Real Estate Web Site Design For Top Search Rankings

Tom Jensen - San Diego Video Production April 30, 2007

by Tom Jensen
Company: Jensen Studios
Subject: Search Engine Strategies for Successful Real Estate Marketing

REAL ESTATE WEB DESIGN AND SEARCH STATEGIES

How to design, plan, implement, and market your own personal real estate web site to rank high in major search engines. Google, Yahoo, and MSN (Live Search) are the current and main players in search engine traffik as of this writing. Google by far is the highest and most sought after search engine to be ranked high in. If you rank high in Google, you probaly will do fair in all the other search engines. Google has the largest percentage of users in the world. Let's do a step=by-step method of marketing your presence on the world wide web to bring those qualified home buyers and sellers to your door!

GETTING STARTED WITH YOUR PERSONAL REAL ESTATE WEB SITE

You have to have a personal real estate web site! Don't depend on your agencies corporate web site as you will not be found. That is unless your local agency is highly ranked in the search engines. But then a perspective home buyer/seller needs to sift through all the agents within your specific realty company. Most internet savvy real estate agents have thier own personal web site. This brings in home buyers/sellers who surf the net first. Real Estate agents/brokers build a web site themselves or pay someone to do it. After that beautiful web site is made and published will it be found? Unless a design strategy was built into it from the beginning you may have diffuculty being found in searches. Flash designs, heavy java scripting within navigation can cause problems. Search engine robots like googlebot, inktomisearch, and livebot are used by Google, Yahoo, and MSN to scan the web for worthy web sites. Then, after your pages have been indexed a unique algorithim specific to each search engine will rank your pages based on many differnt variables.

WEB SITE DESIGN MISTAKES AND SEO BAD TRICKS

What gets your real estate site ranked number#1 in the searches? It is the importance that specific search engines place on your site relative to all the other sites dealing with your market. Sound simple...Well, we are dealing with searches (real estate) in the hundreds of millions! Don't worry though, 90% will not be designed or optimized for search engines. That leaves another 10% who do! 60% of those sites will use unethical spamming techniques, or other tricks to fool search engines. They will be caught and dropped from search engines altogether or penalised...Now we are dealing with only hundreds of thousands of competitors in this extremely competive market of real estate wthin your localized region. Most good web designers can create a functional web site for you that looks professional, but, their expertise is in design and function of the web site, not search engine techniques! If the design for search engine was not implemented at the very beginning it is harder for SEO (Search Engine Optimizers) to get you ranked beyond a certain point. Code rewriting of navigation and internal links may need to be recoded into search engine friendly web sites!

DIFFERENT APPROACHES AND TECHNIQUES USED TO RANK HIGH IN SEARCH ENGINES

A web site that uses clean code with no errors has a better chance of ranking higher in the search engines Professional SEO (Search Engine Optimizers) are knowledgable in helping thier clients riank higher in search engines. However, many use unethical practices and make unrealistic promises that they can't keep. There are no guarantees as search engine optimization is not an exact science. If it were everyone could be ranked at or near the top for thier search phrases. The toughest part is finding a qualified SEO that uses ethical "best practice techniques". These techniques are available and documented by all the major search engines and directories like DMOZ and Yahoo. Not all so-called profesionals know or follow these rules. As a result thier clients get banned or penalized by the search engines. A good SEO is also very capable in web coding...They have to be! SEM or Search Engine Marketers utilize pay-per-click techniques that are also somewhat successful but can be risky or expensive...Link farms and mirror sites (multiple real estate sites owned and operated by same ientity) may haveh duplicate content. That is also a bad idea and seen extensively in the competitive world of mortgage loans and real estate. They will be caught and penalised from search engines eventually. Basically these are shady, spammy methods that will find you out. Some ameteurs do these things without even realizing it. It'ss hurting thier own web sites. Another words there are no shortcuts! How to get to the top? Hard work with a thoughtfu and, craetive design with your visitors in mind!

WHAT IS UNIQUE CONTENT?

