Like real estate, it appears that foreclosure activity is a local phenomenon, too.

As reported by RealtyTrac.com, more than half of all foreclosure-related activity in 2009 came from just 4 states:

1. California
2. Florida
3. Arizona
4. Illinois

More than 1.4 million filings made in 2009 are attributed to the above states. Furthermore, each ranks in the Top 10 for 2009 Foreclosures Per Capita.

The other states are Nevada, Utah, Georgia, Idaho, Michigan and Colorado.

Versus 2008, foreclosures are up 21 percent nationwide and that's a big number, but a deeper look at RealtyTrac's annual reports reveals a more positive undertone on the housing market.

1. 40 states fell below the national Foreclosures Per Capita average in 2009
2. Foreclosure activity fell on an annual basis in 10 states as compared to 2008

Foreclosures are still prevalent, though, and buying homes in foreclosure continues to be big business. First-time buyers, move-up buyers, and real estate investors each are bidding aggressively.

Distressed homes account for one-third of home resale activity, according to an industry trade group.

That said, buying foreclosures can be tricky.

First, properties are often sold "as-is" and the cost of repairs may unwind the home's status as a "value buy". Furthermore, a lender may require specific fixes to be made prior to closing and that, too, costs money.

Second, buying a foreclosed home isn't as streamlined as buying a "normal" home. Closing on a foreclosure can be a 120-day process or longer. A 4-month time-frame may not fit your schedule.

And, third, finding foreclosures can be difficult. Despite the growth in foreclosure search engines, it still takes a good real estate agent to uncover the best homes at the best prices.

Read the complete foreclosure report and take a peek at RealtyTrac's foreclosure heat maps. If you like what you see, talk to your real estate agent about what to do next.

There's still good deals in the foreclosure market -- you just have to know where to find them

Just a quick note to tell you about an excellent resource if you’d like to get more traffic to your real estate website.  It’s called Traffic Secrets and has an absolute goldmine of information for making your website a frequently visited destination on the internet.

I’m not going to say too much about it right now, other than this:  Check out Traffic Secrets

A fellow reader of yours named Gabrielle asked a very good question about the real estate website sold to her by one of the “gurus”. Her question was:

If we bought into one of those websites of the canned version, and we were to attempt to drive traffic to it thru PPC and adwords and keyword strategies, etc., and we spent many hours and days to try to optimize it for the search engines, chances are, the “guru” who sold it to us or one of his partners or first served affiliates has already beat us to the punch with the search engines. That would make our site be deemed as “virtually identical” making all our efforts to have been in vain. Is this correct?

The answer?

Unfortunately for you, its mostly correct that your search engine related efforts have been in vain when using one of the “boilerplate” real estate websites from the real estate gurus. There are generally two different ways that these real estate gurus have sold their websites:

1. UNIQUE DOMAIN: They’ll give you a unique domain name (such as SampleHouseSite.com), but the content on that page is exactly identical to every other domain sold by the guru
2. AFFILIATE LINK: They’ll give you an “affiliate” link within the guru’s website (such as GuruDomain.com/YourNameHere). In this case, every web page sold by the guru is the same (including the domain name), with the only difference from one customer to the next being the “YourNameHere” portion of the website address.

Both of these approaches have a huge problem as far as getting listed in Google, the major search engine of our time. And the problem involves both the “free” search results and the “pay per click” search results they produce through Google Adwords.

Challenges Associated With “Free” Search Results: If the content of your web page is identical to the content of another web page, with the only difference being the web address (URL) used to find the website, chances are your website will never receive any free traffic from Google. This is because Google specifically watches for what’s called “Duplicate Content” which is identical content published on more than one page. When they find duplicate content, their response is generally to allow the first website that they found with the duplicate content to remain in the search engines, while not listing (or giving a very low rank) to the duplicate pages.

The Bottom Line For Getting Free Search Engine Traffic From Google To A “Guru’s” Real Estate Website: If the real estate website your guru sold to you was already ranked in Google at the time you bought your copy of the real estate website, you won’t likely receive any free traffic from Google’s search engine, regardless of how “optimized” your guru says your website is, and regardless of whether your website is on a unique domain or not. The only viable solution is to have a unique website on a unique domain name.

In my next post, I’ll address the issues associated with using “Pay Per Click” advertising to get traffic to a “guru” real estate website. Unfortunately, it’s not much better. But there is a good solution, so stay tuned for when I update you about the next part of this post.

Thanks for reading FreeRealEstateTraining.com!

Ever started to read a book that you just can’t wait to finish? With books like that, you want to read it every spare moment you have, because a story has begun and you have to know the ending. That book is “sticky”.

That’s exactly how your real estate website should be: “Sticky”. And I’ll tell you exactly how to do that.

(Note - this is part of the Internet Secrets For Nationwide Real Estate Investing Series - check out the other parts of this series here on FreeRealEstateTraining.com!)

Your website needs to be good at three things:

1. Motivating people to visit your website to begin with
2. Motivating your visitors to return repeatedly in the future
3. Motivating your visitors to take profit-generating action

I’ll deal with the “monetization” aspect in a future article. Right now, let’s talk about getting people to visit and return to your website….aka “Stickiness”.

In my previous post about making your real estate website search engine friendly, you learned that it’s important to add at least a page or two to your website each week so that the search engines will find freshly updated content. And as it turns out…

…frequently updating your website is one of three major “stickiness” factors:

1. Frequently updated content
2. Interactivity with your visitors
3. “Email Recycling”

I’ll address each one of these issues briefly right now.

