Building a Community Page

Building a Community Page What is a Community Page? A community page is a portion of your website where you discuss a specific community you serve. Many customers are capable of finding listings on the internet, but struggle to find an expert for specific areas. By positioning yourself as an expert in a neighborhood, subdivision, or area, you are able to present your website visitors with a coherent picture of the community. You become the expert. The more information you can offer about the area, the fewer reasons the visitor has to leave your website. Your goal in creating a Community Page is to keep the customer on your site, and offer your expert services to help them in their home search. Research your community and collect your information before you build the page. Where do I build a Community Page? Your website is like a book with your Home page as the cover. You can add as many pages as you want to your book in the form of individual pages in your website. Real Living allows search sites like Google and Yahoo to index the individual pages in your website. This means a person can find your specific community page easier in search results for the community name. You ll add a community page to your website editor. The community name will then appear in your website menu for easy access. What information do I put on a community page? Consider the world-wide reach of the internet when you think about your community. While people living nearby might know the history of the area and the nearby amenities, your relocation customers wouldn t. The internet is also a visual medium. We re going to consider the images you should include on a community page. You ll have some investigation to do, but the information you find will help you better sell the area. What is the community name? History When was the community founded? Are there any historical monuments, buildings, or museums in the area? If it s a subdivision, who was the developer/builder? Resources you can use to find these answers include your local recorder s office, the library, and your local Chamber of Commerce. Try searching for the community name on Google.com. Your goal here is not to write a book, but to offer a paragraph or two of history with some information on spots of local interest. Write a short description of the community. v1.0-7.26.2011 1

Directions How do people get to this area from the popular roads nearby? Include driving directions from four directions (N, S, E, and W). Talk about nearby highway access. What are the driving directions? You can capture a map image from your Create a Map tool in the Business Center. The advantage of using the Real Living tool is that you can add icons for Police, Fire, Shopping, etc. Select the Print Map option, turn on the icons you want displayed using the toolbar at the top of the page, and press <ALT> + <Print Screen> on your keyboard. This copies the window with the map. You will need a photo editing software to crop the image and store it as an image file (JPG, GIF, or PNG). We recommend the free IrfanView software (available at http://www.irfanview.com ) for quick adjustment and conversion. Please feel free to use another image editing software if you have a favorite. Jump Searches Create easy property searches for your site visitors. Are there specific lifestyle related property features that would interest buyers? Build searches by price range. Depending on the size of your community, you may be able to retrieve it by name, or draw the border on the search map. When you create a Jump Search, enter the minimum information. When your site visitors click on the search link, the results window will allow them to refine the search results with the features they want. This example was created to search a specific area on the map (The Westpoint subdivision) with the search criteria of Residential properties and prices from $150,000 to $250,000. Hint: For areas smaller than a suburb, you may need to draw the borders on the map using the Draw Search Area tool. The search will remember the view you used to create it, including the zoom level. v1.0-7.26.2011 2

When you save the search, you ll be returned to the Available Jump Searches list. Build two Jump Searches by price range. School Information What schools serve the area? Collect the website URLs to the school district website. Many schools have a number of booster websites for their sports programs. Collect these URLs to link to the game scores and schedules. School systems can be a selling point for your community. Real Living automatically provides links to the school ratings as part of the listing details, and available on-demand for your visitors in the Local Information menu. List website addresses for the school district. Include booster sites if they exist. Area photos Take a couple of pictures of the area, in multiple seasons as required. You should have clear rights to all photos you use on your website. The best way to avoid problems is to use the Real Living clipart, or take your own photos. List the pictures for your community. Local Event Calendars Calendars of local events are a way to bring current residents to your site, reinforce your image as the area expert, and capture people looking for the events as leads. Think about local festivals, charity events, and parks & recreation events. List community calendar links. v1.0-7.26.2011 3

News Widgets Real Living provides a number of widgets for your website. Widgets are small, interactive programs you can add to your website pages to provide up-to-date information automatically. The Local News and Local Real Estate News widgets will use your community s ZIP code to display the correct articles for your area. What are the ZIP codes for your community? Content Files Content files are additional information you want available to your website visitors for downloading. Real Living will let you offer Text files, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Adobe PDF files, and Publisher documents as downloads from your website. Think about additional information you can provide related to the community. Does your MLS offer statistics for presentations? Do you have flyers for featured properties in the community? Do you have a generic Buyer or Seller presentation for this community? Your website will accept files up to 2MB in size, but we strongly recommend smaller files to reduce download time. Think about how long you would wait for a file to download. List community files you want to offer your visitors. v1.0-7.26.2011 4

