10 Dont’s On Your Real Estate Agent Website
Posted by acehain on Aug 27, 2007
Recently the Geekestateblog posted about forty tips for your real estate website . I would make some additions or changes …but it’s excellent. I have tried to add things but I am having difficulty, it is really thorough and well thought out. Perhaps I can suggest 10 things not to do to your Real Estate Agent Website.
1. Don’t expect your site to generate traffic without any marketing. Having a website is like having a store. It’s one way for people to find you and see what products you are selling and is a way for them to see who you are as a service provider firsthand. You can have the most excellent and amazing store in the world but if you don’t have anyone coming in — guess what, you’re not going to sell anything — not even yourself. A website is there to provide the information and to represent your business and you’ve got to complete the circle by marketing it and drawing people to it.
2. Don’t waste your money on an elaborate flash intro, or any intro. Flash can take a long time to load depending on your internet connection and can severely damper the experience of someone browsing your site. Don’t get me wrong, having nice big photos fade in and out and seeing pictures move around is great — but not if I have to wait for it. Also remember that if you’ve got a flash intro that’s more than 5 seconds long, NOBODY is going to stick around and watch the entire thing… well maybe they will — once. After that, they’re going to want to jump straight into the goods — your listings, your MLS and your services. If you do decide to have an intro, keep it short, clean and small enough that you leave room enough for other information to be seen on your site. One tip is to also make sure that the navigation links on your homepage is visible even if your screen is set to 600 x 800 resolution. You’re going to want people to be able to access the other pages of the site straight away.
3. Don’t copy content form another webiste, unless it’s aquote or a link and you give them credit. First of all it’s illegal. It makes you look like a fool if you don’t give credit to where it’s due. Second, search engines can find this stuff, very easily. If they spot that you’ve copied from another site — the punishment’s pretty severe. Sort of like being caned, in a search engine kind of way.
4. Don’t use frames. A frame is essentially another website that is ‘framed’ within yours. One way to know whether a webpage has framed content or not is the presence and location of a scrollbar. If the only scrollbar is at the very edge of your browser window and, as you scroll down the top part of the web page is left at the top of the browser window — then your page is not framed. If you find more than one scrollbar in the window, then you might have a framed page. There are a couple of ways to frame in a website. You can add the frame below the banner area of the page such that, as you scroll down, the banner remains visible at the top of the window even if you’re at the bottom of the page. You can also frame in the left navigation of the website (if applicable) such that, as you scroll down the page, the left navigation remains constant and unmoving. The problem with framing is that spiders and bots do not crawl the data within the frame.
5. Don’t embed music. First off, it bogs down the load time of the page as your browser first has to load all the elements of the page, the photos, borders, backgrounds, text, etc — as well as the music. If you’ve got a big music file in there, you may have issues with page load times. Also, musical tastes vary and what works for one type of client may serve to insult or bore another. One of the problems that I had noticed with a lot of my previous clients is that they often chose music that was slow and somewhat dramatic. As a consumer browsing their website, that annoyed me. Also, when you embed music to a certain page on the site, remember that it reloads every time you visit and re-visit that page. What that means is that at some point, it will get annoying. If you must insist on having music, make sure that there are controls to stop or decrease the volume of the music.
6. Don’t spend all of you budget on a site and leave nothing for marketing. I cannot begin to stress how much this happens — agents will spend every last penny of their marketing budget in order to have a top-of-the-line website… which nobody will find. If you are going to build a website, remember that your web provider should ALWAYS allow you to scale up or upgrade it down the road. This will enable you to build a modest website with the key features you need it to have, and still have enough of a budget left for people to find it and for it to generate more business for you. Once more business has come in, then you can start adding-on more bells and whistles. A website doesn’t sell people — it’s a properly marketed website that does.
7. Don’t, not have a blog??!!?. The key to getting ranked on search engines organically is by having unique and relevant content. Having a blog gives you the ability to add content to your site at any time. Just remember to use it. I have seen a lot of my former clients purchase blogs and expect it to magically increase their rankings automatically — but no dice. A blog is a tool to post relevant and unique info on your site… that means, YOU (or your assistant) has to do the work and write something unique and relevant.
8. Don’t have all of your title tags the same. Title tags are one of the most effective ways to optimize your website for search engines. They appear at the very top of your browser and tell you something about the webpage you’re viewing. The tag should describe your page and be in line with the content, description and theme for each page.
9. Don’t ignore your Communities Section. Most real estate websites have a section that allows you to post pages of information to talk about the areas they service. It’s a great place to provide a personal insight on the city as well as to show people that you are familiar with your neighborhood. While this involves a lot of work, it can be really fun and need not be done all in one go. I often recommend my clients to post at least one new page a week. They can break down the information on a city or neighborhood into the following: Demographics, School Information, Things to do in the area, Things for your kids to do in the area, Places to see, The local market — property values in the market (for investors), and Local Dining. I have always recommended to my clients that they should build their website such that a person who has just bought a house should want to come back to the site and be able to take more information from it as well as a person living in the are and not even looking to buy or sell a house. Build a site that is rich in content that people will use as a local resource. It will do wonders.
10. Don’t focus too much on the looks as opposed to the content. Function over fashion folks — a great looking site will definitely turn heads but once you get inside it, if it doesn’t have anything relevant then it’s just another pretty face. The key is to build a modestly-designed site, great looking enough to draw people in but more importantly, with enough features and content to continuously draw the attention of people and search engines. Have a blog, have a local events page, have a ton of community pages, have a lot of great information on your site about the market, the area and any relevant investment news.