When it comes to technology, things are changing daily and keeping up can be difficult. We have planned a series of posts to help you sift through the overabundance of technology available and find the right online marketing tools for you and your business. We have designed each post to present a tip on different online marketing challenges and provide some insight on how to apply appropriate technology to address these challenges.
First up in our online marketing tips for real estate: Search Engine Visibility
Do you know if the content on your website is visible to the search engines? And what does that even mean? When you sit down at a computer and look something up on the Internet you are entering a search term into a search engine to get those pages of results. The search engines use “spiders” or “robots” that are constantly searching the internet for content, which is how they determine where sites rank in those organic results. Poor website architecture can prevent the search engines from seeing the content on your website, which means your website would not be properly indexed and would not appear in the search results. There are many well-known real estate websites that essentially hide much of the agent’s content from the search engines. This happens because they are built on older technology that enabled them to build pages quickly, but in the process it obscured the page content. This pretty much defeats the purpose of having website content in the first place.
Put your site to the test using a free tool available at www.SEO-Browser.com. This website will allow you to see any webpage from the perspective of the search engines. All of the images will be turned off and it will show the text and the links that are visible to the search engines.
There are a couple of key things you want to see, your website’s navigation, and all of the text on the page. Each component of the navigation (menu choices and links) such as home, listings, etc. should be displayed in blue, which indicates a link. Some website menu selections are implemented in graphics and will not appear a severe limitation. When a search engine lands on your home page, the only way it will go deeper into your site is if it can find links that take it to each of the pages. One well known website vendor charges several hundred dollars per month but their menu navigation links are not visible, so a search engine can’t explore the pages the menu points to!
Next, you should see all of the text on this page. Don’t just check the homepage either. It is especially important to check the featured properties page to ensure that the description, the remarks and the address (if allowed) are showing. If you can’t see it in SEO-Browser, the search engines can’t either! Listing information is valuable content for search engine optimization.
From our Real Pro Silver to our Real Pro Gold and Real Pro Platinum products, our systems are built on the most search engine friendly, Web 2.0 architecture. Would you like to see one of our real estate websites in action? Try viewing http://www.RobLevy.com in SEO-Brower!
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