1.    Making Your Site More About You Than Your Business

Home seekers primarily want to see pictures of homes and helpful real estate buying/selling  tips on real estate websites.  So don’t have lots of pages on you.  A single “About Me” page will suffice.  Your site’s focus should be your visitor’s interests, not on your own.  So offer many ways of fulfilling their buying and selling needs.  Have lots of information on your farm areas.  A great place for lots of neighborhood-specific information is Wikipedia.  On that site look up the cities your farm areas are in and you’ll find a list of neighborhoods in each city along with an info page for each neighborhood.  If you can’t find web articles pertinent to your farm area, look at offline sources, especially government sources.  Go to the local library and ask for any information on your farm area.

2.    Automated Submission Software For Boosting Search Engine Ranking

Avoid software and services for automatically posting your articles or ads to hundreds or thousands of classifieds sites.  Search engines value both the quality of content….remember with google especially the 3 magic words are “Content-Content-Content”and quality of  back links to your website.  To search engines it’s far better to have 20 content-unique pages with your website’s links on them than 300 virtually identical pages with your website’s links.  Having the latter will lower your search engine ranking and may even get you kicked out of the search results altogether.  Once you get kicked out, it’s virtually impossible to get re-instated with them.

3.    Design Your Website Around The Target Customer, Not Just For Search Engines

Consider the target customer and search engines equally when designing and updating your website.  Just because a prospect finds your site by no means guarantees they’ll sign up for your mailing list.  A search engine optimized website will get found by prospects, but if it has poor navigation, broken links, uninteresting content, spelling or grammatical mistakes, expired listings, or few listings, you’ll lose those prospects.  Your website’s home page should help them find what they’re looking for quickly and easily.  You should also remember that updating your site with new content regularly is absolutely imparative to getting found in the organic section on Google’s page one. The thing they’re mainly looking for is homes for sale.  So have lots of them on your site.  When prospects visit a real estate sales person’s website who’s using my Moneymaker website solution they’ll see thousands of local homes for sale.

4.    Visitor Counters  Visible To Website Visitors

Don’t use them.  Here are the three biggest reasons:

-    They’re not accurate
-    Your prospects don’t care about them
-    You’re showing competitors what works on your site and what doesn’t.  They’ll copy the popular stuff and you’ll lose your competitive edge.

Use internal site data for measuring who goes where on your website.  It’s more reliable and tells you a lot more about your site than external page/visitor counters.  If your site doesn’t offer great visitor data use Google Analytics.  It’s free.

5.    Make Your Pages Easily Digestible

When you eat a meal, you don’t swallow food until you’ve chewed it up into small pieces.  In the same way, if you want people to ‘swallow’ your website’s written content, make it easily readable by not having it in big chunks (IE long paragraphs).  A few tips:

-    Use Bolding – many people scan web pages, only reading the bolded parts.  They’ll stay if they find the bolded parts interesting.  So make sure the bolded parts summarize the following content and are interesting enough to make them want more.

-    Break Up Your Text – break up large text blocks into smaller blocks.  People are more inclined to read 5 small paragraphs than 1 or 2 huge paragraphs.

-    Use Bullet Points – they’re more easily readable than sentences, so use them, especially for your most important points

6.    Luring People Away From Your Site

Within seconds of arriving at your website people decide if they’ll browse it or not.  So don’t tempt them to leave by placing other websites’ links on your main page.  If you have Google ads on your site, don’t place them too prominently on your site because Google is very good at displaying very interesting ads targeted to each individual visitor.

Your first goal is building a rapport with your visitors, and you do that with interesting content.  Have a separate page for “Real Estate Resources” with links to other real estate related website they might find useful.  Put your Google ads at the bottom of your home page.

7.    Assuming Visitors Entered Through Your Main Page

When people visit your site they don’t necessarily first see your home page.  They may enter your site through any of your pages.  So ensure they won’t get lost by the page they start with by having clear navigation on every page.  Having a Site Map option can really help.

8.    Unfocused Web Site Content

Don’t be all things to all people with your website.  Don’t try to have content on every aspect of the Toronto real estate market.  Don’t have wishy-washy content people can get on many other websites.  Target your website specifically toward people living in your farm area and their interests.  You’ll have much more success than trying to appeal to everyone.  People will often listen to a boring, verbose person only out of politeness, but they won’t listen to a boring real estate website.  If your website’s content is boring, they’ll leave your site very quickly and never come back.  You make your website’s content interesting with content directly aimed at the interests of people in your farm areas.

9.    Too Little Online Website Marketing

Don’t make the mistake of spending all your money on a website, thinking a pretty design will suffice.  Search engines don’t value graphics or pictures on websites.  They value a website’s written content.  So spend more money on website promotion than design.  Pay-per-click ads on search engines bring a far better ROI than print advertising.  You must market your website everywhere constantly if you want a steady stream of visitors.  Learn how to promote it, or hire someone to do it.

10.    Procrastinating

Your website is an ongoing project.  Always look for ways of improving it.  Don’t put this off, thinking “I’ve got better things to do” or “it has enough information”.  Regular updates are very important and your site can never have enough information.  The more often you update it, the more pride you’ll have in it.  Then  updating it won’t feel like a chore.  You’ll also gradually improve your website’s search engine ranking.  Create a schedule for yourself that’s consistent but not a burden.  Take a half hour each day for finding and posting new articles on your site your target market will find interesting.

My Moneymaker website solution solves many of the problems plaguing many much more expensive real estate websites.  Try it free for 30 days and see the difference for yourself!