Climate What is the average weather in all four seasons? How much rainfall or snowfall does it receive? What are the winter low temperatures and the summer high temperatures? How many sunny days each year? Real Living provides this information in Local Market & Office Information > Neighborhood Reports. Enter an address in the area and click Go. Click the Environment tab for the year-round weather summary. Hint: You can save the Neighborhood Report to share on your page by clicking the printer icon. Select All Reports and click Print Preview. The file will be sent to your PC as an Adobe PDF file. Use the Save button in the Adobe toolbar when your preview opens. Describe the weather in the community. Keywords Now that you ve researched your community, it s time to think about keywords for your community page. Keywords are words or phrases that describe what you have on your page. These are used by commercial search engines (i.e. Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc.) to classify your page and match it to search words entered on the search sites. Your keywords will be used in various places on your page, so it s time to organize a list. Most search engines will look at the first 25 keywords entered, while others will accept up to 500. We strongly recommend you use the most important and relevant keywords first in your list. Do not repeat the same keywords in the list. This was an older trick to achieve a higher search result position, but search websites have updated their systems to ignore this trick. You should create keywords based on how people would search for properties in your community. Is the school system a selling point? Does the community surround a golf course? Remember to include the community name. Your website page will show higher in search results if you keep the content consistent on the community. Don t dilute your community page with information on hobbies, personal information, or un-related areas. v1.0-7.26.2011 5

Check your keywords with Google s AdWords tool ( http://adwords.google.com ). You don t need to purchase anything to check your keywords against Google s analysis of their searches. Look for the Get keyword ideas link on the page. Google updates the page frequently, and the link may move to different spots on the screen. Enter your keywords (remember, these can be phrases too) and search for suggestions. Google will check their search records to see how many people have searched on your keywords, or related terms. They will provide you with a short report showing how often the search terms are used, and how many other websites have those terms as keywords. Of course, a keyword with high search numbers and low competition would be ideal, but it is a balancing act. Check your keywords and adjust their order or wording to get the frequently searched keywords at the front of your list. Everything you do to improve your position in search results is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. You can check our Search Engine Optimization Quick Reference Guide (QRG) for more information. You can always update your keywords and page content. Examples of keywords for Westpoint Subdivision in the desirable Hilliard schools might include Westpoint homes in Hilliard schools, Affordable single family homes well, you re getting the idea. Real Living provides the branding for you, so you don t need to spend your keywords on broker and brand terms. List the keywords for your community page. Videos You can add video content to your site from outside sources like YouTube.com. Some communities have published virtual tours for promotion through their Chamber of Commerce. You may also have videos you have created for your communities. These are excellent additions to your community page. You will need the Embed code for these videos. List the videos for your page. v1.0-7.26.2011 6

Where does it all go? Start in your Business Center > Website Admin. In the pop-up administration window, click My Tools > My Website. The Website Control Panel will open. Your website has a Left Navigation menu that works as the Table of Contents for your website. Where in this list of pages do you want your Community Page to appear? The menu is sorted by the Sequence number in the Website Content section of your Website Control Panel. The Sequence numbers don t have to be consecutive. You can leave gaps, which make it easier to rearrange later. Select a Sequence number for your new page. Click the Add New Content button in the upper right of the Website Content section. This will open the editing screen for your new page. 1. Left Navigation Title is the actual words that will appear as the clickable link in the left menu. This should be the community name. 2. Left Navigation Alt Text is the clue that will appear in a pop-up window when your site visitor hovers their mouse over the link in the left menu. This should be the community name and can be a keyword phrase. 3. Browser Title is what will appear in the title bar of the website browser when someone is visiting this page. This should include a keyword phrase that includes the community name. 4. Search Engine Keywords. Enter your full list of keywords here. Each keyword should be separated by a comma. 5. Search Engine Description: Enter a short, attention-grabbing description of what is on your community page. It should include one or more of your keywords. 6. Sequence: Enter the sequence number to place the page link in your menu. 7. Main Article URL: You have control over a portion of the website address for this page. You should name your page using the community name, or one of your keywords with the community name. Scroll down to the Content Editor portion of the screen. v1.0-7.26.2011 7

Select Enter Content as the page type. Your new community page will include a Left Navigation menu automatically. You will not see this on the editing screen. You are not required to select a Content Template. Building your page The short sample page was built using the Basic Page Layout with Right Rail template. We ve used a table on the page to organize the content into two columns. Unlike your word processor, text doesn t wrap politely around pictures on a website. We use the table to control exactly where everything appears. 1. Page Heading the subject of your page. It should be one of your keywords. 2. Social Networking widget a handy widget that lets your visitors quickly share your information with their friends. 3. Community description / history 4. Local News widget local news based on the ZIP code of the community. 5. Map show the community. 6. Jump Searches the searches for this community were created in price ranges. 7. Content File link to download an MLS report in PDF format. 8. Directions how to reach the community. 9. Weather weather statistics from the Neighborhood Report. 10. Community video this community had a YouTube video available. 11. School information links links to the school district and to the local high school sports boosters site. v1.0-7.26.2011 8

