February 2007


There are a few basic dillemas that every webmaster eventually comes to in the design and implementation of good SEO (search engine optimization). The biggest is likely:

1. Should I sacrifice rankings for content or (gulp) content for rankings?

The answer to this question is probably the single biggest issue with designing for the internet. On one hand, you need a real estate website that a user is going to be able to easily navigate, find what they’re looking for and, ultimately, contact you. Remember, a website’s main function for you, the agent, is a lead generator. If users are so confused with your entry page that they don’t click through, you won’t get any leads. We’re talking about conversion here - how well your website converts visitors into leads. Often, when we optimize for SEO, we ignore content, but that can really hurt in the conversion department if the public sees your site as convoluted or childish.

However, if you have the best website in the world and noone knows it’s there, how will you even be able to convert visitors to leads because no one is visiting? You need to play the SEO game at some level but that often means sacrificing content. But is there a happy medium? I believe there is to a certain extent.

The key is to narrow your scope. If you’re talking about Aurora Real Estate, your website should mostly be about Aurora Real Estate - adding other communities to the picture means you have to *say* something about those communities, thus dilluting your scope. Why is a narrow scope so important? Well, in the SEO world, keywords are of ultimate importance. It’s about how often you mention a few key words and how they are displayed. The key to optimizing naturally is to dedicate your entire website to a particular word or two. That way, your text should naturally revolve around those particular subjects. And, since you aren’t dilluting the theme with extra text not related to those keywords, it should be easy to stick to the main point and not drift.

Just a few weeks ago I happened to check my Aurora IL real estate website out in MSN and lo and behold, I found that the search engine was actually pulling in part of my IFRAMES not compatible text to build the description. When using IFRAMEs it’s common practice to include a blurb of text for browsers that may not be able to property display IFRAMES. In many cases, webmasters place something like, “If you’re seeing this your browser is not compatible with IFRAMES”. For browsers that can display IFRAMES correctly, that text is never seen, however, to a search engine, that text forms a visible part of your page.

If you are using IFRAMES, make sure you check your alt text. If it’s close to the top of the page, search engines might actually be reading that text as part of your page description. Also, if you use IFRAMES in different pages throughout your site, as I do for my seperate regional real estate sites like Geneva real estate or Batavia real estate make sure to vary the alt text from page to page to avoid problems with possible duplicate content.