Website Design for Realtors; Designing for Search Engines
Website Design for Realtors. When you design a website, it's easy to focus on what your visitors are going to see.
What you have to realize, though, is that you're going to have another kind of visitor with a completely different agenda.
They're not going to be looking at your pretty logo, or judging your background color. What they'll be looking for is the content and structure of your page.
They're the search engine spiders, and they are in control of probably the largest section of your traffic. And your job is to please these spiders if you want your site to be successful -to generate lots of visitors. Here's how.
Make Your Structure Clear
Resist the temptation to lay your page out in non-standard ways: you want it to be very clear to the search engine where the navigation is, where the content is, and where the headings are. As a rule, put navigation first in your page. Always use the heading tags (h1, h2, etc.) for headings and sub-headings.
Avoid using generic span and div tags and only making things clear to the user through CSS font sizes: instead, use every 'semantic' HTML tag that applies to your content. If you're quoting someone, use the block quote tag; if you're posting program code, use the code tag. Search engines love this.
Keep Keywords Consistent
It's not usually worth deliberately saturating your content with keywords in hope of a higher search ranking - the engines have pretty much wised up to this tactic - but do make sure that your keywords appear consistently when they occur naturally. For example, for this web page I have stuck with "website" throughout to maximize the page rank for this particular keyword.
HTML and Javascript
It's worth noting that search engines read HTML, but they don't, in general, read Javascript. That means that using Javascript to insert text into your page is a bad idea if you want search engines to see the text. On the other hand, you might want to have just the text in HTML and insert all the other parts of the page with Javascript: this will tend to make your page appear more focused, although you should be careful not to insert navigation links this way if you want the search engines to follow them.
Use Meta Tags
Yes, meta tags are out of fashion, and search engines pay no attention to them any more when it comes to ranking your site, but they're still important in one way: the meta description tag is still often used to decide what text search engines' users see when they find your site in their results!
This can be just as important as the ranking itself - write something here that will look useful to the searcher, and you're more likely to get them to click-through. Don't forget that while search engines are just machines and algorithms, the end result of it all does involve a human decision: to click, or not to click?
Avoid Splash Pages
You might think it's a great idea to have a 'splash' page displaying a full-page version of your logo (or an ad) to every user who arrives at your site, but search engines really hate that. Using this trick will get you ranked far lower than you would usually be, so you should avoid it - plus, it's annoying to visitors anyway.
Include Alt Tags
Any time you use a graphic, include alt text for it - especially if there is text in the graphic. Remember that, as far as search engines are concerned, all your graphics might as well just be big black boxes. Test by removing all your graphics and seeing if your content remains relatively intact. If it doesn't, then you'll be turning search engines away.
Finally, Write Great Content
The key with modern search engines (and, at the same time, the thing you have least control over) is how many people decide to link to your page from their page. How can you make more people link to you? Make your content useful. Make it something they'll want to quote on their blogs.
Content is more King than it's ever been, and the best way to design for search engines is to make your content really super. But because you'll need more content you can ever possibly write yourself you might consider using pre-written Real Estate Web Site Content.
Why? Because agents short on time and/or desire to crank out hundreds of articles find pre-written articles a fast and affordable solution to their web site content building needs. Click here to find out more about it!
More Web Site Design Resources
Best Realtor Web Site
Build a Realtor Web Site
Real Estate Agent Web Design
Real Estate Agent Web Site
Real Estate Search Engine Optimization
Sample Real Estate Web Site Content Report
Real Estate Internet Marketing
Internet Marketing for Real Estate
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