Why do discussions of search engine optimization (SEO) for your real estate website boil down to knowing how Google ranks or penalizes websites? Real estate agents adding web content in order to improve their search engine ranking (and add information their clients need) have asked IMCD Web Design why we do not give guidance on optimizing for Yahoo, MSN or the other search engines.

The answer to search engine positioning is interesting and simple. Some search engines are like “relabeler” sales companies – companies who depend on a manufacturer to create their product to which they affix their label. Other sales companies may also buy and relabel the same product from the same manufacturer, with or without minor variations. In the search engine world, Google’s indexing engine also delivers search results to AOL and Netscape. The next three important search engines are Yahoo, which supplies results to AltaVista and AllTheWeb, MSN who only uses their results, and Ask.com who feeds search results to Hotbot and Lycos.

With Yahoo and Ask appearing to be influential players on the search engine scene, why not also factor their search criteria in your real estate website’s SEO? To a certain extent Yahoo is figured in the SEO landscape, but the fact remains: Google is the search engine used by most Internet searchers. With most Internet searches done on Google, it is the most important search engine on which to rank highly. Webmasters can tell from their websites’ visitor statistics that most people are funneled to their websites from Google.

In IMC’s experience, in many cases if you rank on Google, you may well rank even higher on Yahoo. Yahoo appears to do a better job of filtering out off-topic websites and focuses more on content and less on external links to index your real estate website. For instance, on a keyword search of “bozeman real estate”, Google gives Weather Underground a high ranking, even though it is a weather information website. As best we can guess, it ranks in the real estate keywords due to the geographically targeted ad links on the website that are Bozeman real estate companies. Yahoo does not return any websites high in the real estate search that are not real estate websites. Yahoo also appears to target more local companies over the national real estate websites also – which is nice for real estate agents!

IMC provides our real estate clients with websites that are optimized primarily for Google, but with a secondary appreciation for Yahoo’s ranking patterns. Our experience with MSN, the third most popular search engine, is twofold: less than 10% of traffic comes from MSN and if your keyword placement in your web content is good, you should rank well in MSN following the standard Google SEO steps.

If your real estate website is not highly visible on Google, contact IMC and find out how our real estate web design and search engine optimization services can improve your search ranking on Google. High visibility on Google is followed by high profitability on your real estate website investment!

Conversion on your real estate website means getting the right message of your real estate services to the right prospect visiting your website. Is your real estate web design allowing you to target home buyers with one message and home sellers with another? If your current main real estate marketing message is your ability to move homes for sale – is that appealing to home buyers? Are you addressing the interests of real estate investors with another message? Targeted messages that address the needs of specific clients improves the conversion of those website visitors to sales leads.

IMCD Web Design real estate web designs for both agents and brokers allow them to craft their messages to their specific market niches. By adding three pages, each one aimed at a specific market, Realtors can quickly quadruple the amount of exposure their marketing message has. Instead of trying to address three or four markets on one page, they maximize their exposure to both visiting sales prospects and to the search engines.

Home buyers are most often interested in your feature listings, but in this day and age of MLS, they are also looking for someone to be their buyer’s agent. Your ability help them in their home search by pointing out strengths of houses and neighborhoods are the benefits that your prospect is looking for.

Home sellers, on the other hand, visit your real estate website looking for your ability to sell their home at the highest price possible in the shortest amount of time. Not something that will be of interest to the home buyer! If you rely solely on your homepage and “About Us” page to carry your message, you end up trying to use one area to carry two messages to two very different markets. To paraphrase Lincoln, “You can’t please all your real estate markets all the time.”

Being able to separate your real estate Internet marketing messages helps you increase your exposure with the search engines. Search engines index your website by assigning each page on your site to one category, keyword or key phrase. Mixing messages may actually dilute your ability to make an impression on the search engines’ indexing ability. By adhering to the “one message, one page” tenet, the search engine will deliver the right page (and marketing message) to the right real estate prospective client.

Investors approach real estate from a different angle entirely from your traditional home selling or home buying clientele. Addressing their interests and showing your knowledge of market trends is necessary to convert investors visiting your real estate website into clients purchasing commercial or rental properties.

Maximize your real estate website’s ability to deliver keyword-rich and targeted content to both your prospects and the search engines by adding buyer, seller and investor specific pages to your website package. Contact us for help in using your IMC designed website to deliver your best message to your targeted prospects and turn your website visitors into real estate clients.

