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.

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!

Since IMCD Web Design fully introduced its Version 9 real estate website design in early 2008, client websites have been building impressive track records with search engine ranking. Whether updating prior sites or starting from scratch with new domain names, clients have seen their real estate websites go from virtually nowhere on the critical top five pages to high ranking and tremendous visibility just in a few short months.

One of our customized Version 9 website designs built for a business that works heavily with the construction industry and homeowners improving the equity in their real estate started with a new domain name and by starting with a content-rich website, consistently rank on Google’s first page for many of the keyword search terms.

The Version 9 real estate website design is the latest evolution of our websites designed to help brokers and Realtors create a very visible marketing window on the Internet. To start with, the Version 9 websites take advantage of advances in CSS techniques that help graphically-intensive websites (which real estate websites are by nature) load rapidly. Our page template structure allows the design to incorporate a wide array of real estate tools, either on its initial launch or at later stages of development.

Many of our most successful stories with relatively rapid rises in the search engines for a new domain are websites where the real estate agents took advantage of adding additional modules such as the Featured Listing tool, article manager for continually adding content and keyword-rich real estate market news and information, and a real estate blog for its informative and advantageous search engine pinging nature. This website design also utilizes the guestbook pages for harvesting leads that has proven successful on all our real estate website designs.

If your virtual real estate office on the Internet is hard for customers to find with their Google or Yahoo searches, it may be time to explore a redesign of your Internet presence. Contact us to see how soon we can improve your Internet image and return on your real estate website investment!

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.

Internet Marketing Design creates real estate websites that organically rank high on the Google and Yahoo searches by coupling professional graphics, content-rich writing and search engine optimization (SEO). IMC’s real estate website designs have a history of providing real estate agents with high ranking sites that garner 10 to 40 warm leads a day. With an SEO strategy that finds niche markets, each guestbook lead is pre-screened since they have arrived at the guestbook through a specific keyword search.

Organic ranking is the term used for websites that are returned by the search engine for a keyword search, not the websites that turn up due to either placement or pay-per-click payments. Organic search engine ranking is the best ranking for your real estate website to have, since most homebuyers searching the Internet for their next home or a real estate agent to list their home for sale follow the organically listed websites first.

Breckenridge and Denver Colorado are just two of the of the many major markets that IMC clients enjoy top-billing in the organic searches for keywords for both general real estate and niche market properties. With clients around the United States, our clients have found that the investment in a an IMC real estate website design has paid for itself many times over with the new business it attracts.

With the addition of IMC’s successful Version 9 hybrid custom-template real estate website, real estate agents have a platform for launching their personal web presence with added traffic and content generating optional features such as Feature Listings, article managers for adding local area information articles and a Real Estate Blog. The IMC real estate blogs are efficient at attracting interest to your domain name instead of driving business to a nationally owned blogging site.

As with any market, “market correction” downturns call for better investment of marketing budgets. With over 90% of real estate customers turning to the Internet to check the market’s offerings, a real estate website professionally designed to organically rank high for your keywords is crucial to your market presence. IMC’s website designs have the successful track record to help you carve out your niche in your local real estate market.