Saturday, April 14, 2007

The Secret to a Compelling Real Estate Website

I wanted to talk a little about content for your visitors. Search engine optimization is one important part of your real estate website but often agents are neglecting to direct their visitors.

Your home page is most likely going to be the first page potential clients will see. And, for some it might be the last page they look at before they hit the back button.

You need to control your visitors and direct them to pages you want them to visit. And here one that should be familiar, you need to close by calling them to action.

The most visited pages of a real estate website are the homepage, property search page and featured listings page. But what about all the other pages of your site?
What you want to do is get people to want to work with you even if they don't find the property they are looking for on your featured listings page or via the MLS search function.

Something you should focus on while doing your SEO for your real estate website is your homepage organization. What pages do you want people to visit? Do you have to many options? or, not enough?

First you need to figure out where you want them to go. Do you even have pages of content that you want them to go to?

Don't delete your homepage and start from scratch this would be bad for your search engine optimization. You want to keep the content that gets you good results with the search engines.

One way to make things easier for visitors and direct them where you want them to go is to create tables. Tables allow you to put content in designated areas on your page and it separates that content from the rest with a border. You can create have a table for buyers and another for sellers. In these tables you can put links and text there to guide them where you want them to go.

The key to getting people to click the links you put in place to guide them is having a hook. A compelling title, the text after the title being juicy but not enough so they have to click the link to read the rest.

Here's an example: A page with tips for hiring a contractor with information about what contractors do, what to ask them, and how to be confident you've hired someone who is honest.

And for the title and or link to that page you should put something like:

The Secret to Hiring an Honest Contractor

or

10 Ways to Know Your Contractor is Cheating You

You will usually get more click from a controversial title or one giving away a secret.

Whatever you do make sure you give the visitor what they clicked on. Don't make misleading titles or you will most likely just drive visitors away.

Now to get them to take action you need something like a contact form at the end of the page. If your page is about contractors, make a contact form at the end to request a list of recommended contractors in the area. Make sure you have this list before you setup the form. And be quick about responding to Internet leads and requests. For this I would probably have an email with the list ready to be sent.

For this page I would talk to some local contractors and if they have web pages get them to link to this page from their site. You get a link and they get a recommendation if they are indeed honest =P . Not every business will go for this but don't just assume anything.

With your homepage organized, optimized for search engines and directing people where you want them to go you will get more leads than just doing your SEO and ranking #1 in Google.

posted by fuji @ 9:34 AM 0 Comments

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Step 2: Meta tag setup, Correct title tags

Meta tags are html codes designed to communicate with search engines. Your meta tags are not going to get you great ranking improvments in the big search engines but none-the-less you should not ignore them. They are a valuable part your website SEO.

What the meta tags will enable you to do is somewhat control how their website is described by some search engines.

Your meta tags will go in the head section of your website. Between the <head> and </head> tags.

First off is your title tags your title tags should look as follows:
<title>Your title goes here</title>

For SEO purposes your title should contain your top 2 keyword phrases with a - in between them. For SEO purposes on a real estate website this would most likely be (your primary city) real estate - (your secondary city) real estate.

What you put in your title tag will most likely be displayed by search engines as the link to your site.

The title tag is not meta data and is also displayed at the top left of your browser in that blue area if your using IE6.

The rest of your meta tags are less used by search engines but I would still recomend using them. They are your description meta tag and your keywords meta tag.

They should look as follows:
<META name="description" Content="Your website description goes here.">
and
<META name="keywords" content="your keywords go here and are seperated with commas. example: SEO, Search engine optimization, real estate seo, etc.">

Your description tag should contain your top 2 keywords as well but should be in sentance form. Your main keyword phrase should appear near the front of the description.

Your keywords tag should contain all your keywords you would like that particular page to show up for. For SEO purposes it is important that each page on your site have title and meta tags that are unique to each page. For instance if you have a page for foreclosure information you would want your title to be foreclosure information and the state or county you work in.

Keywords are one of the most important parts of Search Engine Optimization. And you will be using them in every aspect of SEO for your website.

posted by fuji @ 2:23 PM 0 Comments