Your real estate website is your best platform for extolling the benefits of your Realtor expertise. But use a venture capitalist’s reaction to judge how well you present your services. Many small business owners make the mistake of being to general in their claims of company growth with statements like “targeting a 5% share of a 47 gazillion dollar market”. The VC blank stare should give some indication of the lack of sales punch. Missing ingredient? Specifics that can be backed up. In marketing, generalities leave no impression.

Unfortunately for marketers, we have 3,000-some years of using superlatives and semi-hard to prove statistics to improve our market share. Now our DNA seems to immune to general claims. The biggest problem with generalities is that it detracts from your real estate websites credibility, since people assume that there is a touch of “telling the truth carelessly” as the Irish put it.

One way of adding specifics to your website is to make sure your testimonials from successful home sales or purchases are specific. These can also be strengthened by adding a personal story dimension. For example, “We were interested in a five bedroom house with plenty of sunlight and play area for our growing family. Our Realtor, Seymour Houseman, found the perfect home near a very good school within two weeks of beginning our home search.” Add specifics and testimonials for each market you are targeting: families, military transplants, vacation home buyers, condo owners or commercial real estate investors.

Since your marketing is directed to a particular market, make sure it is specific on the benefits that your market will perceive. As master marketer Claude Hopkins said, “If a claim is worth making, make it in the most impressive way.” An example he uses to drive home the need for specifics is when you greet a customer, who responds to you best: the one you say “How do you do?” or the one you greet with specific questions about their well-being or livelihood.

Make the best use of your agent biography pages and real estate website’s homepage with specifics about your professional expertise, track record and client satisfaction. If you only have a half a minute for people to check your homepage, what do you want them to remember? Make sure you tell them specifically!

Working with your real estate website designer to incorporate feedback from website traffic analysis into your content and refine your target keywords is a very good way to improve your organic search engine ranking. From your statistics you can measure the success of your keywords on your entry pages or if an entry page is not receiving traffic, which ones need to be fine-tuned.

IMCD Web Design works with real estate agents to make sure their marketing maximizes the unique marketing ability of the Internet. Using a mix of main keywords, key phrases and long tail (seldom used, but very specific)keywords IMC utitlizes the search engines’ ability to prescreen your website visitors. By working with the search engines, IMC’s real estate web designs bring our clients websites that are highly visible for their specific markets, thus improving the quality of their real estate lead generation.

If part of your marketing strategy is to regularly post blogs on your website, you can measure what information you posted that sparked interest in your services. When contributing to other real estate community websites, you can check what days you received traffic from those sites and decide if those contributions are driving traffic to your website.

Your website analytics feedback can serve to help you hone down which subjects are most popular at a given moment in time allowing you to cater to that demand. Website analytics allows real estate agents to follow the dictum “The customer is always right” and factor the areas of customer interest (and non-interest) into their articles or blog entries.

Using feedback from website analytics is one of the best ways to fine tune your real estate website‘s Internet marketing offering. IMC, as a web design and SEO company, offers both 6 month and 12 month packages for reporting on your website’s analytics as well as fine-tuning your homepage’s optimization. From your SEO feedback, you can see if you need to revisit some of the content you have on your site for better keyword usage or adding more niche market keywords to capture the long tail searches in your area.

Understanding your real estate website’s traffic statistics helps you refine your online marketing approach and improve you Internet presence.

RE/MAX used Google’s analytics to rethink their real estate website. After incorporating changes spurred by website traffic analysis feedback, RE/MAX improved their return on investment by driving leads to their real estate agents for less money.

However, in order to use the statistics, you need to understand what the statistics are reporting.

Website traffic analysis software, such as Urchin and Google’s Analytics, allows you to review:

• which search engines or websites are directing traffic to your site,
• which pages receive the most traffic,
• which pages are the highest entry and exit points, and
• average time visitors remain on your website.

Three main areas to look at are “hits per day” which includes search engine spiders checking the site; “sessions per day”; and “pageviews per day”. To measure how captivating your site is, simply compare the number of sessions to the number of pageviews. Google Analytics reports give this figure as “Average pageviews per session”. The higher the number the better since it indicates that your website viewers are checking more than one page per visit. Sessions that only have one pageview usually indicate that your visitor came and went without finding value in your site. Google also gives you feedback on the average amount of time website visitors stayed on your site.

The other area you should check is the “unique visitors”. This indicates visitors browsing your site from different IP addresses. This helps you figure whether you have repeat visitors from one area, such as a search engine’s spiders, or visitors from several sites. One item to also take into consideration is you may have several hits from services like Comcast or Qwest that actually are unique visitors that are using the same Internet portal.

