Day Three: Website On Page Promotion

If you've been following along over the last two days you've read about promoting properties both through the MLS and the property search tools that are available with most template provider based websites and even custom websites.

Today I want to review a screenshot of a real estate website that I think promotes properties fairly well through out the actual pages of the website AND at the same time provides visitors to search the MLS or search properties via their own property search tools.

Main Property:  This home is the very first thing someone visually notices when they visit this website.  Nothing else stands out the most unless the visitor scrolls down the page in which case the next visual stand out are the additional three properties at the bottom.

This property could be the most expensive in your list of properties or it could be one that has been on the market for longer than you'd like.  It could also simply be that you randomly rotate all of your properties on a monthly basis so that all properties get equal attention.

Mini Featured:  The three properties at the bottom of the home page are also visually appealing and stand out the most on the website.  In fact if you've noticed, nothing else is standing out visually and this is done on purpose.

The properties on the home page include the following:

• Best Possible Exterior Image
• Image Alt Text Using Property Addresses
• Unique Descriptions
• Property Address Displayed
• Link to More Info

Best Possible Exterior Image - Put your best foot forward when trying to attract potential buyers.  Using a picture of the bathroom with a normal tub and tiled windows isn't exactly that attractive to someone making one of the biggest decisions they will ever make in their lives.

Image Alt Text - For search engine optimization purposes and to help those that are visually challenged please use image alt text.  I tend to use the full property address (address, city, state, zip) since that is exactly what the image reflects.

Unique Description - No matter where you promote a single property, be it in five or ten different places, take the time to write unique content for the property.  Obviously you cant change how many bedrooms but you can change the way you write out the details.

Unique content helps improve your chances of ranking within search engines.  More importantly a visitor might stumble across one description and later find the same property with much more information and that could repeat two or more times.

Property Address Displayed - Buyers are educated and have an arsenal of tools at their disposal.  They may want the address to check out location on Google Maps or maybe even do a drive by if they are local.  Additionally, there is a GOOD chance you could end up ranking in search engines for all or part of the property address.  While less traffic is likely to come of this long tail keyword term, I'd bet that anyone purposefully doing a Google search for the property address is going to be a much more qualified and interested buyer.

Link to More Info - So you've added a property photo & description but are you really going to leave your interested visitors hanging like that?  At the very least provide a link to the property details within the MLS or within whatever property search tools your website has built in.

Avoid sending them to a massive form where they then have to enter in criteria and search for the property.  Why would anyone want to spend time re-finding a property that you are promoting on the webpage itself.

Ideally what you'll want to do is create a custom page dedicated to the property itself with photos and yet another more detailed description.  This will improve ranking chances for the property address and also flesh out your website so that more pages are crawled by Google and counted towards your over all ranking goals.

Notice on the image that I also highlighted where this website is promoting an MLS search and a link to their property search tool that they use on their website?  Do you also notice that 11 out of the 13 possible links on the image are property related? This is purposefully done in order to navigate potential buyers straight to properties because in the end the properties are what visitors are going to want information on first.

Here are a few additional screenshots of internal pages of this website for your enjoyment.

Tomorrow: 3rd Party Property Vendors

Sincerely,

John F. Jones III

Find me on: Twitter | LinkedIn | Trulia | Active Rain

My Previous Post In This Series: Day Two - Online Property Marketing