Who sets the bar for what constitutes an effective and successful professional real estate web design? What makes a certain real estate web design a market leader? The answer to both questions is your market and Google.

Google is the main search engine used in the US. Google takes many areas of a professional web design and a real estate website into account in ranking its search results. This allows website owners and web designers some control in that Google makes clear what it considers good practices for search engine optimization. However, one of the items Google takes into account is web traffic and inbound links.

Your market creates the web traffic. Web traffic is definitely directed towards your website by the search engines, especially when it ranks on the first page of search results. However, traffic coming directly to your website due to people hearing of it on the radio, on printed marketing material or word of mouth helps improve both your sales lead generation and your Google ranking.

Google tries to mimic the market’s decision of what is a desired website along with its mission to deliver content matter that matches search terms. The easiest way to see who is setting the bar in your market is to type your keywords and key phrases into the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN and check who are the top ranking websites. Measuring what those websites have shows you where the market has set the bar in your particular market for professional web designs or the top real estate websites.

IMCD Web Design does a complete survey of the top websites in the market that each of our client’s web design is competing in. Educating a website owner to where the bar is set gives them a good idea of what kind of Internet marketing investment is needed to break into the top ranks. The more profitable the market, the higher the bar.

If you are looking to be competitive in your online market space, contact IMC’s Internet marketing experts to see what website package will position you best to get a more profitable return on your online investment. Don’t go by seat of the pants or leaving it to chance, call IMC to enhance your professional online appearance!

In comparing the initial and ongoing investment in a professional real estate web design and a do-it-yourself business websites template, one additional area to factor is the web hosting service. To utilize the services of a webmaster and hosting services or contract directly with a hosting company to save initial expenses?

Just as custom professional real estate web designs have a greater upfront investment than the business template websites, professional hosting is usually slightly more expensive than going to a basic “cheap hosting service”. And similar to the custom versus template scenario, the long term costs are possibly the key factors to really judging your return on investment.

With template websites, search engine optimization and content can not compete with the SEO and content of professional web designs. Real estate websites created with templates usually have plenty of content, but they usually have ad links in those keyword-rich articles that circle business off your website and back to either the template creator or a person from whom they licensed the articles.

Similarly, by opting for an inexpensive web hosting service, a website owner takes on the webmaster role. This role covers the uploading and testing of the websites including all the forms and scripts and testing and troubleshooting all the little glitches that happen with a first-time install.

With professional real estate web design packages that include web hosting services, such as IMCD Web Design’ web services, the web designer takes on the webmaster role. IMC has over a ten year track record of dealing with web hosting service providers, website installs and troubleshooting, and form and script creation and maintenance. IMC’s web hosting service is dedicated to the proposition that all web hosting services are not created equal – those who provide the best power back-up, software back-up and virus and spam protection are superior for creating market advantages for small business and real estate websites.

IMC always keeps several back-up copies of every website so regardless of what happens, the website can be restored to its last working configuration. As you decide if you want to take on the role of webmaster, consider when was the last time you backed up your business computers? Many businesses have back-up procedures in place, but in practice few consistently follow-through. IMC not only has the procedures, but knows from experience how necessary it is to follow-through.

Working with IMC makes your custom professional web design or real estate website decision easy – go with a web design that has a track record of combining web development, graphic design, search engine optimization, content creation and secure web hosting to help our clients achieve their sales lead generation and online marketing goals. Contact us today to see how quickly you can establish your competitive advantage on the Internet playing field.

Many real estate website owners whose Internet presence is successfully generating sales leads have found that effective graphic design is more than just good art. As an anonymous real estate web designer recounted, “Art and graphic design differ in that graphic designs demand a viewer’s response and with art, the viewer’s response is optional.” Possibly we can define web graphic design as “functional art that demands a return on investment.”

Real estate agents and small business owners investing in their commercial real estate web design don’t launch websites to be patrons of the arts – having a great looking website for the sake of beauty and esthetics alone. The investment into a web design’s look and feel revolves around creating an atmosphere that invites attention and leads the eye to the informative, call-to-action content.