One caveat is to beware of certain free analytic software since the price of the free software is to allow advertising on your site. IMCD Web Design uses traffic tracking software that accurately follows user browsing patterns without turning your website into someone else’s revenue generator.

IMC uses software that tracks search engine ranking as well as Google Analytics and Urchin’s traffic analysis software to fine-tune real estate agents’ websites to position themselves to capture their target market. Contact us today if you need a website that brings you a return on your Internet marketing dollars or if you are adding to your marketing muscle with a new site.

In a competitive real estate market, control of your Internet marketing means directing how you appear to 90% of the potential home buyers searching your market. The National Association of Realtors (NAR) reported earlier in 2008 that the number of home buyers using an Internet search to check the latest listings of homes for sale increased almost 10% from 2007 to 90%. Yet, according to a report released May 14th, only 60% of real estate agents have a personal real estate website. The remaining 40% depend on their real estate firm’s website for Internet visibility or work for a real estate company that has no Internet marketing.

This is a boon for real estate agents who have secured their domain names and personal agent websites, and even more so for agents who invested in a professional real estate website design that has brought them attention, traffic and leads.

The benefit of having your own real estate website is that it builds credibility to you as a professional Realtor and drives leads to your phone or email inbox. From IMCD Web Design’ research, one of the greatest points of leverage for an agent’s personal website is adding a real estate blog. You can research blog effectiveness for your real estate market – simply type in your market’s keywords and check the personal agent or local Realtor websites that rank and keep tabs on which ones consistently rank high. Of those ranking high, you can do some secondary research and see how many times a week or month posts are made to the blog.

Just in a quick search on May 15th, the number one real estate website for “Dallas real estate” has a blog with at least one entry a week. The number two position for “Cleveland real estate” also has a very active blog. In the very competitive market of Chicago, the first local real estate website ranking on the first page has a very active blog.

IMC has found blogs to help its clients Internet presence in several ways:

• the blog adds keyword-rich content to the site,
• it is the easiest way to add content and address real estate issues in your area, and
• the blog software “pings” the major search engines, telling them a post has just been made.

Search engines usually browse inactive websites every three weeks. Real estate websites that add material on a regular basis get be checked every week. With a blog entry, the website is checked every time the search engine receives a ping.

In a time when the majority of property searches occurs on the Internet, your professionally designed IMC real estate website is a key marketing asset where you can control the content and are in the driver’s seat to increase your visibility.

1. How does real estate website optimization deal with niche real estate markets?

Discovering real estate niche markets is a two pronged discovery: the real estate agent’s market experience and a search of keyword usage databases. The reason for directing several web pages’ content to a niche market is to harvest the small quantity, but high quality leads. The use of the niche keywords provides the screening process that tells your website visitor exactly the market you can help them with and tells you exactly what kind of property your visitor is searching for.

2. As an agent, I don’t have direct control over my website’s meta tags – what can I do to boost my website’s rankings?

Due to years of “keyword stuffing” of meta tags – the practice of putting any subject related keyword in the meta tags regardless of the web page’s actual content – search engines assign a low priority to meta tags. The highest priorities go to a web page’s content, the quality (more than quantity) of incoming links and the amount of web traffic your website attracts – all areas a real estate agent can control on their website.

Real estate agents are actually in the driver’s seat for helping their website’s visibility. Investing in adding a blog and neighborhood news tool and taking some time every week to add content on your real estate market is the best thing you can do for your real estate website. Next, follow some of our earlier tips to make sure you have taken advantage of all the qualified (i.e. have to do with real estate in some way) areas you can to place incoming links to your website. Third, make sure you have your website address on your business card and direct your clients to visit your website (and give you feedback).

3. I hear that Flash is bad for websites and yet some of the highest ranking real estate websites are using it, what gives?

The reason some designers caution against the use of Flash is that it does take up valuable real estate on the web page and does not provide content that the search engines can read, especially any words that are graphics and not text. Some Flash home pages also are so graphic intensive they take a long time to load, causing a certain percentage of website visitors to quickly leave. But this well-intended advice must be balanced with the idea that appealing to the search engine is not the main purpose for your real estate website.

Flash is a very effective marketing tool to present a captivating real estate slide show. Catching the attention of your website visitors is the doorway to capturing leads. On the technical side, there are ways to limit Flash’s loading time. True, the search engines can’t read the graphics, but if the real estate website is designed correctly, there is enough content on the page for the search engines to index the page. Bottom line: your real estate website is a marketing portal whose target is the website visitor. Create the site that has an attractive design and the best content and the search engines will follow.