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Web Design in a Search Driven World

In the world of web sites we often ask ourselves the question ‘Who’s looking at our site?’, and based on that answer we can design the site. This fundamental question needs to be changed to ‘Who or What is looking at our site?’. Why do I say What? What - are robots, and on some web sites I have seen more robots visiting than actual people.

My company sells web sites to real estate professionals, and during the design process it is easy to fall into the trap of designing the site according to what the broker wants. After all the broker is our customer, and he or she needs to like how the site looks and navigates according to their taste. These types of designs look good to brokers, agents and the home owners, but these designs tend to be laden with ‘eye-candy’ or other fancy looking things that do not provide much functionality. Most of the people coming to your site are people searching for listings, and they will skip right past a lot of flashy eye candy.

So in order to make a great real estate web site we need to balance between ‘eye-candy’ and listing search functionality right? Hold your horses, we are forgetting the robots, bots, or spiders depending on what your favorite term is for these non-breathing web crawling, page slurping creatures. The spiders are looking at your site with a keener eye than any of your home owners or potential customers have. They can see all the things you can’t, and are indexing and cataloging your site based on what they see. So the new web design and layout needs to be based on three primary considerations. The design should be first and foremost ’spider friendly’, second it needs to serve the needs of home buyers, and third is needs to look good. Now the real trick is satisfy the first two simultaneously. You can do this because the purpose of the search engine is to find the sites that best suit the needs of the person doing the searching. If you have a real estate web site, that means home buyers, and theoretically speaking if the site satisfies the home buyers, the spiders should love your site and rank your site accordingly.

Now is a great time to look at your home page. Does it look nice? Is it easy for buyers to find listings quickly? Is it spider friendly? You need to be able to answer ‘yes’ to all three of these questions. The next time you look at your home page I want you to think about WHAT is looking at your site before you think about who.

For more tips and information about real estate web site optimization please visit http://www.realestatepointe.com/trafficpointe.html

Jim Komara

Tags: real estate web site design and search engine optimization

This entry was posted on Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 8:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.