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!

Do your website visitors visit more than one page on your real estate website? Do your website hits from unique visitors turn into contacts? Search engine optimization and professional real estate web design work to get web visitors to your professional website. After that it is your written content that is your primary tool to move a visitor from being just a “hit” to someone who provides you with their contact information. If your websites has these three areas working seamlessly, you are enjoying great sales lead generation.

If your website is receiving hits and enjoying lots of traffic, however you are not seeing too many sales leads, it is time to look at your web content. IMCD Web Design provides professional copywriting, web writing and copy editor services to our real estate web design clients.

IMC watched websites start out on the same level of SEO and graphic design, however some climb up the rankings on Google and Yahoo and others languish low on the search engine rankings. The difference rests in two distinct areas: the web content that the websites started with and, second, the consistency and type of content that was added to the website later.

Professional web copywriters understand the purpose of the text content is two fold: appeal to web visitors and present information to search engine spiders. Web content that holds a visitor’s attention and moves them to action must take into account marketing principles and peoples’ reading behavior. For search engine optimization, using keywords in the right amount, with most effective placement and in such a way that the still content reads naturally for visitors.

Websites that take advantage of professional copywriting services or coaching position themselves to appeal to both their visitors and the indexing spiders. IMCD Web Design provides both professional web content copywriting services as well as web authoring coaching to our web design clients. IMC recognizes that the a key leverage point of the Internet is providing web owners the ability to easily add content to their websites with blogs and article managers. Many of IMC’s successful Realtor clients actively use their real estate blogs and article managers to add up-to-date information on their area’s activities and market news.

If your website is not converting hits to sales leads, it is time to contact our web design team! IMC has the professional web design or real estate website package to move your business into the mainstream of Internet marketing and harvesting your web traffic. Every small business web design is a potential sales lead generation tool in the largest market on the planet. Call us to see how IMC can improve your conversion rate!

In large real estate firms or businesses with marketing departments, being aware of the “silo effect” can help improve your real estate web design. The silo effect is when departments focus only on their goals (the silo) and not how all departments’ goals interact for the overall benefit of the company’s sales and profitability. In web designs there are at least three areas that need to all be addressed: graphic design, web content and search engine optimization.

Webmasters generally track the search engine optimization, while marketing focuses on making sure the graphic design is attention arresting and the web content is persuasive enough to turn visitors into sales leads. The silo effect usually manifests as marketing favoring a fantastic Flash presentation that really keeps a visitors attention and delivers the marketing message. However, when Flash is not used in balance with web content that the search engines can index or with areas for basic search engine optimization, then the super attractive website languishes well off the top search engine ranking pages.

When all areas connected with a website work together to balance the overall marketing effect of the triple titans of web design (SEO, content and graphics), then marketing gets their sales leads, webmasters get more traffic to track and the company enjoys greater profits.

IMCD Web Design’ creative web design team maximizes the effectiveness of our professional real estate web designs search engine optimization, web content (for SEO and marketing) and the graphic design. Our goal is not to provide our small business and real estate clients with a website, but with a powerful lead generation tool that brings home profitable business by consistent high search engine rankings and high conversion rates of web traffic to solid business contacts.

Our Internet marketing strategy is to get our real estate clients to the top of the search rankings in their very competitive markets. for our professional web design clients, our online marketing approach is to get their products or services ranked highly for their keywords, key phrases and long tail keywords. Just as it is hard to call it “sailing” if the boat never raises anchor, IMCD has a hard time calling it “Internet marketing” if a website is not visible for a company’s market keywords.

Contact IMCD’s sales team today to increase the effectiveness of your online marketing campaign with one of our affordable custom professional web designs or real estate websites.

Investing in your new real estate website without maximizing its search engine optimization is like buying a new car without any wheels and expecting to get somewhere. In short, search engine optimization (SEO) is the tool that gives your real estate website the traction to get anywhere with your real estate Internet market.