IMCD Web Design , with our strong background in photography, graphic arts and multimedia presentations, has refined the use of color, shape, search engine optimization features and layout to create graphic designs that not only win awards, but fulfill a web designs’ primary goal of gathering sales leads for our clients.

We regularly see gorgeous websites whose owners invested in art at the expense of the design. Real estate developments showing the model homes and neighborhood layout in vivid colors. The missing part of these websites is the graphic design that takes into account search engine optimization. Unfortunately for the art websites, lack of search engine optimization has relegated them to the realm of invisible rankings – nowhere near the first page of search results. Stunning websites done totally in Flash may fulfill the requirement of moving the viewer to action, but without the SEO (which Flash is inherently not meant for), no one finds the website in order to become a viewer!

For that perfect blend of the artistry you soul longs for and the graphic design your sales leads are attracted to, contact IMC and see how our sales and graphics design teams respond to your professional and real estate web design needs. Small businesses and real estate agents all over the United States and Canada have found the perfect balance in their IMC-created online marketing websites.

In the last 15 years, real estate marketing has undergone a dramatic shift. Real estate web design and development has facilitated the latest disruptive marketing technology. With the advent of the Internet, online marketing has become many consumers’ first choice in shopping for merchandise from knickknacks on Ebay to multimillion dollar luxury real estate and homes. Shop at the best shops any time and don’t worry about dark parking lots.

What is affect of a disruptive technology? A disruptive technology lets new comers or pioneers who adapt first in a market quickly take a dominant position. Older, larger, even better financially situated companies may find that these traditional assets of size and wealth actually hinder their ability to adapt. The Internet greatly leveled many marketing playing fields, from real estate sales, retail sales of clothes and books to mortgages & banking.

In the real estate field, traditionally most business was from referrals. The Internet’s disruptive technology can be seen in the shift in homes searches from Realtors driving clients to homes to finding the Realtor’s websites and taking a virtual tour or the home. Critical to the new shift in referrals is that Google and other search engines are acting as the referral source, not the neighbor or next of kin

The real estate agents and brokers who adapted first to Internet marketing or came in later investing in a competitive web design, have received more than just a return on investment, they began to take in a larger share of the market. Suddenly, a real estate agent ready to invest in their own real estate website was on equal footing as the largest agency to capture leads from the growing online market of home buyers.

In the disruptive technology situation such as Internet marketing, the traditional giants in the field that rely on their successful traditional marketing do not perceive the shift until it has become a unstoppable erosion in their market. To use a real estate term, the small and fast online marketing adapters receive the accretion of that market erosion.

IMCD Web Design took advantage of the Internet’s shift in marketing to fill the newly evolving web development niche. IMC quickly adapted our graphic design and marketing copywriting experience to the new paradigm of search engine optimization and web hosting to mold a powerful Interment marketing package for our clients. Do you need to shake things up in your marketplace? Contact IMC to see how our web design and development can help your company ride the opportunity wave of Internet marketing with a professional online presence.

Here is some SEO info we hope you will find useful when choosing a real estate web design company to build your new real estate website.

ComScore, a global Internet information provider, just released their August 2008 figures for search engine usage or websites. Google of course ranked highest with 3 web searchers to every on Yahoo searcher. With Google commanding 63% of the market and Yahoo just under 20% all the other search engines divided up the remaining 17%.

Why is search engine optimization (SEO) for Google so important? In an average month in 2008, almost 12 billion searches were done on Google. Not only does this make Google’s pay-per-click (PPC) advertising more valuable, it makes their database of search terms the most valuable in the world. With actual search numbers the divide increases, Google handled over 10 billion searches to runner-up Yahoos 2.3 billion.

IMCD Web Design has followed the evolution of Google’s search engine techniques from the beginning in order to present our clients web content in best way for visibility and optimum indexing and cataloging by the search engine spiders. Spiders are servers programmed to continually “crawl” the web recording web page content, upgrading the server’s website cache and indexing the content in order to deliver the most content relevant websites.

