Your real estate website can take advantage of the current market conditions. Drayton Bird, a British advertising legend said, “Good times breed bad habits. Bad times breed good habits.” This is true in online real estate marketing also. What are the good habits that can be improved in real estate market downturns?

1. Utilize your real estate blog on a weekly basis – or if you do not have a blog, get one.
IMCD Web Design has long offered a real estate blog option for integration into your customized web design. Ingraining the habit or discipline of weekly adding content to your real estate website adds more reasons for people to visit your site regularly, builds your image as a real estate expert and improves your website’s search engine optimization.

2. Maintain your listings as up-to-date as possible.
Web visitors quickly form the opinion that a website with old material is a marketing after-thought and migrate to websites that are kept up-to-date. Unfortunately, they do not give you any customer feedback before leaving your website, so this is an area you have to trust the web visitor behavior studies. As time consuming as it may be, establishing the good habit of listings maintenance pays off in visitor retention and website trustworthiness.

3. Similar to Habit #2, maintain your external website links.
At least quarterly, do a review of your external website links to make sure none have changed. One area to always check is links to government websites. It is our experience that, possibly due to personnel changes that happen after elections, government websites have often had major web design changes that turn all the old page addresses into “page not found” errors.

4. Improve your online writing skills.
Take the time to study what makes effective headlines, opening sentences and web content so your blog entries improve their sales lead generation aspect. There are also articles on the web on how to improve the SEO aspect of your blog writing. The way your real estate blog’s content is presented can mean all the difference in the world for how well it ranks in the various search engines’ results.

However, all the good web habits in the world can’t overcome bad web design. If you need a strong foundation for your online marketing, contact IMCD Web Design and see how our real estate web design or our business websites can improve your sales lead generation.

IMCD Web Design is a company that works with small businesses, like real estate agencies, to provide complete website designs that fulfill the company’s different online marketing needs. With many web design clients, a recurring marketing theme is the business tries to replicate its brochure or newspaper advertising methods online, not taking into account the different medium.

Certainly various marketing areas are the same, such as content writing and graphic design. However, in the online marketing world, the way content is presented and graphic design is encoded rests, to a large degree, unseen elements that can make or break a website’s visibility in the search engine results.

Web designs for small businesses utilize search engine optimization techniques (SEO) to carry your message, not to your potential clients and customers, but to the search engines that are screening your website for your potential visitors. To market online as one would in a print ad is to miss the marketing to the gatekeepers of the Internet – and the biggest gatekeeper or search engine is Google.

Professional web designs by IMCD Web Design incorporate SEO principles in both the presentation of your marketing message (web content) and in the encoding of the images the make up your graphic design. When Google searches a business website created by our web designers, it knows what your marketing message is and what product or service your business is selling online.

Search engine optimization actually begins before any other step – the research for keywords and key phrases is a critical step in finding out how your potential clients are searching for you online. It should be a red flag to any business owner if their web designer treats SEO as an additional option or an element that can be taken lightly in the web design budget.

Simply put, experience has shown us that without SEO, your business’ web design is a futile investment – your website may have the most captivating marketing buzz and the most eye-catching graphics, but never show up on the search engine results. Similar to the tree falling in the forest with no one around, does it make a sound, if a website is launched on the Internet with no SEO to focus the search engines on its main marketing message, will the marketing message get heard? Not likely.

For your custom or semi-custom web design that utilizes all the many facets of a successful SEO campaign as part of your complete website design, contact our professional web design specialists to see how quickly you can get your business’ online marketing campaign going with a top-notch graphic design matched with cutting edge SEO techniques.

Maximize your real estate web design with these four top content building techniques. One of your business website’s key search engine optimization (SEO) areas is keyword-rich content. Web designs with web-content adding features like integrated blogs or article managers give business owners user-friendly ways to quickly add content – both text and images – to their websites. Following these top content building techniques helps entrepreneurs make the most of their online marketing opportunity.

1. Testimonials. Each successful customer transaction can be an opportunity to get a testimonial. Testimonials are beneficial marketing aids because they:

• Are a third party validation of your service or products,
• Usually contains the benefit the customer received (versus the features you’re selling), and
• Quotes draw the reader’s eye, so the probability of the information getting read is high.

