What To Avoid With Your Real Estate Web Site Part 1

July 3, 2009

Your real estate website is your face on the internet.  Prospects judge your site very quickly (as do search engines), so it’s just as important to have the right ingredients as avoiding the wrong ingredients.  So make sure your website doesn’t the following blemishes:

The Me-Me-Me Website

When people visit your website, they’re mainly looking for listings (especially pictures of listings) and secondarily any helpful info you can provide for helping them find their dream home.  So don’t bog your site down with info about “you”.  All you really need is an About Me page giving a brief description of you: mainly your professional background and a few tidbits about you personally.  Remember: your site (and your whole approach to being a real estate professional) should be about your prospects’ and clients’ interests, not yours.  One of the best ways of meeting their information needs is having lots of info on your farm areas.  Wikipedia is a great place for neighborhood specific information.  Another source is your local library, especially for historical information.  Try to find ready made content on your farm areas your competition is unlikely to use.  Search engines love original content, and the more of it you have on your website for your farm areas, the higher search engines will rank you for people looking for real estate in those areas.

“Get Top Ranking Quick” Offers

Don’t buy into anyone offering overnight results in getting your website top ranking in major search engines like Google.  Services exist who offer to post your listings to thousands of classifieds sites for a low price.  Don’t use them.  Usually they only email your website to thousands of unknown classifieds sites they own and control that no one actually reads.  The major search engines will recognize such efforts as cheating and your website’s ranking will suffer… badly!  You may even get removed permanently from these search engines ranking, and that is the death knell for any future traffic to your website.

Design Around Target Markets, Not Search Engines

You should make your website interesting to your target markets, and search engine friendly.  But your visitors’ ability to navigate your site easily is more important than search engine friendliness.  If you create a content rich, search engine friendly web site that people can’t get a clear sense of how to navigate within a few seconds of visiting it, you risk losing them just as much as if you’re website was content barren and boring.

Learn how to trade the fine line between “prospect targeted content” and “search engine friendly content” for your website by taking my Building Your Ecommerce Business course.  This course has been approved by the Registrar, REBBA 2002 to qualify for 6 credits.

Filed under: Realtor Websites - Best Practices,SEO For Realtor Websites

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