What Your Real Estate Website Needs
March 30, 2009
A real estate professional’s website is their face on the internet. So it’s critical your website engages and interests the online consumer enough to have them sign up for your mailing list. It should be your website’s main goal. Here are a few things your website needs to accomplish this.
Easy To Navigate
It should be easy to find any information on your website. A difficult to navigate site is an immediate turnoff and may be deterring prospects from searching your site and opting in to your mailing list. Ensure the links to your site’s various areas are prominently positioned. It’s also good to have a site map so people can get a complete rundown of everything on your site, especially if you have more information than can be summarized on your home page’s navigation pane.
What’s New Section
Use this to update visitors on new additions to your website. You could also use it for posting new developments in your farm neighborhoods such as upcoming events, garage sales, community meetings, new stores opening and so forth. This can get a lot of people interested in joining your email list.
Content Rich Pages
Have lots of pages that would appeal to your target prospects. A great way of doing that is posting lots of neighbourhood specific information on your farm areas. Many home buyers are looking for mortgage info, so get yourself added to a few mortgage broker’s mailing lists and keep on the lookout for articles that might be beneficial to your target audience. Having lots of content rich pages where your farm areas are frequently mentioned also goes a long way to having people sign up for your mailing list. It also helps get your website highly ranked in search engines for people searching for homes in those areas.
Make Listings Printable
Just because a listing looks correct in an internet browser doesn’t mean it will print properly. Print outs of your listings may have information cut off or worse. So ensure your listings will properly fit an 8.5” by 11” page.
HTML, Not Flash
It’s tempting to get a custom designed website designed with Flash. Flash is a website design language featuring animation. Some of the best looking websites in the world were designed with Flash. The main problem with Flash is search engines can’t read Flash page content, so they can’t properly index them. This seriously limits your ability to get your website into search engines. If your website isn’t in the major search engines, it’s not much better than no website at all.
My Moneymaker website is specifically designed for real estate professionals. You can try it free for 30 days. My Building Your Ecommerce Business course teaches how to get your website to the top of search engine rankings.
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Filed under: Realtor Websites - Best Practices
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