffic to your own website into the Alexa database, as well as the other real estate sites you visit on a regular basis.

Have you ever wondered how some of your Realtor colleagues got to become the experts in a particular area of real estate?

Whether it's commercial real estate, development land, vacation properties, or even a neighborhood, city, or county, it's possible for you to become a real estate expert by combining your experience with focused search engine optimization strategies.

Everyone wants to be all things to all people, but sometimes it is better to narrow in on your strengths and really get that message out clearly.

Did you know that there are seven common but fatal flaws that can destroy your chances of ever showing up in the search engines?

In fact, these SEO Killers can make your site completely invisible to Google and Yahoo!

In my work, I am frequently asked to analyze websites to explain to their owners why they're not showing up on the search engines. What I've found is a stunning lack of knowledge in the web design industry about the fundamentals of how search engines work.

They should be embarrassed. Instead, they're raking in monthly subscriptions from tens of thousands of Realtors each month who don't know any better!

Many of these big companies (I call them website factories) couldn't care less about your ability to show up in the search engines, because their template sites are full of these SEO Killers.

Want to check your own site to find out of it is invisible to Google and Yahoo?

I've prepared a report for you that will walk you through it step by step. Just print it out, set it next to your computer, and check each item. You can do this in ten minutes.

My report is simple enough that even a newbie can understand it. It's normally $49, but I'm currently offering it for free when you subscribe to my newsletter. Considering what you currently pay every month for a website that may be totally useless, this little report is very valuable.

Subscribe today, and get

Top SEO Killers: Is Your Website Invisible to Google? 

When I talk to Realtors and real estate agents about their websites, one of the things I talk about is the importance of unique content—in other words—written content that is not boilerplate, that is not simply one copy of 10,000 copies out there on the web.

Boilerplate content is content that comes standard with most agent websites. But if you want your site to show up on the search engines, you need to either replace it or add significantly to it. Otherwise, your site will be exactly like the sites of the 10,000 other customers of that particular Realtor website factory.

Are you a boilerplate Realtor®? Are you a clone of all the other real estate agents out there you are competing with?

"Of course not," you say. But is your most important marketing tool, your website, a boilerplate site? I thought so.

Why do so many real estate agents get sucked into boilerplate sites that just don't perform—that just don't bring in leads, listings, or sales? It's easy to keep paying for them, month after month, year after year, with the same dismal results when it comes to search engine ranking and search engine traffic.

Sometimes Realtors® forget that in order to market their properties, they need to market themselves and their own websites. One can't simply focus on advertising her or her properties, and not spend time and resources dragging a wide net to collect leads. That should include plenty of offline promotion of you and your website.

If your job is to match buyers and sellers, it stands to reason that you need to get in touch with a lot of potential home buyers and a lot of potential home sellers before you'll be able to effectively sell real estate.

I can do some amazing things with search engine marketing techniques to drive organic search engine traffic to your site, but online efforts can be supplemented with great results through the following offline promotion techniques.