Is your website a custom built site or is it an out of the box website bought from an on-line source that has predesigned sites available?
If it is an out of the box site there are some things you need to be aware of. These sites normal do not score as high in the www.websitegrader.com tool and normally do not rank as high for your particular search phrases.
One reason for this that can be easily checked as that the out of box sites tend to place information about themselves in your H1 or H2 tags. This gives them the benifits in the search engines rather than you. You can check this at the web site grader page. If this is the case for you ask your website builder to change this. It might just be the one thing holding you back in the search rankings.
There are some other benifits of having a site custom built. The biggest thing is the very nature of custom. You can customize things easier on a custom built site. 1 thing you can easily do is create a customize search format from you MLS. Rather than the standard search page you can have the searches look like a page inside your website. Our site at www.tuprealty.com will have this feature up and running in a short while. We will also have information there that brings people back to the site even when they are not looking for a house.
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The less expensive out of the box sites are most definitely limited as far as how well they can be optimized and so yes you are correct. There is at least one provider of out of the box websites which can be customized more, who's out of the box sites can be made to rank with about the same effort as a totally custom site would need. Cost is about $800 to $1,000
I soon will be going with the option I discussed.
Many go with the Point2 Sits, but they are very hard to rank if you have competition. There is a Realtor in my area who spent $500 having her P2 site totally customized as far as the look, and has spent a great amount of effort trying to get it to rank in google, but it really is not working. This person has had their own domain for more than 2 years now, and been working it for that amount of time, but yet my site which is not a P2 site and the domain is only 5 months old has been more than out ranking the P2 site for the last 2 months now. The P2 site cannot even get on the first page of google for any of the search terms I know this Realtor really wants.