Watson Realty: Sticky Website-Creating Neighborhood Photo Tours

Creating a Neighborhood Photo Tour

In my previous post I described my success with neighborhood photo tours and our members raved about the concept. The neighborhood tours compelled site visitors to return to the site frequesntly to view the tours. The concept truely captured visitors with 90% of visitors saving the site in their favorite places.

The following has been developed over a period of time while I collected more than 1,400 neighborhood photos. Each step contributes to the efficiency of the process. From the settings on your camera to the methods for identifying the photos I have created a process that minimizes the time required.

It typically requires about 15 minutes to photograph a subdivision. At first I had a problem photographing more than one subdivision at a time because I couldn't separate the individual subdivisions. I then bought several more cards for my camera so I could put one subdivision on each card. The cards are not expensive.

1) On your camera there are multiple setting for resolution. You want a setting that will produce photo images that are 1200 pixels wide. This will produce photos that will fill the screen on most computers. It will also minimize the file size. Photograph a subdivision and then remove the card and label it with the subdivision name. Insert a new card.

2) When uploading the photos to your hard drive first create folders with the the name of the subdivisions. Then upload the photos into the appropriate folder.

3) If you are having your webmaster create the tour pages you can burn a CD with the subdivision folders and mail the CD to him. This makes it simple for your webmaster to load the photos onto his hard drive. If you are creating the pages yourself make a template page for the tours so that you don't have to remake this for each neighborhood.

4) The photos should be compressed utilizing jpeg compression to a file size around 150KB. Using your webpage editing software set the thumbnail size to 250 pixels wide and upload the photos in rows three photos wide.

Page One Position on Search Engines

The response from our website visitors is fantastic but even better has been the response from the search engines. We now have more than 50 page one positions under the names of the neighborhoods or subdivisions. In the process of creating the pages we utilized some simple SEO techniques to earn high search results. We put the name of the subdivision in the title meta tag as well as the description, The public page has a header with the subdivision name and we used the html header codes <h1> and <h2> to emphasize these phrases. In order to push the pages higher on the search results we created additional pages with commentary about the neighborhood and placed text hyperlinks on the primary neighborhood page.

Look at these pages to see examples of the keywording and the linked pages

St Augustine Shores Homes      Moultrie Creek Homes    Oakbrook Homes

This approach to SEO employs the long tail keyword concept. People are searching by subdivision name and these visitors represent high quality traffic.

If you have questions just e-mail me.