Florida Realtors with their large markets of out-of-state home buyers find that their real estate website – both in terms of search engine visibility and marketing positioning – becoming a more critical marketing element in their continuing business success.

The setback in Florida property values can be used in a real estate website marketing strategy tailored to attract American retirees who experienced depreciation in their retirement accounts and investments. Finding the keywords, adding the web content retirees are looking for, as well as maintaining an active real estate blog on current market conditions are critical steps to getting visible to an out-of-state market.

Four factors help contribute to shaping Florida’s current real estate market:

1. Florida’s jobless rate is higher than the national average,
2. More people moving out of the state for the first time in decades creating a greater buyers’ market,
3. Midwestern and Northeastern retirees prefer moving to a warmer climate, and
4. No state income tax.

With these factors in mind, refining keywords and search engine optimization to reach retiring Baby Boomers and the wealthy may well play a part of a successful online marketing campaign. Two of the biggest target states for the Florida wealth migration are New York and California. Tom Golisano, the Buffalo Sabres owner gave tax savings as his primary reason for his Florida home buying move.

Besides targeting out-of-state wealthy and retiree migrations, Florida real estate websites also are targeting the Hispanic migration moving from South and Central America. As the Hispanic population grows, bi-lingual real estate websites position themselves to reach the largest inward bound market – Miami alone draws over half of its foreign home buyers from Latin America. Along with bi-lingual real estate websites, Realtors are traveling major cities of South America to hold property investment seminars extolling the benefit of Florida’s home values and the weak dollar favoring South American currencies. Most Latin American investors are buying for the long-term – short-term speculation buying is not a part of the new buying wave.

IMCD’s search engine optimization, online Internet marketing and graphic design expertise have helped Florida Realtors position their real estate websites to hone in on Florida’s current market mix. Contact us if your real estate agency needs a real estate website that is effective in generating new sales leads.

Realtors know that a competitive real estate web design is essential to establishing a highly visible online presence and improving their marketing.

With over 80% of home buyers turning to the Internet to search the available homes for sale, it pays to market online…if your real estate website is high on the search engine results.

How can a real estate agent find a real estate web design to compete with the national real estate websites? First, realize it isn’t a hopeless task – search engine rankings are in a constant state of change. Hitwise.com found that the top ten real estate sites, for all their search engine results dominance failed to interest 75% of the market.

The reasons for this may be two fold:

• Home buyers are looking for local companies that show expertise in the market and
• Searchers are using search terms of three or more words.

Both of these reasons favor personal real estate web designs over national listing websites.

With recent changes in Google’s search algorithm, local companies are given greater visibility. Interestingly, Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo’s searches already ranked local companies higher in their searches. Now agents have a more level playing field in the search engine most of the market utilizes.

With the evolution of search techniques – people are using more words in their searches – long tail keywords are driving 80% of the traffic most real estate websites receive. The more long tail keywords agents can find for their market – and use – the wider they can cast their online fishing net. Just as in any sales funnel process, the wider the beginning of the funnel, the more people make it to the final sales stages. It is always a percentage game.

IMCD Website Design creates competitive real estate web designs that place clients’ websites on Google’s, Yahoo’s and Bing’s front page. By balancing graphic design, search engine optimization (SEO) for popular and long tail keywords, as well as helpful content for home buyers and sellers, real estate agents are able to utilize effective web designs to fast track their web marketing to profitability.

As recently as a few years ago, no one was using search terms over 5 words long. Now, as web visitors realize how powerful the search engines are at ferreting out specific information, keyword searches using 6 to 8 words has grown to 10% of the online searches.

Contact the SEO specialists at IMC to see how you can improve your online marketing and take advantage of long tail keywords for your market with our successful Agent Select custom and semi-custom real estate web designs.

Just as home buyers rely on real estate agents to handle their transaction from start to finish, experienced agents rely on real estate web design companies to handle their real estate websites so they can focus on selling homes.

For over 14 years, IMCD has been helping agents field award-winning, sales lead generating real estate websites.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, real estate agents using IMC’s real estate website designs benefit from the following key design & SEO components:

1. The graphic design is balanced. The images support your real estate sales message, attract the visitor’s attention, are not over-powering and are fully search engine optimized.

2. Real estate web design incorporates Web 2.0 features of contact forms, blogs, and new property notification email sign-ups.

3. Intuitive and optimized navigation. All website pages are within 2 to 3 clicks of the home page and the navigation architecture allows the search engines to index the importance of each pages content.

4. Cascading Style Sheets are used to optimize keyword use throughout the website’s architecture. IMC makes the use of your use keywords count the most!

5. Professional marketing support. Your headlines and web content are created using both marketing and search engine optimization principles. In search engine results, keyword placement is critical to gaining first page results placements.

6. Graphic designs utilizing color palettes that attract most people. One of the common short-comings of amateur real estate web design is the creator uses color combinations that appeal to them without realizing a great body of marketing study would quickly show them that their choice of colors repels of 75% of their visitors. A tried and true formula is always a more timely and higher return on investment choice than the school of hard knocks!

7. Flash slide shows that balanced between graphic emphasis to your message and search engine optimization of your website and included in your basic package. Often web design companies charge extra for Flash slide shows, however, IMC builds the benefit of Flash into every custom web design and customized template web design.

As a real estate professional, side step the online marketing school of hard knocks and accelerate the effectiveness of your online real estate marketing campaign with one of IMC’s cost-effective semi-custom template real estate web designs. Contact our web design specialists to see how quickly you can upgrade your online marketing performance!

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an integral part of effective real estate web design. Search engine optimization is not solely a science of getting your real estate website to the top of the search engine results, it is also an advanced Internet marketing tool for increasing web visitors who are looking for your information, homes for sale listings or home selling services – it serves as a pre-qualification step for your sales leads.

