5 Questions To Ask About Your Real Estate Web Site

I attended codemash in Sandusky Ohio a couple of weeks ago, and it was quite good. Hats off to my friend Darrell Hawley for doing a great job with the registrations. I particularly liked "The World is Dynamic"keynote presentation by Bruce Eckel. He had lot's of photo's from Burning Man and made an analogy between the art projects that folks undertook there and software projects.

Anyway, codemash got me thinking about what technology information I could relay to interested real estate people. While most of what was presented there was highly technical, I decided that there were still plenty of simple tips that I could be sharing with real estate professionals who might not be internet savy. So without further delay, here are 5 things to ask yourself about your real estate web site.


1. Are your property listings search engine exposed?
That might sound like you need to take your site's clothes off, but what I'm really talking about is, if a search engine spider such as google finds your home page and reads it, can it find the links to take it to all your individual property listing pages. The litmus test to find out is, if you surf your site, can you reach your individual listing pages from the main page just by clicking your mouse, and without typing anything, then your well exposed. If you have to type in criteria and press a submission button, thats a form submission, and search engines will have a tough time finding those listings.


2. Do your listings include a title or short description, and are your page titles optimized for them?
Having a short title thats displayed in a slightly larger font than the main description can really allow the search engines to better determine what your page - and your listing - is all about. It also allows you a spot to emphasize geography or other special keywords that may not be supported by standard fields, such as "Home Near Golf Course For Sale In Somerset Township". Ideally, if this short title is what shows up in the title bar for the page, then it will be the main header on search page results. *Technical Note: Whatever text is between the <title> and </title> tags when the page is displayed constitutes the page title, and its also displayed in the bar at the very top of the browser window.


3. Does your real estate site provide or allow for original content?
Just as cash is king in the real world, content is king in cyberspace. If you purchased a real estate website from someone, and the only content thats provided is listings from an MLS feed, then you can bet that those listings are also being displayed to many other sites. You need something to differentiate your content. If you can easily add articles and other local commentary or information, then you should take the time to do so, and update or add to it periodically. Also, there are so many good blog softwares on the internet now - I use blogger.com - so writing on a blog site and then publishing it back to your real estate site is another possibility . Ask your real estate site provider if they support rss or atom feeds from other sites.


4. Does your site have any inbound links?
Does your website provider network your site so that other sites have links to it? Are those links good natural links, meaning does the text thats hyperlinked say "yet another real estate website" or does it say "best homes for sale in Jackson County"? Hopefully you get the idea. If you post listings on other free classified sites like backpage and craigslist, you can create your own natural links back to your own site. I'm planning a more detailed article shortly with more detailed descriptions of real estate posting sites. (Note: I used to be able to post natural links on craigslist, but I had an odd note from them recently and haven't had time to check it out, so if anyone finds out otherwise, let me know).


5. Is your email address sufficiently hidden?
Just as it would presumably be desirable to get as much exposure for your listings as possible - items 1,2 and 4 - your email address is another matter. You really don't want to have your email address exposed in plain text on the internet, and if it is, you'll know what I'm talking about already. If your email address can be read off of a page, then sooner or later the spammers will get ahold of it, and you'll be bombarded with junk mail, or spam mail. One way to get around it if you want to advertise your email is to use an image of the address. type it up in microsoft paint, crop it, and save it as a jpg or gif file. Thats not 100 persent safe, since wandering eyes can still read it and abuse it, but it cuts down on junk mail alot. Another solution that most folks are familiar with is to provide a text box for people to submit a message to you. I'm not personally fond of that method - it seems so impersonal and one way - but it does allow people to email you without subjecting your address to spammers.

I hope these tips help to improve your real estate website and sell some property for you.