Recently, IMCD Web Design did an semi-scientific serious survey of real estate websites. The survey criteria was simple: visit real estate website designers whose sites are high on the Google search return, review their positive testimonials and then do a Google search in the markets where their happy clients are competing. What we found is that many designers as well as real estate agents apparently do not understand marketing on the Internet, or at least do not factor the financial return on the real estate website investment in their Internet marketing strategy.

A typical real estate website situation is the Realtor would give a testimonial on how great their website looked, how easy it was to work with the website designers and the compliments they  have received from their site. A Google search of their market using the usual search terms like “Sacramento real estate”, “Boise homes for sale” or “Seattle real estate agent” and even longtail keywords like “Los Angeles luxury homes” yielded no visible search ranking of the satisfied clients’ websites on the first five pages, much less the critical first page of results.

A quick look “under the hood” of the real estate agents’ websites found that, however beautiful and captivating the graphics, Flash slide show of area homes and scenery, or ability to find contact information, the websites lacked simple search engine optimization. SEO can get sophisticated and multi-layered depending on the need of your market and the time you wish to devote to capturing your potentially lucrative market. However, most real estate websites reviewed lacked even basic SEO.

Without SEO, the gorgeous websites were most likely found by people who found the web address on print advertising – a business card, post card or newspaper advertisement. Although print is a solid secondary advertising window, with 90% of the market using the Internet and maybe 15% checking newspaper ads in search of a home – print is nowhere as efficient in getting your real estate marketing message visible on the first page of the search results.

Make sure you have professional and experienced help with your website’s SEO to get you the visibility in the Internet market. Proof that you have the wheels on your real estate website vehicle? You receive steady, consistent and solid leads from your Internet marketing and are high up in Google searches for your keywords. If you are in a competitive market like Denver or Los Angeles, your tires may need white walls to gain attention – add a real estate blog or an article manager to make it easy to add content to your website. At IMCD we don’t let our clients only focus on the vehicle (attractive and captivating as our graphic design is) and forget that their website investment needs solid SEO to get traction on the Internet highway.

What are the benefits of investing in IMC’s professional real estate web designer skills? The foundation of search engine optimization (SEO) for your real estate web design happens in the initial html coding and web content creation of your website.

When IMC critiques real estate websites, curiosity as to why some very fine Realtor websites are not high on the search engine results causes us to examine the underlying web design. What we usually find is that the web designer had a professional strength in one of the foundational areas in website design, but not in SEO. Since the nature of a website is largely graphical, many web designers have very good graphics background. This is a tremendous asset as long as it is balanced out with copywriting and SEO building skills.

The benefit of working with professional web designers with SEO skills as well as graphic design wizardry is that your attractive real estate website is also “seen” by the search engines. Web designers who concentrate on staying up with the latest in SEO “white hat” techniques not only listen to SEO experts, but know enough to experiment with nuances in real estate website construction, to arrive at their own formulas for successful search engine positioning.

IMC lays the foundation of our real estate web designs with a template that easily evolves and adapts to changes in the search engines indexing and ranking patterns. We constantly implement search enigne optimization techniques we find that improve our clients’ real estate websites visibility on the search engines.

Beyond the foundations of your real estate website, another benefit of working with IMC’s real estate web design pros is that we steer our clients away from “black hat” SEO techniques. These are SEO techniques that work (maybe) for a short time, but sooner or later Google catches up and the next thing website owners know, their real estate website has disappeared off the Google search results – sometimes banned entirely until the problems are corrected.

Internet marketers usually contact real estate website owners promising that their sure-fire search engine optimization consulting will help get a real estate website to the top of Google – possibly even guaranteeing their results. Remember the stupid stunts you pulled in high school that brought you fame (or notoriety) for a bit, but forever after you regretted doing? If no, that’s good. However these guaranteed SEO programs are usually a black hat technique that may get your page to Google’s first page of search results, because computer algorithms are not the same as someone looking ag your website – they can be fooled…for a little while. Then just as fast as your website ascended in the search engine rankings, it descends – only it usually goes farther down than the ranking where you started.

Working with a professional SEO company never guarantees an overnight ascent on Google, but from IMC’s experience, real estate website owners who implement the SEO strategies we recommend along with using our proven real estate sites, find themselves slowly, but surely climbing up in the search engine rankings.

