Is Your Website Search Friendly?
Mike Parker, in this article for Broker Agent News, makes a very good point about agent websites:
Maybe you have just shrugged it off; maybe you’ve given up, maybe you keep trying. One thing is certain: if you are on a platform that is not search engine friendly, you have about as much chance of turning your personal Internet situation around as I have of winning the Powerball lottery.
Many agents ask me what is wrong with template sites and re-using a bunch of content provided by a real estate website provider, and the answer is pretty simple.
Relevance.
The search engines will downgrade your site’s relevance in a search for a variety of reasons:
- Identical content to another website
- Buried within a site (for example, an agent’s sub-page on a broker’s site)
- Non-standard link formats
- Too many repeated keywords that do not relate to content on the page
- Poor HTML organization – search engines can’t pick out the most significant content on the page
Now, it may seem hard to understand how a search engine works behind the scenes, but the mechanics don’t really matter. Just avoid the above, and your website pages will show up earlier in search results. A good website ranking is very difficult to achieve immediately… it takes time, it takes other websites providing relevant links to your site, and it takes unique content.
The problem with getting a low relevance rating is that it affects all your pages. So if you have a page that really is unique, and describes your fantastic listing services and testimonials and awards, and someone just searches by your name… a low relevance makes that page hard to find, while a higher relevance will bring that particular page closer to the top.
The sites I produce have been and will continue to be optimized for search, with search engine friendly URLs, page structure that tells the search indexer what content is most relevant, etc. Whoever you choose for a site, check on their search engine friendliness.