A sign of ineffective SEO in real estate web design is situations where the web development team does cursory keyword investigation and does not create a keyword sales funnel that targets particular web browsing shoppers. The shotgun approach to gathering sales leads often backfires due to its lack of focus. It has the same effect of asking a busload of people “will anyone will lend me $5?” No one responds…or they respond in ways your call to action did not intend.

IMC does our SEO homework of researching our real estate web design clients’ market along with the strengths and benefits of their real estate service. After the market research, an Internet marketing strategy is put together that includes choice of target keywords. However, beyond keywords, IMC web designers have analyzed over a dozen different areas of our real estate web designs that incorporate search engine optimization features. Each of these areas integrates seamlessly to provide your real estate company with and Internet marketing presence that targets you niche markets and target your potential clients.

If your online marketing efforts have not increased you search engine visibility or bringing you consistent sales leads to your website, contact our real estate web design sales team. Besides our real estate web design hat, we are also an SEO company that knows how to plan and execute a formidable Internet marketing strategy. Our web design goals are to make your real estate website bring you the best sale lead generation possible. When going through the online marketing minefield, it pays to follow a market leader who knows where the hidden mines are that can impair your Internet marketing program.

Denver real estate websites have an interesting challenge: what is the best marketing for so diverse a home buying and selling population. Denver is well situated in the center of Colorado’s Front Range with several top-notch universities, large corporate employment opportunities, an international airport and one of the biggest all season playgrounds out the back door.

Denver’s real estate market, with its many property acquisition drivers – need to be close to work, near a particular school, in a condo near downtown, in an upscale luxury home, or close to a road that heads out to a second home at a ski resort – demands multiple online marketing messages.

IMCD Web Design has helped several Denver real estate agents stake a claim on the gold rush of Google’s first page results for Denver homes for sale and property searches. Without the need for pay-per-click advertising. Behind each successful real estate Internet marketing strategy was a thorough research of the current market and an analysis of what was necessary to be competitive. The rewards of successfully marketing with a Denver real estate website are profitability in this active Colorado market.

IMC utilizes its array of real estate marketing tools, sales web pages marketing specific market niches, to help Denver Realtors attract and prequalify their sales contacts. By targeting several markets as once, Denver real estate websites cast a wide, yet specific, net that will address whatever part of the market is active at a given time.

From Broomfield down to Highlands Ranch, real estate agents have depended on IMC’s Denver real estate web designs to consistently bring leads and a return on their online marketing investment. Call our Colorado sales team if your Internet marketing campaign is not positioning you for the best results in Denver’s diverse real estate market.

Phoenix real estate websites drawing repeat visitors have two factors in common. The interesting aspect of these two factors are they are somewhat counter intuitive to marketing tendencies. Over-riding market tendencies are to list features of using a particular real estate agent or Realtor company and to strive for new customers. Successful real estate websites in the Phoenix and Scottsdale market do a good job of mirroring in their web content the principle of fostering current relationships.

The first factor is to follow the 80/20 rule on web content. Devote 80% of your web content going over the benefits clients gain from your real estate services or providing information that is helps further their home buying or selling needs. By only using 20% of your marketing on the features of your real estate company you adhere to a successful rule in marketing: “Make the advertisement a biography of your client.”

The second factor is utilizing a real estate website design that gives people in the Phoenix market reason to return to your website. Real estate blogs, article managers, and up-to-date feature listings serve as proven effective online marketing tools. Phoenix real estate websites that understand long-term sales lead generation, cater to the large percentage of web visitors who are people months away from actually initiating the process of buying or selling a house.

By providing a solid base of information and continually adding more valuable information to the website, Realtors place themselves in the position of expert and a person who understands the needs of the current market. With the severe “market corrections” in the Phoenix area, many people poised to go on the market read of the home devaluations and foreclosures and wonder “Is now the time to get in or wait?” Answering that question may be impossible for any real estate agent, however, by updating your website with information of the Phoenix market and reviewing points to consider, you help your web visitor ways to answer the question for their own circumstances.

Think of a web visitor’s computer mouse as your Phoenix real estate website’s remote control. Do you have the local real estate market information that will move your visitor to other pages in your web site or are they apt to change the Internet channel? If you need a real estate websites that will draw repeat visitors, contact IMC’s sales team to see how your Phoenix realty company can benefit from a more active and interactive online marketing presence.

Many real estate agents have seen the benefits of search engine optimization (SEO) extolled for its ability to attract sales leads, but are not as familiar with real estate website optimization. An SEO company specializes in using keywords and web design technology to help a website attain a high placement in the search engine results. Website optimization is the use of marketing, copywriting and graphic design techniques to convert the web traffic from visitors to contacts – people who take action either by calling, faxing, or filling out an online contact form or guest book page. Any high ranking on Google or Yahoo only comes to fruition with top website optimization.

In website optimization, key pages in real estate web design are the funnel pages that lead to a “goal page”. The goal page is the carrot on the stick, that nugget of information or possibly a report download that entices visitors to sign a guest book page or contact page. The sign-in pages are a key part of the funneling process.

Many of the key sales and marketing techniques, both copywriting and graphic design, that have proven effective in traditional marketing and direct mail marketing translate well to online marketing. IMCD Web Design works with our real estate and business web design clients to help them use website optimization techniques in their content management systems – either blog entries or article manager updates – to improve their conversion rates of website visitors. IMC also builds website optimization into the website’s initial content pages – both in the writing and the award-winning graphic design.

If your real estate website is failing to convert visitors or your website analytics reports are showing a high number of visitors using your keywords to find you and only visiting one page of your website, it is time to talk to the IMC sales team to see how our website optimization and real estate web design can move your website up in the search engine rankings and improve your conversion ratio.