Website Design for Realtors;
Build Your Website for People and Spiders

Good Website Design For Realtors begins with your site visitors in mind. It's easy to focus on what your human visitors will see. You have to realize, though, that you're going to have another kind of visitor with a completely different agenda.

They will not be looking at your pretty logo or judging your background color. They'll be looking for the content and structure of your page. They're search engine spiders, and your job is to please them if you want your site to be successful. Here's how.

Make Your Structure Clear

Please resist the temptation to lay your page out in non-standard ways: you want it to be evident to the search engine where the navigation is, where the content is, and where the headings are. As a rule, put navigation first on your page. Always use the heading tags (h1, h2, etc.) for headings and sub-headings.

Avoid using generic span and div tags and make 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 the hope of a higher search ranking - the engines have pretty much wised up to this tactic - but make sure that your keywords appear consistently when they occur naturally. For example, I have stuck with "website" throughout for this web page to maximize the page rank for this particular keyword.

More Real Estate Agent Website Info

HTML and Javascript

It's worth noting that search engines read HTML, but they don't generally read Javascript. 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 different parts of the page with Javascript: this will tend to make your page appear more focused. However, 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 when ranking your site. However, they're still important in one way: the meta description tag is 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 result involves 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 hate that. This trick will get you ranked far lower than you would, so you should avoid it!

Include Alt Tags

Best Practices re Website Design for Realtors indicates that any time you use a graphic, you should 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 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

Good Website Design for Realtors requires Great Content. The key with modern search engines (and, at the same time, the thing you have the 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 valuable. Make it something they'll want to quote on their blogs.

Content is more King than ever, and the best way to design for search engines is to make your content super.  But because you'll need more content than you can ever possibly write, you might consider using Pre-written Real Estate Web Site Content.

Why?  Because agents are short on and desire to crank out hundreds of articles, they find pre-written articles a fast and affordable solution to their website content-building needs. Click here to find out more about it!     

Web Site Design for Realtors - More Resources

Agent Website  
Best Realtor Website   
Build a Realtor Website         
Real Estate Agent Web Design              
Real Estate Agent Website  
Real Estate Search Engine Optimization       
Real Estate Website  
Sample Report: Effective Ways To Increase The Value of Your Home 
Effective Web Design For Real Estate Agents   

Home Page > Website Design For Realtors