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| October 2009 Inspector eNews |
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October 2009 | Archives
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This series of columns is designed to familiarize CREIA members with “The Glossary Project” which is “Standardized Terminology for the Professional Real Estate Inspector”. This is a must have for all inspectors and is especially helpful in preparing the candidate for the CREIA CCI test as most of the terms in the test are defined in The Glossary Project. It is available from shop.CREIA.org.
Click here for the answers (Sorry members only)
Off the Net The following is various excerpts from a discussion on how the "CREIA Inspector Finder" will function in year 2010. This should be required reading for all CCI and MCI members as you look ahead to the new year. Talk to your CREIA leaders and join the conversation. Q: Currently the Inspector Finder is split up into categories based on the chapter area. Anyone know the reason for this? I'm guessing because it was easier? A: For the new site do you think we should continue with these same categories or use counties instead? While counties are rarely used for searches for inspectors, there are a few counties which have the same names as cities and there are some rural parts of California where someone might use a county to search. This would mean we would have better website optimization using counties instead. My guess is that it was done that way since the beginning and no one has ever given any thought as to if it is a good thing or not. Most if not all inspectors do inspections outside of their Chapter area/boundaries. A roster by chapter could still be made available to members. That's kind of what I figured. I'm leaning towards splitting it up by county and then allowing the inspector to choose up to 5 counties that they inspect in. This makes CREIA appear larger as there are more people in each category and it helps the inspectors as they show up in more regions. Then we just randomize the results returned in each county. Five counties may be a little to large in some cases (San Diego, Orange, LA, Riverside, San Bernardino) could result in over 200 inspectors. I currently list 5 counties on my business card. I happen to live in an area on the edge of these areas. I don't know how it would work on the finder section. Yeah it's not hard to live on the edge of all 5 listed. Just live around the 15 and the 91 and you're within 45 minutes of all of them. We could base the listing order on distance from inspectors address to inspection address or we could just limit it down to top 3 counties. Either way it's better than the current 1. It means more links back to the inspector which increases their website ranking and exposure as well. I think in general the distance limitation would be good. I personally don't want to drive 100 miles to an inspection. I agree. If it is distinctly advantageous to do the five counties we should stay open to that parameter. Is there another way we could do this? By zip codes, like the inspector's zip code and all zip codes within a radius of that. It's going to work two ways. The current inspector finder ONLY lists inspectors if they type in a zip code. The problem with this method is that search engines like Google don't enter zip codes into fields so it's impossible for them to index all the pages of inspectors. This is a huge flaw in the current system for Search Engine Optimization (though it's not on a CREIA site anyways so it didn't matter much). The new system will have both. You can search by proximity or search by county. That way the search engines, and potential buyers/sellers could search by county and the buyers/sellers could also use the proximity search as well. I like the way ASHI has the search. It is by geographical regions/areas and the inspector may select which areas to be placed in. Are you talking about the Metro Area search they have on http://www.ashi.org/find/default.aspx? That's the one. And we customize our own and it might work better than a zip code search unless we use only the first 3 numbers of the zip code. Hmm, we could definitely do a two tiered system like that. Any reason you think Metro Area/Neighborhood would be better than Counties? It would allow more refinement, but can we cover as many areas? Some of their Metro Areas are entire states. For CA it looks like they did counties for the most part and then split them up. I can see either way working, both are good for SEO. Question is what does everyone think? "We could base the listing order on distance from inspectors address to inspection address." This will definitely be one of the options. The question is how will we list the directory portion of it which will get everyone indexed on Google and give potential clients another way to view the sites.
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Congratulations! New Candidates Kevin S Smith New CCIs Tom Fasold (6/2009)
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October 2009 | Archives
|
||
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This series of columns is designed to familiarize CREIA members with “The Glossary Project” which is “Standardized Terminology for the Professional Real Estate Inspector”. This is a must have for all inspectors and is especially helpful in preparing the candidate for the CREIA CCI test as most of the terms in the test are defined in The Glossary Project. It is available from shop.CREIA.org.
Click here for the answers (Sorry members only)
Off the Net The following is various excerpts from a discussion on how the "CREIA Inspector Finder" will function in year 2010. This should be required reading for all CCI and MCI members as you look ahead to the new year. Talk to your CREIA leaders and join the conversation. Q: Currently the Inspector Finder is split up into categories based on the chapter area. Anyone know the reason for this? I'm guessing because it was easier? A: For the new site do you think we should continue with these same categories or use counties instead? While counties are rarely used for searches for inspectors, there are a few counties which have the same names as cities and there are some rural parts of California where someone might use a county to search. This would mean we would have better website optimization using counties instead. My guess is that it was done that way since the beginning and no one has ever given any thought as to if it is a good thing or not. Most if not all inspectors do inspections outside of their Chapter area/boundaries. A roster by chapter could still be made available to members. That's kind of what I figured. I'm leaning towards splitting it up by county and then allowing the inspector to choose up to 5 counties that they inspect in. This makes CREIA appear larger as there are more people in each category and it helps the inspectors as they show up in more regions. Then we just randomize the results returned in each county. Five counties may be a little to large in some cases (San Diego, Orange, LA, Riverside, San Bernardino) could result in over 200 inspectors. I currently list 5 counties on my business card. I happen to live in an area on the edge of these areas. I don't know how it would work on the finder section. Yeah it's not hard to live on the edge of all 5 listed. Just live around the 15 and the 91 and you're within 45 minutes of all of them. We could base the listing order on distance from inspectors address to inspection address or we could just limit it down to top 3 counties. Either way it's better than the current 1. It means more links back to the inspector which increases their website ranking and exposure as well. I think in general the distance limitation would be good. I personally don't want to drive 100 miles to an inspection. I agree. If it is distinctly advantageous to do the five counties we should stay open to that parameter. Is there another way we could do this? By zip codes, like the inspector's zip code and all zip codes within a radius of that. It's going to work two ways. The current inspector finder ONLY lists inspectors if they type in a zip code. The problem with this method is that search engines like Google don't enter zip codes into fields so it's impossible for them to index all the pages of inspectors. This is a huge flaw in the current system for Search Engine Optimization (though it's not on a CREIA site anyways so it didn't matter much). The new system will have both. You can search by proximity or search by county. That way the search engines, and potential buyers/sellers could search by county and the buyers/sellers could also use the proximity search as well. I like the way ASHI has the search. It is by geographical regions/areas and the inspector may select which areas to be placed in. Are you talking about the Metro Area search they have on http://www.ashi.org/find/default.aspx? That's the one. And we customize our own and it might work better than a zip code search unless we use only the first 3 numbers of the zip code. Hmm, we could definitely do a two tiered system like that. Any reason you think Metro Area/Neighborhood would be better than Counties? It would allow more refinement, but can we cover as many areas? Some of their Metro Areas are entire states. For CA it looks like they did counties for the most part and then split them up. I can see either way working, both are good for SEO. Question is what does everyone think? "We could base the listing order on distance from inspectors address to inspection address." This will definitely be one of the options. The question is how will we list the directory portion of it which will get everyone indexed on Google and give potential clients another way to view the sites.
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Congratulations! New Candidates Kevin S Smith New CCIs Tom Fasold (6/2009)
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