Prepackaged Real Estate Websites

Came across dealing with a site that was a webtemplate for real estate by a company www.@@@@@@.com, well the name isn’t important since most are similar at heart. Most tend to use a php or ASP template and plug in the variables system with alor of framing of other pages and sources of tools.

This new clients website was a complete site in a bag ready to go real estate website solution, which is not always bad, as these prepackaged designs have more functionality than most web designers could ever provide….BUT, you end up with the same coded site as 5,000 other realtors. Many of these prepackaged sites rely on css to create substantial difference between them, which is not part of the spidered code in most assumptions, and you still have the same site to the G, MSN or Y.

This above fact coupled with the fact that the entire site is “framed ASP pages” has made the site very non friendly to search engines. The framing is generally framing of other useful tools and MLS feeds which means sources from other websites, and this in turn creates a situation where your website is 85% duplication from other more prominent places on the web. To make matters less friendly, the URL’s created by this framing are god awful jumbles of id #’s and other peoples URL’s.

I am not against this type of total site solution as many of them have exceptional tracking and newsletter features which can convert at a much better rate than simple high rankings.

In our opinion you really need to find a middle ground and try to meld the prepackaged features into your well seo designed static template. If you do choose one of the major real estate package websites you may find it important to work with a good designer or smart SEO to try and make sure the features do not go wasted, and make sure your site bypasses the many shortcoming of this templated approach.

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 23rd, 2006 at 1:57 pm and is filed under Online Marketing, Search Marketing, SEO, Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.