When it comes to marketing your real estate web site there are several things you should ask yourself before you decide that you will do it yourself.

Firstly, Do you know how to do it ? All too often people think they know what they are doing and receive advice form a whole multitude of web designers, friends, blogs and wherever. But is the advice right, we had a new client recently whose designer knew all about search engine marketing and was going to build his knowledge in as he went. The first thing we found was hidden text on the page an absolute no no of course, with all engines, but an immediate ban waiting to happen with Google.

Secondly, OK, you know what you need to do to get those elusive top 10 rankings but do you have the tools to do it, and the technical know how. It’s all well and good knowing you need links and to restructure the HTML of your site etc. But how do you go about getting links, what are you looking for, how do you find them. Without the right tools it is a daunting task and one that many set out on, but never achieve.

Thirdly, Do you have the time ? Many people ask me how long do I need to allow each week for internet marketing, well actually they still call it SEO. My answer to this depends on the site, but in general if you cannot give at least 10 hours a week, you are not going to succeed and even then you are talking 10 hours a week for at least 6 months in many cases and even after that around 5 hours a week. So is your time better spent on what you know best ?

After reading this article you like many people we speak to say, then how can you do a good job for the fees you charge ? The answer to this is volume and years of knowledge and expertise. When we are working with links we have many contacts already and can exchange or get one way links for many clients in one go. Hence we are more efficient than one offs, and contacts want to work with us as it is more beneficial to them. So we may achieve in 10 hours, 10 times what you would for a one off deal. Also we have technical writers who know how to write content to look good on your site, and be be good for the search engines. These people do it everyday and it’s second nature to them. We know how to title pages and write those meta descriptions so consequently we can make change fast and efficiently. All in all it’s our job.

So market it yourself or use a company ? – Should I sell my house myself, I think they call that F.S.B.O. You decide for yourself, but I think you know the simple answer.

I speak to many people in both the real estate world and other areas where templated web sites are used and they ask us the question should I use a templated web site ?

This is a difficult question to answer so knowing I’m about to get a lot of comments objecting to my response here goes.

Templated web sites all come out looking pretty much the same even if you wrap them with a different graphic, footer, colors etc. The main problem is, everybody using a templated site is likely using the same names for their pages, with virtually the same content, all hosted on the same IP address. This then brings up the duplicate content question, and experience tells me, that if the search engines, especially Google see duplicate content, on pages with the same name, on the same IP address you are going to receive a penalty of some sort. I’m not saying your page or site will be banned, but I would expect to see it in the supplemental index, then what this means is that Google will only report that page if it doesn’t have a page in it’s main index that matches. Before all of you templated guys start screaming at me, I know many of you allow custom pages, but on the whole many of the pages are the same.

So my advice is find a nice web site template layout that you like and then build up from there. The clever guys today are using a template like this, then using a content management type system to generate unique pages, with unique content. This does mean a little more work up front, and I’m sure in many cases a little more cost, but in the long un you will end up with an Internet Marketing friendly web site, with unique content that will be appealing to your visitors.

Remember internet marketing is about having a site that is appealing to your visitors when they arrive on your site, being friendly to the search engines so you rank well and driving traffic there using all of the internet marketing tools available.

I’m in no way saying that a templated site will not rank or that it cannot be ranked, what I’m saying is more pages will likely be indexed and it will be more appealing to your visitors if they see something that is telling them what they want to know that they haven’t already seen on 10 other sites before.

As a company based in Canada and working with clients in the UK, US and Canada, we are asked this question all of the time. The reason we are able to work with clients all over the world is the World Wide Web and its ability to allow anybody, anywhere to view what we do.

With this in mind you would expect our answer to be: host with whoever gives you the best value for money. In fact, this is not the answer. Google and the other major search engines all have country based versions of their search engines and will normally offer their visitors the ability to see results delivered for sites just in that country. The question is, ‘How do they decide where the results are coming from?’

This is a 2 phase process, which in many cases can be totally inaccurate.

1). If your domain name has one of the many country specific extensions, they conclude that your site must be related to that country, and where it is hosted is totally irrelevant. What we mean by this is a .co.uk domain could be hosted in Canada but will still show up as a UK result.

2). If your domain name has one of the generic domain extensions, .com .net .org .edu, the location of your site is based on where you host your site. So if the IP address that it returns shows as a Canadian location, your site is regarded as Canadian.

In both of these cases it is easy to see that your site can turn up in the wrong results.  If you have a generic based domain, your host should be in the country where you want your business to be found. If your site is geographically based, that would be the place to host it. If you are offering services to a worldwide market, the US would be as good as any as they offer a huge share of the Internet traffic. Once you decide the country, look at the services that you need and go with a host that provides them, and always try and take a look at other sites that they host for speed comparisons, etc. You don’t want to lose your visitors because your host delivers your site at a snails pace.
Leaf Tech Web is a  real estate marketing company and Eden Production is a Canadian web host supplying a great affordable Canadian web hosting solution.

We’ve been asked the question about how Google treats duplicate content and penalties for it. We have no 100% answer as we believe we can make cases for the myth and cases for the fact, so here’s how we see it.

If you are posting an article that has been posted on another site, on another server and with a different name for the page, it is unlikely that you will receive a duplicate content penalty for the page, if this wiss the case millions of news pages and feeds from around the world would all be penalised, but as we all know they still get listed and ranked by Google and the major engines.

However, we do believe there are cases where if you are hosted on the same IP address, with exactly the same page name, and if any parameters are the same that you will be placed in Googles supplemental index. At this point all we know about the supplemental index is that Google only considers these results if there are no results in their main index. Another thing we have noticed is that once you are in the supplemental index, the cache isn’t updated very often, if at all and that it is therefore very hard to get a page out of it. Duplicate content on the same site ends up the same way.

There would apeear to be other reasons that you may end up supplemental but we will discuss those at a future date.

Rob Parker is a real estate internet marketing expert with Leaf Tech Web Inc. who specialise in real estate search engine marketing and real estate web sites.

This is the first in a line of articles about marketing your real estate internet web site. Some of the things that I will say during this series will most definitely be regarded as controversial by many SEO pundits, but I am talking about marketing your web site, not just optimizing it for the search engines. The key difference here is that the aim is to bring you good qualified traffic from many interested parties not just from the search engines.

So here we go, as I have said above the whole aim of any web site is to get good quality traffic from as many sources as possible, now this of course depends  how you market the rest of your business, our you a real estate agent looking fro both traffic from the search engines and also from local people remembering your web site because they saw it on your vehicle, at your agency or in the newspaper, or are you a purely online business that is trying to generate leads purely from the search engines.

If you are purely on line I agree with many of the pundits who would say that it is good to have some of your keyword(s) in your domain, however if you are, as probably 95% of real estate agencies are, working from an office with local people go for a domain that is easy to remember because it has your business name in it, or go for something that people won’t forget and make it a household name in your area. Does Google or Yahoo have anything to do with search engine, you bet they do, but does their domain name, well yes because they made it a household name.

So to sum up go for a domain name that people will remember, repeat qualified traffic is way better than people that may visit your site once and never return. Make it something that people will tell their friends, and if you don‘t believe me, I can give you 100’s of first page listings in the 3 major search engines, where the domain name has nothing to do with the keywords that they are found for that still brings them good quality traffic, but still is memorable by each and every visitor they receive.

Rob Parker is a real estate internet marketing specialist with Leaf Tech Web Inc. and has helped 100’s of real estate web site owners successfully market their web sites, both on and off line.