Frequently Updated Content

You already know it’s important for the sake of getting good search engine rankings to add at least a page or two of new, relevant content to your website each week. And just as importantly, it’s important for your visitors, since they are more likely to return to your website regularly if there is more new information all of the time.

Sound like a big chore to you? Maybe you’re not a writer and would prefer that this requirement vanish entirely?

No problem. There are quite a number of tools for WordPress that will automatically populate your blog with recent news and articles. So even if you’re not a writer yourself, the need to regularly update your website won’t be a problem at all.  (Check here for my recommendation for automatically generated content tools.)

Interactivity With Your Visitors

A great way to motivate a person to take an interest in something is to give them a “stake” in it, and allowing your visitors to interact with your website by leaving comments and/or having a discussion forum is a great way to do that.

And there’s more good news on that front: When you use WordPress on your website as I’ve recommended, the ability for your website visitors to make comments on your pages is built in! (More good news: WordPress allows you to “moderate” those comments so that only the comments you approve will be publicly viewable.)

There are two huge benefits allowing comments from your visitors. First, it gives your visitors a “stake” in your content, motivating them to want to know how you and other visitors respond to their contributions. Second, each comment builds the amount of information on each page of your blog, giving search engines even more highly relevant content to include in the search results.

“Email Recycling”

If you collect the e-mail address of your visitors, you will be able to send emails to those subscribers and get their attention whenever you like. For example, I send out “broadcast” email messages to my entire database whenever I post articles that have a very short period of relevancy, such as news items or special events. This allows me to guide my subscribers back to my website over and over again, and allows me to remind them about my website if they’ve managed to forget.

“Email recycling” is also a way to create “income on demand”. And when you pay attention to the rest of the articles in this series, you’ll see exactly what I mean.

That’s all for now. But rest assured I’ll post the next article in this series tomorrow. I hope you’ve found this interesting and helpful. Let me know if you have any questions in the comment area below, and remember: Visit FreeRealEstateTraining.com once a day for your update on the real estate investing world!

(Be sure to check out the prequel to this article, Internet Secrets For Real Estate Flipping (Wholesaling) Nationwide - this article will make a lot more sense if you do.)

Yesterday we talked about the 3 standard features that most real estate investor websites include. BORING. Now let’s move on to the 4 critical factors that most of them totally ignore.

(You boneheaded promoters of real estate websites have sold websites to your customers that are darn near worthless at this time. You copied models that worked well 2-3 years ago, and never gave a thought to how effective your services would be long term. It’s shameful. You know who you are.)

REQUIREMENT #4: It must be “optimized” to attract search engines

I’m guessing it’s self-evident why it’s important for your website to be well-listed in the search engines, but in case it’s not: You can get visitors to your website at absolutely zero cost to you if your website is designed in a way that meets with the approval of the search engines. And free visitors means more good deals, more eager buyers, and more real estate profits. It’s that simple.

When I use the word “optimize” concerning a website, you may be thinking I’m referring to some really complicated technical stuff that only serious propeller heads can understand.

Nope. Here are some of the things that I mean:

• Use blog software like WordPress to manage the content on your website. (Other than making it really easy to manage a website, WordPress seems to attract search engine attention far more easily than any other website management tool. Plus, it’s free.)
• Add a new page or two to your website each week (or even more frequently). You don’t have to write anything grand or glorious. A summary of the week’s real estate news will be fine, and it requires very little effort. (Create a Mortgage Update Page like this one - it’s easy and very useful.)
• Make sure your website automatically notifies the search engines whenever you add a new page. (Again, WordPress can handle this for you automatically.)
• Be sure to choose the words and phrases that are most important to you, and use those words and phrases liberally in the titles and bodies of the pages you create each week. These are the words and phrases that are most likely to be picked up by the search engines.
• Make sure all of your pages have links to at least one other page on your site. This way, if a search engine finds one of your web pages, they’ll eventually find all of them! (If you use WordPress, this will be handled automatically.)
• Make your website “interactive” by allowing your visitors to add content to the website for you. I’ll tell you more about this in tomorrow’s post, but rest assured that the search engines LOVE this type of thing.

There are more things you can do to optimize your website, and many of them are highly technical in nature. But if you take the advice listed above, you’ll be giving yourself a huge advantage.

A big problem for most people who have a real estate website is that their websites are “static” in nature. The website has a set number of pages, with a set type of content on each page, and nothing ever changes. Furthermore, most people who buy a pre-fab real estate website receive a design or content that is already in use by hundreds or thousands of other people.

Generally speaking, the search engines will list one and only website when there are two or more websites that are virtually identical. I bet your real estate “guru” didn’t tell you that, did he?

The good news is that when you follow the strategies I teach you, you’ll not be hamstrung by bad advice or bad websites you’ve been sold in the past. There are a lot more ways to “optimize” your website to get search engine traffic, but a lot of them are very “techy” in nature. But if you do what I told you in this article, you’ll do just fine.

Be sure to check out FreeRealEstateTraining.com tomorrow for my instructions on how to make your website “interactive”. Websites that have this feature are like an irresistible drug to the search engines, and I’ll tell you how to make it happen with no additional work on your part whatsoever!

In the mean time, please use the comments box below to let me know if this article has been helpful to you. Also let me know if you have any further questions about optimizing your real estate investor websites.