By Barry Hurd
Part 1 of 10
RISMEDIA, June 4, 2007-As we introduce our 10-part series on improving your site’s search engine placement, here is a list of 10 reasons why your Web site may not rank. We will review the basics of why most real estate sites fail to reach audiences online and do not rank in the search engines, and how to avoid throwing valuable marketing dollars into online solutions that fail to produce a return on investment. Over the next 10 installments, we will detail each of these points and address solutions for your business dilemma.
The following are common mistakes real estate Web sites don’t rank. You:
• Can describe your website, but apparently your developer fails to.
• Have a site based on a template, the same one 10,000 real estate professionals bought.
• Have an intro page, and haven’t realized how badly it hurts you online.
• Love watching flash, but the robots won’t wait for your flash to load.
• Have nothing original to say and the search engines aren’t looking for the mediocre.
• Rely on a family friend to update it, and the last time they answered the phone was six months ago.
• Have duplicate content found on a dozen other sites.
• Realize you shouldn’t do brain surgery on yourself, but for some reason you waste a lot of your budget on failed online efforts by trying to do it yourself.
• Rely on pay per click from major search engines.
• Don’t know how to convert online visitors into leads, and leads into customers.
The above reasons are fundamental problems that can completely derail your efforts to produce quality business revenue. By understanding the pitfalls of online marketing, your budget will work with increasing efficiency and generate on-going results. Through these articles, we will cover each point and help analyze where your online efforts went wrong.
Barry Hurd is president of Social Media Systems, an online marketing and advertising consultant group working with search engine marketing and leveraging social media communities.
For more information, visit www.socialmediasystems.com.