2. Press releases. Use your website as a press release outlet. Current information on sales, industry changes, new models, etc. keeps your website fresh. Also, by including model numbers on hot sellers, you target keywords that are highly specific  to your product offering. These keywords generate high quality sales leads. An article manager included in your web design is a great place to ad newsworthy content.

3. Comments on your market. By utilizing Google or Yahoo as a news reader, you can use keywords to get an alert when news stories come out on areas that affect your business or your market. With your web design integrating a blog into the website’s structure, you have a powerful tool for getting information out in a timely manner. Doubly beneficial is the blog software automatically notifies the search engines that new content is available.

4. Originality. Create web content using your own words. Borrowing ideas is a time honored practice, however lifting web content wholesale is counter productive. Not only do you run counter to copyright infringement laws, but the search engines usually disregard duplicate content. In recent testing, it was found that Bing was more strict than Google at discarding duplicate content websites, (which is one reason Bing search results are often more relevant and helpful). Don’t undermine your professional web design and content with non-original works.

If your current business website does not have the infrastructure that makes is easy to add web content, contact IMCD Web Design. Our professional web designs are adaptable to many business ventures and created with your online marketing and SEO needs in mind.

Search engine optimization (SEO) in your professional web design makes the most marketing sense. A customer or prospect that finds you first is more apt to buy from you than if you find them. SEO is the art and science of getting your business website high in the search engine results so the people in your market that are looking for solutions you offer find you.

Professional web design gains your business potential clients by positioning, not by prospecting. Cold calls are prospecting, lots of energy expended for small returns. SEO in your web design is a small investment up-front for ongoing and growing warm sales lead generation returns. Call it eco-friendly online marketing – you expend less energy for better return on investment.

An IMCD Web Design business websites utilize professional graphic design, SEO and keyword-rich web content to position you as a professional and your business products as the most desirable. The goal of marketing is to generate sales leads. The ability to build a client base and a backlog of orders spells success and a level of security for your business. Time and choosing the marketing medium that is seen by the most people likely to be your customers are the variables in getting to the client critical mass point.

Businesses with well-place, well written and attractive business web designs shorten that time by using keywords to narrow the marketing search to people seeking you versus an add in the newspapers that is broadcast to everyone in the town, whether they will ever need your services or not. It is the change from spending energy on the wide sales funnel to spending energy creating the most powerful magnet.

Businesses using professional web design and online marketing techniques to position themselves successfully on the Internet have the problem of too many sales leads. Not because they work harder or are more motivated than their competition, but because they are better positioned online in front of specific potential customers – most people who are seeking your services or products search online first.

If your business needs a boost in sales lead generation, greater visitor traffic or higher conversion rates, contact IMCD Web Design to position your business for tapping the tremendous market of potential customers seeking your products or services.

Your real estate website may be missing its most essential ingredient if your web design content isn’t marketing your USP – your Unique Selling Point (or sometimes translated as your Unique Selling Proposition). The art of conveying your USP is to do it while using your keywords and the long-tail variant keywords so your optimized for both the search engines and marketing angles.

What does your real estate website need to have to convey your USP? First, utilize your Realtor website’s home page and bio pages to show why home buyers and sellers should listen to you and why it is beneficial for them to utilize your real estate services over anyone else. Five areas to look for unique aspects is your service, niche market(s), experience, price and products that help your clients in their property transaction.

In promoting your real estate agent services, use of guarantees creates an added level of credibility. Guarantees usually cover either your service, either measured in time or a specific deliverable, and price.

Never take for granted your real estate client knows all the work you do for them. A unique guarantee is preferable, but successful online marketing includes being the first real estate agent to make a guarantee of a service that other agents may also offer. An example is the guarantee of your client getting their home listed in your website’s Featured Listings, others may offer the service, however potential clients may be unaware of the commonality of the service and your website’s listed benefit becomes a marketing plus.

