IBS Team Blog

This morning I finally switched to the new platform which was in the development for the last X months. Even though it's not near the completion yet, it should be more robust then the previous system.

I would like to ask everyone to comment here, or in the forums about any problems that you may have with the new system. anything that doesn't seem right would help to pin-point existing issues and improve the site.

Thanks!

Sorry for the inconvenience, but our Real Estate Directory won't be available for now until I completely move everything to new host. My current hosting company took the liberty to pull the plug on my site due to high server load from the directory. After about 18 hours of downtime and bullshit they finally turned the site back on until I pack up and move out. Unfortunately they don't allow me to run the directory, to make sure it won't pull down the whole server. Please be patient I'm working on migrating the site right now. Hopefully it won't take too long.

I would like to apologize for the delay in submissions to the Real Estate Directory.

Finally I finished moving the non-directory part to WordPress as main content management system for this site. I'm excited, since this is what I wanted to do for long time now. I pointed the most important indexed pages with 301 redirect to the new ones and hopefully we won't have trouble getting re-indexed and ranked again. Please, let me know if there is something wrong or raises concerns about functionality of the site in the comments of this post or in the forums by clicking on Leave Feedback. I appreciate all your help and support.

It was discussed many times that unique content with relevant links in it may benefit much more in the long run rather than regular links that we exchange on daily bases. It is not proven thing, but you don't need to be scientist to figure it out. We already know that link exchanges are not approved by SEs in the way a lot of people do it, and seeing latest implementations of "nofollow" attribute, researches on block-level link analysis indicate that search engines working on improvement of their ranking quality to bring highly relevant search results.

I've been thinking for a while now about adding an option to request reciprocal links from the other members in the directory. I would like to through a poll into you and see where it leads. Meanwhile, here is how it could be implemented:

1. Members always have choice to opt-in/opt-out by checking on/off the option in their listing editor.
2. All the requests would go through online form from our directory, - no email addresses will be revealed this way until recipient replies (autoresponders are exception).

I would like you to take a few minutes to look at Directory Announcements thread in our forum. I listed very specific keywords that keep appearing in our statistics. Very many of which are less competitive, but since you mentioned them in your link titles and descriptions people keep finding those exact pages. This keyphrases might not drive as much traffic as city and state specific ones, but they surely very targeted and may convert more business. Please read the Free Content post and then check out the keywords.

We always had additional page available for each listing - the detail page. To see this page you can go to any category and click on the More Info hyperlink under the listing or click on the Options, and then Details from the new available choices. Here is an example of regular detail page, which being created automatically after submission is approved.

Just wanted to show a few recent examples of Real Estate blogs that some of our directory members run. Fran and Rowena from California run Southern California Real Estate Blog. As you can see it is perfectly incorporated with their link details page. Here is another great example from Kristin Noll from Wisconsin - Milwaukee Real Estate News. In addition link details page can have your featured areas content - check out Roxanne's page from New Jersey

Since a lot of realtors started to create their own blogs to keep their clients posted with real estate and local market news or just as matter of web marketing and promotions, I decided to add an option where directory members now can insert URL to RSS/XML feed of their blog, and headlines will appear on your listing detail page. Here is an example of Myrtle Beach Real Estate News