RealBird Blog

New featured listing Wordpress plugin with SEO and synced with your RealBird account

SEO-friendly featured listing plugin is now available for self-hosted Wordpress real estate sites.

You can now simply add a simple RealBird shortcode to your WP posts and pages and your listing will be automatically pulled from your RealBird account and synced to your Wordpress site. Set it up once and continue to manage your listings on RealBird.

You can see an example on our own rental blog where we share RealBird members' rental listings using the same backlinking, SEO-friendly plugin. You can achieve now the same result on your own Wordpress site for your own listings (coming soon, active, pending and sold listings).

How to setup the Wordpress featured listings RealBird plugin:

1. Login to RealBird
2. Add your listing or click-through from the list of listings page to an existing one
3. On the listing's admin page, click on the "» Wordpress Featured Listing Plugin (native, SEO)" link that will open a popup with instructions
4. A unique shortcode is provided for each of your RealBird listings. The popup alsop shows the one-time, Wordpress plugin installation steps in case it is the first time using this new feature.

Please note that this is a beta version, but fully functional and tested with self-hosted Wordpress sites up to version 4.9.5 (latest at the time of writing this post). While we can't support your 3rd party Wordpress installation tasks, we are happy to send you tips on how to best utilize this new RealBird feature. Just ask us :)

-- The RealBird Team

All-In-One Real Estate Marketing at RealBird.com

Listing on our rental blog is courtesy of Adam Waxler

How to add Google+ authorship to your RealBird listing websites

With our last update, it is now easy to add a link of your Google+ profile to your RealBird property websites. During that update, we also implemented the Google+ authorship protocol, which now allows you  to configure your Google+ profile and have your profile photo presented next to your RealBird listings in Google's search result.

For example, see Ashton Coleman's photo being shown next to his RealBird listing on Google. It took approximately 4-5 days from configuration until Google started to show his picture.

Here are the steps for setting this up:

1. You must have a Google+ account with your personal photo uploaded (it's suggested to have a picture of your face used as a photo instead of a logo, landscape etc.)
   
   
2. Add your Google+ profile link to your RealBird profile. The profile link must have the format of https://plus.google.com/[your_id] . If you are not sure that you set it up correctly, you will be able to  test it as described in Step 4.
   
   
3. Add http://listings.realbird.com to your Google+ profile, under the "Contributor to:" section
   
   
4. Verify that all settings are correct by copy and pasting one of your RealBird listing links into Google's testing tool at: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets If step 2 and 3 are correctly completed, this test will show "Yes" for all items under the "Authorship Testing Result" section.

Please note: there are no guarantees, that Google will actually show your profile photo and authorship markup in Google's search result, even after successfully submitting the information as described above. It's completely up to Google to do so and we have no control over this. However, completing the setup is quick and the potential upside is huge. We recommend to complete this configuration, there is nothing to lose but a lot to gain.

-- The RealBird Team
www.RealBird.com

Summary of new RealBird features launched in 2011

Today is the last business day of 2011 and we thought it is the good time to summarize the main new RealBird features that we launched in 2011. 

Switched the RealBird Property Search from Google Base to Oodle data

As you may recall Google suddenly announced in January '11 the discontinuation of Google Base. Because the RealBird Property Search was based on data from Google Base, we had to find another solution. We successfully ported the application to use real estate data from Oodle, soft launched in March and made it available for all RealBird members in June. The new search application has been working great ever since and has delivered thousands and thousands of buyer leads to RealBird members.

New listing inventory widget replaced the old version, with color themes and custom transition effects

We retired one of our legacy sidebar listing inventory widgets and replaced it with a brand new one, which can be configured with custom color theme and custom transition effects.

The first version of the RealBird Mobile Real Estate Website was launched

In March, we launched the first version of the RealBird Mobile Real Estate Website service with vanity domain name and QR code support. Within weeks, thousands of mobile sites were set up by RealBird PRO members. It also received coverage from Inman News.  

The second version of the Mobile Real Estate Website added Property Search support

Soon after the initial launch, we also completed the mobile user interface for the RealBird Property Search and added to the RealBird Mobile Property Website service. Update to the platform (and the new desktop IE support) also made it possible from then on to embed the mobile real estate website on regular blogs and pages with the handy RealBird widget, including the inclusion of the QR code and a call-for-action message.

Default Property Website Theme editor added

One of the powerful features of the RealBird single property websites has always been the versatile theme editor. We realized however that even with the easy-to-use interface, it has been an unnecessary hassle to set up the custom design for each listing one by one, so we introduced the same powerful theme editor tool as a global configuration option. In other words, RealBird members can now set up a default custom design once and all new property sites will inherit this theme.

Introduced 3 Facebook Real Estate Page applications

Just in time for Facebook's application platform overhaul during the summer, we released three Facebook applications for different RealBird services. You can now easily add your listing inventory widget, map-based property search and your mobile real estate website to your Facebook business page.