The single most important aspect in eventually rising to higher search engine rankings is quality unique content. This is very subjective but ultimately true! The consensus among experts seem to agree that Google, Yahoo and other search engines rate web site importance based on incoming quality links. This is not something simple to you can do or something that can be done in coding or even in design elements. Quality inbound links have now become all the talk within successful search engine starategies. People are now buying these expensive links in hope of coming up higher in the search results. Link campaigns are undertaken with software programs. Amateur real estate agent/web designer/optimizers are using paid or shared linking to increase the importance of thier own sites. Again, trying to beat the search engines at thier own game. Quality inbound links from other real estate related sites are important, but how to get those links are another story...My own experience has shown that this can be an exercise in futikity! Let me explain...Years ago when first learning about search engines and thier ability to detect inbound quality links I found another willing vendor in my field (otherside of the country) who had an astonishingly high Google Page Rank. After convincing them to trade links with me, I watched in anticipation what weight this would have on my own site. Little if any results were noticed! Even though they had very few other outbound links on this page and they were completely related to my industry with a properly prepared and thought out text link. I still have that link pointing to my site but gave up my link campaign and concentrated more on upgrading my own site and adding what I thought was unique and quality content. To my surprise other web sites started linking to mine. I have video samples of my work viewed all over the world now as search engines have picked up on things like Google's YouTube, and Yahoo Video which has crawled most of our images and video samples as well. Real estate virtual tours are videos either in Flash, Windows or Quicktime format. Search engines will pickup on these but you need a contact profile where viewers can find you!

UNCONTROLLED SEARCH EBGINE VARIABLES TODAY!

Sometime around March, 2004, web masters noticed a delay (3 to 6 months or more) where thier new clients web sites were not ranking for primary search phrases. This is especiailly true in competive markets like real estate...It is called the "sandbox effect" where new web sites are not ranked high if at all for thier primary search phrases (i.e. "yourlocation real estate"). The theory goes that Google and other search engines are putting new sites on a kind of "probation'. They were crawled by Google, found in whois to be new and immediately "sandboxed". I believe this theory to be true. My own client's site had googlbot crawl them and immedaitely parse a whois result in my logs. Again, I totally understand the reasoning behind this, with real estate site domain names and server results showing many people creating mirror sites with different domain names. During this "probation" period a good thing to do would be regurlarly update and add good quality, unique content for your visitors. This takes a lot of work and creativity in an industry like real estate which is bloated with redundant and duplicate content. Many real estate sites use frames where MLS listings appear run by the owners site. It keeps the agents photo and contact info on the page where the visitor browses through the MLS listings. Is this good practice web design? Maybe for branding purposes but not for search engine placement.

OPTIONS AREN'T CHEAP

In the long run bacic SEO principles can be utilized to work secondary key phrases relating to your specific area of expertise. Do you know what these are? Have you optimized each page for these areas of specialty? Have you researched good secondary key phrases? I would suggest thinking outside the box for a minute...You will not be successful in coming up on the first page foe every neighborhood in San Diego County! Unless of course you exercise a pay-per-click plan. This is like Google's Adsense program or Yahoo owned sponsored results section that appear on top or to the right of organic search results. Have you checked what the bid is on the phrase "San Diego Real Estate"? Bet it's not cheap to appear near the top! This just means you are charged for someone just to look at your site. I'm not saying this method is ineffective, just expensive. Most surfers realize the more quality and reputable sites show in the organic rankings. Directories like Yahoo is $299.00 per year to be in for any business web site dealing with a product or service. Yahoo and MSN also have thier own Real Estate section. That means they are kind of in competion with you. Even if you carefully prepare your web site and meet every guideline, Yahoo reservess the right to exclude your submission. Another words, your site is not guaranteed to be placed in thier directory. Meaning you forfeit your $299.00. The category is not up to you. You might be buried where thier editors put you along with 100's of other real estate agent sites. Might help you get crawled sooner by thier robot though!

WHAT WORKS


Tom Jensen
JJensen Studios
San Diego, California
Edited April 30, 2007