The real estate website market follows the tenet “you get what you pay for” only in that you will get a website for a fixed price. What many real estate agents undervalue is the vital need for search engine optimization (SEO) of their website, unless they are planning on an expensive Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing campaign. PPC has a legitimate place in Internet marketing, but investing in a real estate website that uses SEO techniques to elevate your website’s search ranking moves your website into the “upper class”, the websites that are naturally surface at the top of search engines results. This is the class of websites that brings the biggest return on investment to the real estate agent or broker.

Recently we checked a website designer that was honest in selling a real estate website for under $2000. For that amount, real estate agents are clearly told their website will have 10 pages, no email contact form and any SEO work would be extra. After visiting one of their customers’ site to view the basic package I was surprised to see someone had bought the package without paying extra for the SEO, probably thinking that a good looking website was all that was necessary for a successful Internet presence.

On the surface the website looked very nice and professional with a real estate logo and product pictures. However, looking under the surface at the underlying code seen by the search engines, there was zero SEO – no meta tags, no “alt” tags – alternate text that is attached to any pictures, and minimal keyword-rich content. Essentially the customer has what we refer to as a “business card” site. Anyone receiving your business card will visit your website, but it will probably never rank higher than page 457 or 754 on a Google search.

At IMC, SEO is always an integral part of your real estate website package. IMC knows the real worth in your website is its lead generating capacity – which mainly comes from visibility on the search engines and good marketing positioning in the content. Without visibility your real estate website’s ROI perishes. We invest in staying abreast of changes in Google’s search techniques and tracking how well our clients are doing in the search engines. Our clients have found that, although IMC makes no search engine ranking guarantees, our experienced approach to real estate website design and SEO has brought them a very high return on their website investment.

By everyone’s measure, a real estate website’s success can be measured in how many leads it drives to the Realtor. A common question real estate website designers encounter is “How long will it take my website to get to Google’s first page?” There are two answers since there are two ways to obtain visibility on Google’s (or Yahoo’s) search results.

The first answer is “Maybe one day.” Add the Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing strategy to your advertising budget – and be willing to be a top keyword bidder. PPC search results are the advertising you see on the side and top of the search engine results. The higher you wish to appear on the list, the higher your bid must be for each keyword term. Indeed, PPC is one strategy to get a link to your website in front of many people very quickly. Depending on your market, this may be fairly inexpensive or, for very competitive and lucrative markets, rather expensive.

The second answer is “No one knows when or if, we only know what has worked in the past to make that happen over a period of time”. For example, take the launch of a real estate agent website that is targeting the market and keyword “Denver real estate”. The website is entering a field for which Google finds 2,340,000 other results (pages or sites using “Denver real estate”, “Denver, co real estate” and other close variations). Yahoo finds 259 million results, with half of their top ten returns the same as Google. These figures tell you that this is a very competitive field.

Real estate website designers and owners closely follow SEO experts feedback and reported experiences of other webmasters. But then so do the search engine creators, so every few months the search engines change their algorithms, sometimes just to throw off old rules of optimization, but usually to increase the relevance of the returns their searches (since that is how they stay competitive). In the end, effective search engine optimization is how well your website designer can position your keywords throughout the visible and invisible code on your page.

Another hurdle new sites must overcome is how much search engines give weight to the age of the website. IMCD Web Design has noticed how several of our clients who actively use a real estate blog with their new real estate websites seem to have mitigated this hurdle. In tracking other non-IMCD real estate websites that are created solely as blogs, they tend to ride a roller coaster in their rankings. Appearing one day and disappearing the next. Having a real estate website with an overall SEO foundation helps to create a content-rich foundation that appears and climbs in the rankings on a steady basis.

At IMC, we approach website building on the strong three-leg approach: SEO, cutting edge design and keyword-rich content. Our clients have found that, although IMC makes no search engine ranking guarantees, our experienced approach to real estate website design and SEO coupled with content showing the client’s knowledge of their real estate market has brought the website owners a high return on their website investment. Contact IMC today to get your Internet presence – and your income – on an upward trajectory.