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.

Earlier I talked about what your real estate website shouldn’t be.  This is as just as important as what it should be.  Here are a few more tips on what to avoid with your real estate website:

Avoid Website Counters

Don’t bother having a website counter at the bottom of your website.  These counters aren’t accurate, and your prospects won’t care even if you have lots of visitors to your website.  Moreover, if you have counters on each of your website pages, you’re revealing to your competitors valuable information about the effectiveness of your website’s pages.  If they see certain pages have lots of visitors, they’ll copy what you’re doing.

Instead, you should rely on your website’s own reporting for telling you what’s working (and what isn’t) on your website.  Keep that data close to your chest.  This data is more accurate than website counters and will tell you a lot more about your site.  If your website doesn’t have great metrics, install Google Analytics.  It’s a free tool and will give you a wealth of data on your website’s visitors so you know what’s working (and what isn’t working) on your website.

Keep Your Pages Simple

More and more in today’s info driven economy, people want information that is readily accessible.  So make your pages easily readable to your prospects.