1. Enter the page heading. Ideally, this should contain your primary keyword. Once you have it typed in, highlight the text with your mouse and select Heading 1 from the Style drop-down list on the left side of the toolbar. Search engines use the Heading 1 style to help them determine the page content. Use it only once per page, and only at the top. 2. Enter the Social Sharing Buttons widget. This widget is designed to put itself on the right side of the page. Don t worry that it appears in the wrong type style. The appearance of the widgets is controlled by their programming. They ignore any formatting you do to their code onscreen. 3. The community description and history. This is the first item in the table we added to the page. We initially created it with two rows and two columns using the table button in the toolbar. The table will appear onscreen with dashed lines around each box. It starts with one space in each box. Click inside the box to place your cursor and just start typing. A table lets you arrange things side-by-side and gives you control over how much space each gets. You can put text, links, pictures, or widgets inside each table box. 4. The Local News widget. This widget accepts the ZIP code to find news items specific to the community. Paste the widget code from the Widget Token Generator into the box. This widget requires a space 250px (pixels) wide (the size is listed in the Widget Token Generator where you create the code). To set the width of a box in a table, right-click in the box and select Cell Properties from the pop-up menu. You ll be able to adjust the width in the cell properties. v1.0-7.26.2011 9

5. Map of the community loaded as a picture file in the next row down. The picture is also a clickable link to download a PDF version of the Neighborhood Report as a Content File. When you load a Content File, it is assigned a unique URL you can use to create links for its retrieval. The picture is loaded first using the Image Manager button in the toolbar. Click Save as Draft each time you finish loading an image to your website. Images don t always respond correctly if you don t save the page after inserting them. After saving the page, click on the map and use the HyperLink Manager button in the toolbar to make it into a clickable link. If you turn an image into a clickable link, it s usually wise to label it as such. 6. Add you Jump Searches as clickable links. Because we are using a table here, the text and links will appear to the right of the image. The Jump Search tool will show the unique URL for each search you create directly below the search name. Copy the Jump Search URL. Enter the text for your clickable link on your page and highlight it. Use the HyperLink Manager button in the tool bar to make it a clickable link to the Jump Search URL. 7. We ve added a clickable link to download an MLS report loaded in Content Files. The report is in PDF format and can be downloaded by our site visitors. If you create links to Content Files that should be updated regularly, you don t need to recreate the link each time the file is updated. Just delete the old file from the Content Files list, and upload the new one with the same name. As long as the name of the file doesn t change, the links you created in your website will always work. 8. The Driving Directions were loaded in a new row. Because we had only created our table with two rows, this means we needed to add one more. To add a new row, right-click in a box in the last row of a table and select Insert Row Below from the pop-up menu. You can add rows and columns to your table whenever you need more space. 9. The Weather copied from our Neighborhood Report. You ll notice this is centered both horizontally and vertically in the table box. This option is called Content Alignment and is also included in the Cell Properties you access by right-clicking in a table box. v1.0-7.26.2011 10

10. A YouTube video of the community. Many video sites offer the ability to Embed the video into your own website. This means instead of a clickable link to the video, the video player itself is embedded on your page. These video sites will provide a block of HTML code you can copy. To add it to your website, you ll need to edit in the HTML format. As this video was to be centered on the page, it is below the table. Enter a word you can find easily in text (i.e. HocusPocus ) on the editing screen. Highlight it and apply alignment as appropriate (Centered in this case). Click the HTML button at the bottom of the editor to switch to the HTML view. Find the word you entered earlier in the code. Highlight it and paste in the HTML code from the video site. You can now switch back to the regular view by clicking the Design button at the bottom of the editing screen. 11. School Information as clickable links to the school district website and the team booster site for sports scores and schedules. Side information like this is used to attract current area homeowners to your site. If you link to the local information they frequently use, they ll return to your site and remember you. You become their expert. Other schedules that work well are local festivals, parks & recreation centers, and charity events. This particular community doesn t have a photo yet, but the photo in the Right Rail can be replaced when a photo is taken, or add a panoramic photo below the page heading. Preview your page frequently as you work. What you see on the editor screen doesn t always match the final version layout. When you re happy with your page design, click Publish at the bottom of the screen to activate your community page. This worksheet is designed to give you ideas to create your own community pages. The layout we demonstrated here is a suggestion. It is easiest to collect your community information first, and then create the page around it. v1.0-7.26.2011 11