Creating a consumer and seo friencly website for realtors.

In todays world of internet saavy consumers, it is extremely important to make yourself accessable vie the world wide web. Throughout the past decade, the internet has evolved to a great extend. You can no longer write a few pages of html and post and expect to have consumers find you online. I started out in the online world in the mid 90's when it was still very new to most people. During this time period, it was extremely easy to write a web page and submit it to Yahoo and obtain great results. Now days with millions more competitors online, how can you get noticed?

I have had many successful online retail businesses in the past and now that I now enjoying a career in real estate, I want to parlay my past experiences in the e-commerce world into the real estate world. There is lots of competition in this field, especially here in Arizona where the real estate market was extremely hot in 2005 when I became a realtor.

This blog will speak of my experiences and lessons learned in trying to create a real estate website that I hope to generate a substantial amount of traffic and lead generation.

One of the most important aspects of the website must be to appeal to the consumer and be good at delivering on its intended purpose. I want the perspective buyer to find the website easy to naviage, allowing for a pleasant experience that one might share with friends and family. I also would like it to be very search engine friendly allowing for consumers to easily find my website through one of the major search engines without having to pay enormous pay per click fees. The idea is to generate perspective client leads originating from a very pleasant online experience to the consumer.

I started my first real estate website as a stricly HTML based website that provided a framed window to a simple text based IDX search feed of the local MLS. During the first couple years that this version was online, it did very little to generate leads. I did have a few, but extremely rare. In mid 2008, I decided to completely revamp the website and devoted significant time and resources into development of my online vision. I began my quest at a technology fair sponsored by my local MLS. Trying to keep the required investment low, I signed up for an IDX feed by FlexMLS, the same company that our local MLS uses for our Realtor MLS feed. I figured that I could integrate our Realtor MLS feed and the website IDX feed together to make for a truly custom IDX and website mix.

After spending hundreds of dollars on a yearly IDX subscription with FlexMLS, I realized that their IDX solution was just not a very consumer friendly experience. A couple weeks later, I decided to invest money in what I originally thought and has now proved to be a much more consumer friendly experience................... Diverse Solutions dsSearch IDX feed.

I spent many, many months and hundreds of hours developing the layout of my new website to incorporate the Diverse Solutions feed. I did not want just a plain website with a framed in IDX feed that felt like it was an external link. I wanted a website that seemlessly incorporated the IDX feed into a site that could become a top destination for Phoenix area home buyers searching for their new home.

You can see my website at:

http://PlatoTeam.com

http://ValleyBankOwnedHomes.PlatoTeam.com

or http://RayPlato.com

In a later post, I will go into more detail about this integration and then the complete design change I encountered when I realized that I had to make drastic changes in order to better suit google and the other search engines for SEO purposes. The websites are still a work in progress, but I hope to be able to keep you up to date as they evolve into a true web destination for home buyers and sellers. There are so many other things to discuss as well....... like the importance of social networking, links and more!