Top 8 Mistakes that Property Web Sites Make

A friend recently asked me to review her property management site to see if I could help her in the search engine rankings. I said sure, and spent a half hour studying her site. It didn’t take long to find many mistakes in both search engine optimization (SEO) and usability. I gave her my thoughts, which she implemented. After a month or so, she saw a marked increase in traffic from the search engines.

It occurred to me that maybe her mistakes were pretty common in the industry (property managers and real estate agent web sites). So I looked at several dozen property sites and took notes on what I saw in common to them all.

#1 - File Size Too Large For Small Property Photos (thumbnails)

2K Thumbnail

I couldn’t believe how many sites made this mistake. It’s common for property sites to list all properties on one page. This page usually has small images for each property with a short description and a link that sends you to a detail page. The common mistake is for the web site owner to just resize the original photo down to a thumbnail size while leaving the large file size intact. What happens is you end up with one page that takes forever to load when it doesn’t need to. This has negative effects for both the end user and the search engine spiders. The search engine spiders will actually leave if the pages is take too long to load, and so will your visitors.

The best way to fix this mistake is to resize the original photo first, then compress it. If you compress the thumbnail around 30%, you will be left with an image that looks like the original but is much smaller (2 to 5K bytes). It will then, in turn, load really fast for your visitors and the spiders.

#2 - Title Tags for All Pages on the Site Are the Same

Missing Title tag - big mistake

I wasn’t surprised with this common mistake. Forgetting to add a title tag that describes your page is an easy one to forget (I do it myself sometimes).

What you don’t want to do is have the same title tag (this goes for other meta tags, such as the description and keywords tag) on every page of your site. The first reason is that the title tag is your most valuable text “real estate” on the page, and you want to get the most of the 68 characters that the search engines use. So if one of your pages is about the rental market in San Jose California, don’t name your page “Joe’s Property Management” or worse “untitled”. Instead name it something like “San Jose Rental Market Conditions”. Just by placing some good keywords in your title, you will have a major impact on your rankings.

#3 - “Call To Action” Is Missing or Is Hard to Find

When I review property web sites, one of the first things I ask the site owner is “what is the purpose of your web site” and “what do you want to accomplish with it?” Everyone has an answer like, “I want to generate leads to sell more houses” or “I want people to contact me about using our property management company”. After reviewing their site, I usually ask them, “Well, if your primary purpose is to get people to contact you, then why is your phone number not on the home page?”, or “Why is your phone number buried at the bottom of the page?”

If you want them to call you, have your phone number at the top of the home page. Also, place it in the title tag and description tag of your home page. That way when they search for you in the search engine results your phone number will be right there for them to use. They might not even have to actually go to your site.

#4 - Explosion of Reciprocal Link Icons at the Bottom of Your Home Page

Spammy links at the bottom of the page

You’ve all seen it — the huge cluttered explosion of icons at the bottom of the home page. Several years ago these reciprocal links actually helped your rankings in the major search engines. Now these links can actually hurt you. They hurt you for two reasons; (a) the search engines are de-valuing these incestuous link exchanges and (b) it makes your site look spammy to your visitors and they will run away.

I went to a search engine conference a couple months ago (Aug. 06) where I attended a session on link building. The panel consisted of all the head engineers from Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask. During the Q and A at the end of the session a real estate site owner asked about reciprocal links within the real estate community. The answer from most of them (including Google) was that the search engines are now detecting unnatural linking rings within the real estate community and providing a lower weight to those links. To the search engines, these rings are not natural ways for a site to accrue links over time. It can actually hurt your rankings if you are reciprocal linking to a bad neighborhood.

The internet has now been around for awhile, and visitors are getting more sophisticated. Today, people can smell a spammy site pretty fast and if your site looks spammy the back button will be the most used button on your site. Why place these links on your site? They don’t add any value to your site anymore.

#5 - Sites That Use Frames

Code view of a framed site

Framed real estate sites are “so 1999″. If you have a real estate site that uses frames, you might want to consider doing a major site redesign. Many years ago framed sites were “all the rage” because it was an easy way to maintain your site. All you had to do was change the left navigation frame if you need to add a link to all your pages. Some of my first sites were done in frames. I quickly changed formats after I saw the problems they cause.

There are two reason using frames is a mistake (a) search engines have problems with them, and (b) if you do it completely wrong, your visitors can’t email an interior page of your site (or bookmark it) to someone else because the URL never changes as they surf the site.

Search engines don’t do a good job of crawling and indexing framed sites. Even Google discourages frame site use. Even if Google could (for instance) get to your main content frame and it is placed in the search results - the visitor will be directed to to just that frame. As a result, they will lose the navigation bar and your visitor will be stuck there with no way to navigate your site. Frames also make it very hard to print pages, which could frustrate your home buyers and renters.

I don’t understand why companies like Advanced Access are still offering framed sites for sale. In some of the real estate forums that I read, many realtors have been with Advanced Access for years and really like their service. However, I have also read that many complain that their interior pages don’t rank well because of frames.

#6 - Hidden Text

This one surprised me.

Two of the web sites I reviewed actually had hidden text on them. Both sites placed hidden text at the bottom of the page “chock full” of spammy keywords. The hidden text was white in color on a white background making them invisible to the visitor but visible to the search engine spiders.

What also surprised me is how well they ranked on Google (in the top 10). From what I understand, Google can detect this and penalize your site. Placing hidden text on your site is a mistake because your competitors can easily fill out a spam report to Google and get your site thrown out of the index. Don’t do this unless you are willing to torch your site to the ground (that you may have worked years on).

#7 - Missing Content

One thing I noticed on some of the Advanced Access web sites was that they outsourced the information about their community to some third party. People would rather see that community information come from you and not some other source that probably doesn’t live in your community. If you have been working your market for years and live there too, you should be the one writing about it. Site visitors that you want to become customers need to form relationships with you. You have a great opportunity to start that relationship by offering great content on your community in your own words.

For instance, go around town taking pictures and do write ups on the “Top 10 Places to Eat” in your town and put your spin on it so your reader can get to know you. Why not interview your kid’s teachers and place that interview on your site showing the quality of your schools? Do you have a favorite place to play golf? Take your camera next time and do a write-up on why you love the course? There is no better knowledge than that from a trusted first-hand source.

#8 - Bloated Code

Some of the sites I reviewed used were created on Microsoft Publisher. Publisher creates a ton of unnecessary code, so much so that it can actually slow the page load time. Some of the older versions of Publisher are even worse. Publisher can do things like turning text into a graphic, which then makes it impossible for the search engines to index that text.

If you really want to rank well in the search engines you should throw out your copy of Publisher, buy something like Dreamweaver and actually learn a little bit of HTML code. Chances are, if you look at who is ranking the best in your rental or real estate market for your “money terms” you will see that they are not using Publisher and have some understanding of HTML.

• If you’ve got mistakes of your own that you learned from, please do share.

[tags]seo, usability, property management, real estate, web design, graphic design[/tags]