IMC positions its real estate websites and professional business web designs for Google, so the Internet’s largest marketing point of leverage works in our clients’ favor. Undocumented in the ComScore statistics is how each market uses the search engines. In vertical markets such as engineering, niche market search engines carve out a small, but very high quality market. In the real estate online market, IMC’s experience is that Google as search engine follows it overall trend as leader and giant in the search field.

For positioning your company with a professional web design or real estate website with the most advantageous search engine optimization, contact IMC. Put our web design track record of highly placed websites and real estate websites that dominate with the visibility of their online presence to work for your business!

Just as multiple streams of income spread your economic opportunities amidst market changes, multiple marketing conduits improve your sales lead generation of your real estate website.  Think of your real estate website as the bay into which all your streams of marketing deposit their sales leads.

What are the benefits of using your real estate website as the central gathering point?

1. With an email autoresponder, any contacts who fill out a contact or guest book form get an instant answer. Calls to answering machines or voice mail may not get a response for several hours. Market surveys by various Realtor associations have found that, as with many markets, the first person to answer a potential client’s call usually gets the business.
2. Your potential clients can view all your featured listings and available properties, as well as all your real estate information, without your presence! It is like an online waiting room with all the magazines about you, your listings and the benefits of your real estate services.
3. Any web traffic directed to your real estate website from your articles, emails, real estate postcards, radio ads, and press releases all build a pattern of incoming traffic that shows the search engines how popular your website is.
4. By creating permanent conduits with inbound links from solid sources, such as your local Chamber of Commerce, you build up your website’s standing as an Internet location that other websites point to for information – all a plus for working on higher placement in the search engine rankings.
5. By staying aware of the traffic patterns on your website, you can fine tune and improve your hits to contacts conversion ratio. Having a website the consistently moves hits into contacts and sales leads is where the return on investment goes from green to golden!

Each of your multiple marketing streams can be profitable in their own right, however, by steering them to your website, you can leverage your website along the lines of this list as well as duplicate the knowledge you give to your clients without having to repeat yourself.

IMCD Web Design real estate web designs are the perfect safe harbor for your various marketing streams. With IMC’s informative web content and eye-catching graphic design – it is a perfect marketing foundation for your Realtor bio and list of real estate service benefits. Contact us to improve your online marketing presence with our Agent Select semi-custom real estate website.

As with all web design, real estate web design encompasses the areas of attention-grabbing graphic design, search engine optimization and market savvy web content authoring. However, where it differs from most professional web design and Internet marketing campaigns is that a real estate web design is a one stop shop that must appeal to an array of web visitors and potential sales leads with the opposite goals.

A real estate website must have marketing information for home buyers and home sellers, not to mention real estate investors. Home buyers are interested in an agent’s listings and MLS homes search as well as the benefit of their track record securing the lowest purchase price for a home. On the other side of the spectrum a home seller is repelled by the low price and looking for an agent who aggressively pursues top dollar for their home for sale. The real estate investor is more interested in a properties maintenance history and potential return on investment.

IMCD Web Design has created many real estate web designs and has found that the principle focused marketing is the key. Our successful real estate design package has pages dedicated to the needs of the home buyers, several focusing on capturing home seller leads and finally informative real estate investment pages as well as investor lead capturing pages. The search engines categorize and index the various pages of your real estate website, so the more specific your web content is per page, the better the search engines can index your page to your chosen keywords or phrases.

Real estate agents who try to minimize their online marketing investment by minimizing their web content offering act against the Internet’s primary sales asset: the ability to target your message. Targeted messages bring the greatest return on investment.

Key to gathering sales leads online is having the specific web content that moves potential clients to act. Often agents who feel their website is not bringing leads find that the website is getting hits, however less than 10% are actually signing a guest book to provide contact information or picking up a phone to call.

Meeting the challenges of the varied real estate markets means using the strength of keywords and search engine optimization techniques on different pages for the different markets. It also benefits agents since you can tailor your autoresponder message to the contact’s specific needs depending on whether they fill out a VIP Buyer or VIP Seller contact form.

To build your powerful and targeted online real estate presence, call IMC today to get IMC’s proven real estate web designs working to capture your sales leads. Our targeted marketing pages are customizable to include your specific real estate services and talents.