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[O291]Open Source Website Tools

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The Internet is a tool that almost every business uses to promote, advertise, and sell the good points about their company. The real estate world is not exempt from this. With the correct real estate website tools, you can make your own realtor page as simplistic and straightforward or as impressive and detailed as you want it to be. The Internet is the new and different way to sell anything in our culture today.

There are four major components that need to be included with your real estate website tools. Each agent that works for your company should have their own page, complete with picture and possibly awards given to them. This is only a concern because many potential clients will relate more to your company if they have a face to put with it. The second real estate website tool is custom pages. These can be tailored to fit anything that you see as productive. If you want one of your custom pages to be labeled "Homes over $1,000,000," than that's your prerogative. More than likely, though, you will want to save this group of pages for more important things, like satisfied customer testimonials or even pictures of homes that you represent.

You will want to fill your realty website with as much original content and information that you possibly can. In the world of cyberspace, storage space is not an issue. In cyberspace, information and pictures do not take up valuable space as they would in a photo album or a brochure. A helpful tip to remember is this: if a potential client cannot find what they are looking for on your page, they will likely go to other pages until they find the answer to what they are looking for. Chances are, they will either use that site's owner as their realtor. Statistics show that prospective clients who do their research online end up using a real estate agent more often than not. Also, the more content a web page has, the higher its odds of being ranked higher in the search engines. This is called search engine optimization. This simply means that your company's page has a better chance of being viewed by the average person doing their real estate research on the Internet.

There are other aspects to consider when creating your company's real estate website tools, too. People who are in the market for a new home want pictures. They don't just want pictures of the front of the house taken on a cloudy day from inside your car. They want pictures of the inside, the backyard, and the views. With your page's capacity, having many pictures of the houses you have listed will be beneficial to the potential client. It also keeps clients browsing your site for a longer period of time. Remember, the longer they stay at your site the more likely they are to choose you as their realtor.

Finally, when considering your real estate website tools, you should also mention local information associated with each listed house. Most customers who are looking for a new home consider the area in which they want to live. The locality of their home is more important than the home itself in some instances. Giving them information about the local dining spots, school systems, and shopping centers may prove beneficial to your website and your company's success.

Ever since I started my website, theIanternet.com; I have found so many useful tools online to help me with: keywords, SEO, forums, reciprocal linking, etc. These tools you can find online for a price as well, they can claim they are better or work more efficiently. Well, starting an internet business require for you to spend some money correct? Not necessarily.

There are products out there that speaks for itself and which I myself would like to get a hand on, but as a starter I wanted to start off searching the net for useful tools. I have joined several forums which helped me in doing so.

I looked to my website and when I first published it I wanted it to seem as it was online for a while, publishing forums (with no users), reciprocal linking (with no links), articles (with no articles), etc. So I said to myself I need some tools to help me here. I found several important tools and programs that helped with my site. I will list them and explain them below.

The first tool I used was a keyword generator called Good Keywords. This tool links to overture and shows you how many times that specific phrase has been searched for the month. I used this to help create my FrontPage and Meta tags, applying most of the keywords to target the niche market I wanted. As you may all know keywords are very important to your site, it helps search engines and users define who and what you are going to provide to the user.

RSS feeds are great to help refresh and give your content a new look and new information all the time. This is great for SEO as search engines see different content all the time. Keep your site fresh with RSS feeds. The script that I used is called Carp. This turns RSS feeds to HTML so it is SEO friendly. Having a SEO friendly site is great as new content is always being added, making the search engine search it more frequently.

Reciprocal linking is the process of exchanging links. Every did a site comparison via Google or Yahoo and you noticed a site has a page rank of 4; you would like them to have a link on their site correct? Emailing them and posting their link on your site and then having to always check their site to assure yourself that your ACTIVE link is on there is very time consuming. There are scripts out there that do this for you, well except the fact of contacting the user themselves. I use Duncan Carvers Link Management Assistance. I can add a link or have a user add their link to my site or directory and the script will automatically check their site every week (or however you have it set) to assure your site is being linked back! WOW we save a lot of time. You can have users add links to your site as well, but you would like to have site that have high page ranks, it will give you more respect to the search engine showing that your content is worth its views. Please visit: http://directory.theianternet.com to post your link.

Other than that you want to have your site be interactive, in this case I created a forum. There are a lot of good scripts out there for online communities. PHPBB is a very popular and very configurable forum, very similar to VB bulletin. I myself I do not need all that configurations, so I went with Simple Machine Forum. This is a very simple and useful forum, not a lot of change this, font size this, color that, etc. You can download themes, mods, avatars, etc and add it to your forum, very simple, as the name states, and useful. Even then I am trying to grow my community but it takes time. Please visist: http://forum.theianternet.com to help grow my community and get assisted help from other young entrepreneurs!

I am always looking for more scripts to help update my site and its value, looking for new software that can do the same job as the paid ones. As this article title states, why purchase when the simple ones are FREE and BETTER! To me this is true, I had no failure with any of my scripts or tools that I am using to help my site. Most of the tools I have has easy to read instructions and installation procedures, the programmer will even install it for you for a price, if you wish.

First I say research, research, research for web tools help and or scripts before actually buying. This saves you money!!

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