I was helping a fellow AR agent today and was going to run his website through my ranking software to see how he ranked and what he needed to do to get up in the top 5 positions on Google. I couldn't crawl his site. It turned out his site has never been VALIDATED. Please note if your website can not be validated, the search engines can not crawl it either. Run your site through a validator and send the errors to your webdesigner to fix. A lot of sites will still validate if there are only a few problems. There are too many web design companies designing these Real Estate website templates and not caring about our ability to control our SEO. If they won't work with you find another. My Point2 site is FREE and I have 100% control of everything on it and no webmaster to answer to. If you want a copy let me know and Ill email you one.
Vicki, thanks for this very valuable piece of information. I'm in the process of designing my very first website and can use any and all information with value.
Lisa.it is all explained here. When things get hard to understand, best find someone that can help. I know at times I can spend hours trying to figure out an issue and it would have been a lot better to hire someonthat could have gotten it done in no time.
Kim I'd be curious to see what he says! I had a friend send me a copy of their IT guys email and they said "well we never promised any SEO work, that costs extra and with the right promoting you don't need your site validated. That's what Google Adwords is for. We can set that up for you" Wow! We all are working so hard on AR to help our rankings and if the search engines can't crawl our sites..this is all for naught!
The document located at <http://www.needanotary.net/> was checked and found to be valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional. This means that the resource in question identified itself as "XHTML 1.0 Transitional" and that we successfully performed a formal validation using an SGML or XML Parser (depending on the markup language used).
While I always recommend that a website be W3C valid that does not mean it cannot be indexed by Google. The best way to determine this is through Google Webmaster Tools. The tools will determine if you are being indexed and when was the last time Googlebot visited your site. The tool also provides other information like broken links, site map info, stats, and much more.
Illinois Realtor and Broker Owner of Exit Platinum Realty. Number One recruiter and Number One in Sales Volume for the State of Illinois in 2006. Certified Foreclosure and Shortsale expert for Illinois foreclosures. www.vickisdreamhomes.com
Vicki Watzlawick
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Vicki, that tool found 43 errors on my website. Lots of work to do. Thanks for sharing that.