Uniqueness may also be defined as the niche market in which your real estate website and business specializes. Your unique knowledge of the niche market extends to both the properties and the particular clientele that search out those properties. Make sure your real estate web design reflects your market niche in the graphics and keywords most prominently used.

Finally, your real estate website must convey what your experience and online marketing can do for your client’s property buying or selling needs that no other area website can offer. Search engine optimization leading to high search engine ranking creates a much sought after USP – your website is in the best position to show property to your areas’ largest market – the online searcher.

Contact IMCD Web Design for a proven real estate website that combines search engine optimization, award-winning graphic design and a wealth of real estate web content to bring you a cost-effective foundation for your online marketing or your real estate USP.

Agents’ use of their real estate websites often overlook a key search engine optimization technique that also can be used to improve web visitor conversions to sales or home listing leads. Without touching your real estate web design, you can affect both your search engine optimization (SEO) and your ability to convert web visitors to warm sales leads.

First, review the best pages of your real estate website to act as landing pages. The homepage is always your best landing page. However, by choosing internal pages that have high “stickiness” factors – visitors will move from that page to other pages on your website – you create “deep links”. Search engines assume that any internal page of your real estate website that is drawing traffic directly is a page with valuable web content. Make sure the real estate website pages you choose have marketing content, valuable information and keywords.

Second use deep links in advertising and emails. Increase traffic to internal pages by adding a deep link in your email signature or a link to one of your website’s information page in the body of your email. Banner advertising, Adword campaigns and Adsense campaigns are also places to use deep links to your real estate website. Coupled with a traffic analytic code on your site, you can see which ads and which pages are the most successful at generating warm sales or listing leads.

Real estate agents using a professional real estate web design company, such as IMCD Web Design, will find search engine optimization (SEO) as part of their basic package. SEO is not an option for agents competing for the 80% or more of their areas home buyers and sellers who start their searches for homes or a local Realtor online. Your IMCD Web Design created real estate website has a high level of SEO built into the design, including the significant internal linking of homepages and landing pages.

An optimized real estate website is foundational to making the most of the external links that you place in your online marketing as well as in your traditional print advertising. For radio and TV marketing, it is best to stick to using only your domain name as the most easily memorized address.

Visit IMCD Web Design’s gallery of real estate websites and see how quickly you can improve your online property marketing with a web design that meets your SEO, marketing and online property listing needs.

Real estate web design companies handle dozens to hundreds of websites for Realtors each year. There are key areas real estate agents and brokers can address to accelerate their company’s real estate website projects and avoid certain web design bottlenecks. Two key web design bottlenecks are the text content and image content.

Much like your customers review your home listings online before contacting you, look at your web designer’s portfolio to get an idea of the pages you can use to put your marketing message online. Make a list and begin assembling the content you will use. Key area of focus for both the search engines and marketing is your home page. Next prioritize the pages that have your keywords in the titles, these need content to reinforce the keywords

Especially concentrate on the information that appears in the web design “above the fold” – the images and content in the first paragraph or so that your visitors see without scrolling down the page. Market research shows that website visitors that aren’t attracted by what they see above the fold, generally never scroll down to read the rest of the page.

Choose your graphics and begin building a high-resolution image library. IMCD Web Design offers a list of stock photo companies to our real estate website clients where Realtors can secure royalty-free professional images of property and landmarks in their town. Hiring a professional photographer to create a library of unique images for your company is another option. Your web designer can size the graphics and save them in the resolution necessary for maximum impact and speed of loading for your real estate website. It is always better to start with high-resolution images since they may be cropped prior to final sizing and placement.

The use of professional photographs in your web design is also a wise positioning move. Research by various real estate and web design companies found that home buyers searching online valued homes several thousand dollars higher if the photos of the house were taken by a professional photographer. Professional photos on your Realtor bio page also improve your credibility with online visitors.

IMCD Web Design works with our clients to accelerate their web design projects from conception to completion by providing a checklist of not just items, but sample pages to help stir creative juices on creating web content and choosing attractive images. If you are just beginning or are an experience website owner, you will find your real estate website creation process with our web designers a seamless process that rewards you with a powerful online marketing tool.