I am having trouble getting consistent traffic to my real estate website. I am needing some idea's and help. http://www.thehomedirectory.net
Do some local networking with the real estate community. Try to get in a few of the local neighborhood papers or LA real estate blogs. Get reviews of your site.
Post in my forum for example We have real estate locations by state and you could post some Los Angeles related information in our California real estate forum. Although it's quite new, you will still get links and Google comes by our site every other day so it will increase traffic for you. Even if it's bots, Google will see your site as more popular and you'll get higher SE rankings. It may not be much traffic at first from our site, but over time you may start getting some traffic as our member base grows.
In my opinion these things will give you best results. - Writing articles on your niche and submit them to social networking sites. - Post on classified sites, with link to your site. You can submit your houses free on my site also http://www.webcosmo.com
Add more content centered around specific keywords that are related to your site - then market these articles and you will see natural search hits without a doubt.
ok thanks I am going to start doing more of this stuff. I think it will just take time building up the name in the area I took out some text advertising and it worked out good at first but brought me practically no traffic after the first few days so I am guessing it was bots to make me feel like it was working.
Happy to help here. Before I give you a brain dump; can you advise what type of budget are you working with? I will base recos around that.
You may want to consider changing your home page. I find the font is a little small and the "Times New" is a little hard to read. Also, graphically speaking you have 2 of the same logo on the same page. Lose the lower right logo and make better use of those pictures. The people who are coming to your site are looking for homes. So ... show them the homes! Then, if they like what they see, they will look around. Also, in your top banner you have a picture of a bunch of houses. It's just not an appealing photo and it doesn't make your logo pop. Go to istockphoto.com and for $1 find yourself a sweet shot of some homes and drop that in behind or eliminate that picture all together and just have your logo top left. If you go bigger and better with those pictures of the homes, I don't think you need the picture in the top banner. Plus, your logo already has a home incorporated in it. Anyway, hope this helps
From my experience, link ads from any sites except Google Adwords is waste of money. Never did any good. It may be just for me, others may have benefited from this.
trying to do this on no budget really as I don't really know how much money can be made by this so basically it is a project where I will invest as I get money from it.
Looked pretty good. Here are some tips about getting traffic - you might be able to use some of these. Also, I would recommend getting rid of "welcome" and "Welcome to The Home Directory" texts and replace them with your site's main benefits (such as "Find a Home from Los Angeles" - or something like that)
Yeah I have gotten some traffic from craiglist from contacting sellers and buyers of property on their and also posting some advertisements but it is not the type of traffic I want. I was thinking I may need to do a press campaign to get into some real estate magazines, newspapers, and just general press in southern california. Just want enough traffic first where we are filled up with listings and have everything on the site looking good and 100 percent user friendly and functional
Keep it local. For the most part, try to do more regional marketing. You dont want people from NY landing on your LA real estate site (this isnt good for your adsense ctr). I run a regional real estate site and created other local web sites for the sole purpose of being a marketing arm for my real estate site. Consider starting some basic LA related sites that you can drive traffic from to your RE site.
Localy Advertise, if the site is for real estate in a General Area, then only advertise in that General Area.