Diligent SEO work brought major results: video thumbnails of your property websites are now shown on Google

We've been always focusing on SEO best practices, but 2011 brought some break throughs: Finally, over 1 million pages on RealBird has been indexed by Google and to our great surprise, RealBird became one of the few real estate information providers whose pages have been enhanced with video thumbnails on the Google search result pages. This is a very positive and stunning SEO news and together with the high ranking of the RealBird property websites, it represents a major improvement in visibility for our members.

Tighter integration of your RealBird featured listings and map-based property search

We also introduced a small, but powerful feature for RealBird PRO members. The RealBird map-based property search can now be configured to show your own featured listings as "sticky", highlighted icons on the map. We call them "sticky" icons, because they are shown on the map independently from the actual search criteria, as long as their location falls within the current map boundaries. This a great, non-intrusive advertisement of your own properties to home buyers using your map search.

United Kingdom coverage added to RealBird

We also extended support for most of the RealBird services for estate agents in the United Kingdom. With this launch, RealBird now provides online marketing services to US, Canada and UK agents and brokers. 

Brand new, major redesign of the flagship RealBird single property website platform launched

It's been a long time coming and finally, in October, we launched a major redesign of our flagship RealBird Listing Publisher property website platform. The system has many, many improvements and new features, while remaining fully backward compatible: new layout design, improved SEO, improved load speed, deeper social media integration, better lead capture, more automatic integration with 3rd party services such as Walkscore, ability to add more custom pages and content and many more features. We were very happy to receive an overwhelmingly positive response from all of our members regarding this major update.

New Craigslist property ad generator released

A revamped Craigslist property ad generator was launched in November, making it much easier for RealBird members to create a Craigslist ad with unlimited color theme options. Craigslist is one of the most popular classifieds ad platforms and this new tool makes it way easier to create much better looking ads for your RealBird listings. 

SMS keyword property marketing added to your mobile marketing toolkit

Just in time for the holiday season, we added a new listing marketing service to the RealBird mobile toolkit. We integrated RealBird with the leading SMS technology provider, Twilio and introduced SMS keyword marketing for your properties with an amazing, automatic lead capture feature.

Last but not least, 7,616 real estate professionals joined RealBird in 2011. This is our highest yearly registration number ever and we thank you all very much (long time and new members as well) for trusting your real estate marketing on the RealBird platform. 

We Wish You All A Very Happy & Successful New Year !

-- The RealBird Team
RealBird.com 

RealBird property websites indexed by Google with video thumbnail

Reposted from our ActiveRain blog

--

Without further ado, check this out:

The RealBird listings are indexed in Google's video search 

We don't know how and why it happened, but we certanly love it and so should you :) I'll explain below the screenshot

Google somehow considers the photo slideshows of the RealBird single property websites to be videos.

And it gets better. Most users search on the main Google search and not on the video search interface - I assume - but Google now shows a thumbnail of the RealBird videos on the regular search results as well. As you may be very well aware, you have to rank good on Google, but you also have to somehow pop-out from the rest of the results. Even if you are on Page 1, there are still 10 other sites (plus the ads) you have to compete with for the click-through. We ran into many results where ONLY RealBird had the video thumbnail attached to it, making the RealBird property sites pop out like there is no tomorrow and screaming "pick me". This can easily mean a few magnitude of improvement in terms of click-throughs. I can't emphasize it, this is amazing.

Here is an example: The search for 129 Elmhaven Way Morrisville, NC 27560 on Google returns the RealBird listing website of Lee & Pamela St. Peter at the 2nd position, which is in itself cool, BUT it also shows the video thumbnail (at least from my location). Guess which result will be picked. No other result has the thumbnail, not even those from the large national portals.

As you can tell, I am overly excited about this, but this is absolutely cool.

Google please don't touch anything, we love it this way and we love you too !

 

-- Zoltan 
RealBird.com

Some SEO Coolness - Condos Fulton MO

RealBird property sites rank great in search engines for listing addresses and for many long tail keywords, but we often run into generic, targeted search terms for which the RealBird sites rank amazingly well too. 

See an example below: a RealBird listing website ranking #5 (from my CA location) on Google for the amazingly general "condos fulton mo" search (without the quotes). In this particular instance and as of right now, the RealBird property website is ranked above homesandlands.com, Trulia, Zillow, Oodle and many other large real estate portals.

I noticed this morning via Clicky Spy, a click-through from Google to the following Fulton, MO condo for sale by Sherry Abbott. While we see a lot of Google traffic every day (in fact, over a quarter of all traffic is from search engines), this particular one popped out in the live report this morning, because it was such a generic term: Condos Fulton MO 

Here is the screenshot of the Clicky Spy record:

 

And here is the screenshot of the 5th position on Google.
Note that Google search is a dynamic system and rankings may change over time and may depend on other factors too, such as your location, browsing history etc. but right now, the RealBird listing site is at the 5th position.

 

Also note that Google highlights the location and the keyword Condo in the title, in the excerpt and also in the RealBird property site's Url, which is important for achieving actual click-throughs.

Last but not least, here is Sherry's Fulton, MO condo for sale on RealBird.

RealBird.com