Real Estate Web Design

The Economics of Web Design

Over the past few months, I have been reviewing the economics of search engine marketing. This includes web site design and development, search engine optimization, pay-per click and other forms of SEM. In this post, I will outline some of the economics of website design.

As a result, I thought I would outline some of the general economics and steps associated with maximizing your exposure on the internet. Once a business understands the fundamentals, it is much easier to know what are the best decisions given a companies current financial situation.

When a company is looking to establish a presence on the internet. The first and most important question they need to answer is “What is the purpose of the website”?

• Is it meant to be an online brochure?
• Is it meant to be an income generator?
• Is it meant to be a communication tool?
• Is it meant to be a tool to help facilitate your employees interaction with existing clients?

Most companies will say “I want our website to provide all these functions”. The reality is that answering yes to each one of these questions adds additional expense to your website. That is why a company needs to really answer these questions before they begin researching companies with whom they may want to work.

Is it meant to be an online brochure?

The cheapest solution is to have an online brochure which you put in your offline ads or business cards. If this is your primary need, there are a number of solutions which range from $500-$1,000 to set-up and about $50 per month to host. What is important to note here is that although these companies will claim to be able to generate you additional business, the reality is that without additional SEM, chances are that they will not.

Is it meant to be an income generator?

If you are looking to use the internet as an online brochure and an income generator, then you should budget between $3,000-$5,000 to build a custom website. The cost difference between an online brochure and an income generation website is that the basic structure of the website is fundamentally different and requires significant manual effort on a per website basis to prepare a website and give it the optimal chance to succeed in the search engines. In addition to the above amounts, if your website requires significant database programming or interactive tool integration, you can easily increase the oveall cost by $5,000-$10,000.

Is it meant to be a communication tool?

The communication aspect of a website adds another level of integration when building a website. The popularity of blogs has allowed many small companies to communicate to there clients via the web. The other main communication tool companies use to communicate with clients is newsletters but this tool is very different than your website. They may be integrated in the mind of the average user, they are in reality very different products. A company wanting to utilize drip email marketing campaigns or a traditional email newsletter should consider this as a separate marketing expense when budgeting for their online marketing costs.

Is it meant to be a tool to help facilitate your employees interaction with existing clients

If you are looking at the web primarily to facilitate improving current client relationships, most companies will recommend that you utilize a separate URL to integrate any software to choose to use. The primary reason is that most types of software like customer relationship software is developed fundamentally differently from a marketing website and including these activities on the same url can potentially hurt your online marketing efforts. Costs associated with this type of software can run anywhere from $500 to $50,000 or more.

Once a company answers these fundamental questions, they can then properly budget to meet their online marketing goals.

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Link Exchange Debate - How to move Forward

The debate over link exchanges has been going on since the inception of Google so the current uproar in the search engine community is nothing new. Every year or two, the search engines make various changes to their algorithms which affect a block of websites. In almost all these cases, the block of websites which are affected are templated websites.

In regard to real estate websites, the current uproar started last year after AA (Advanced Access) websites were hugely affected in Yahoo with many of them losing rankings they have had for many years. The issue this year again involves AA websites as due to a recent change in Google, many of these websites have lost their rankings in Google.

In general, this would not affect any Site Tutor websites. However, it is now being recommended by a number of custom real estate web design companies that they not only stop any type of straight linking program between websites, but actually remove these pages with the links all together. When this happens, there will be an affect on Site Tutor websites. It will not have an immediate affect, but it will have an affect over time.

As you all know by know, Site Tutor has always felt that although link marketing is a necessary evil in regard to internet marketing, over the long term, a scenario similar to the one being outlined above would happen. This is not a “told you so” post. I only mention this to emphasize the importance we have always placed on diversifying your internet marketing activities and focusing on the long term approach to search engine optimization.

Site Tutor has always had a linking policy with some of the following guidelines:

• Unless requested by the client, no links with templated websites
• All link partners are verified as established / committed / knowledgeable website owners
• All sites have been indexed in ALL 3 search engines and all link pages have been indexed as well.

Because of this strict policy, we have not been affected by many of the ranking fluctuations that have affected other websites. We also feel that because of this policy, the current structure of our links pages actually continue to help our clients. Not as much as in the past, but more importantly, they do not hurt our clients websites. However, just because we feel we implemented to solid strategy in the past, we were always dependent on the strategies of our link partners. It is that dependence which has forced us to create a proactive approach to these coming changes.

HOW TO HANDLE THIS CURRENT CHANGE AND MINIMIZE ANY AFFECTS

1. First and most importantly, you need to check all your reciprocal links on your website to make sure the sites you are linking to are linking back to you. Over the next 3-6 months, we recommend checking these links once a month. Any links which are no longer linking to your website should be forwarded to tutor@sitetutor.com for removal.
2. If you do not have a blog on your website, we recommend you have one installed. The cost to install a blog on your website is ($100). Customization of the Blog is billed on an hourly basis of $60.
3. If you have a blog on your website, make the effort to post in your blog a minimum of once a week. This will add additional content to your overall website and strengthen the value of your website in the search engines. I will have further posts in the blog to outline how to best use your blog to maximize your efforts. If you would like to have a consultation meeting, this is charged at $75 per hour.
4. If you are not actively a member of a popular real estate forum. Sign-up and begin contributing to the community. Our forum is one of the top real estate fourms on the web and a great place to network online and benefit your search engine optimization activities.
5. If you have been thinking about adding additional changes to your website, now would be a good time.
6. If you have not paid for a Yahoo directory listing, I would consider the investment. It is $299 per year, but depending on the power you may lose from having sites which were linking to you no longer linking to you, the power from one yahoo link could greatly help to offset that loss. For many of you, in the past I had mentioned that Yahoo was something to keep in your back pocket in case we were not able to receive rankings through other sources, now is the time to get that Yahoo link.

These are some of the initial action steps we recommend our clients to implement to combat the loss of links from other websites. As always, please feel free to contact us for clarification and or assistance. The money and time invested at this stage is unfortunate but necessary. The internet marketing process is no different from off line marketing in the sense that there are occasionally expenses which were not in the budget, but are important enough to re-look at the budget and prioritize. This is one of those times.

In future posts, I will outline the contextual linking strategy which is being implemented by many custom website owners. This approach is nothing new, but given the various changes in the search engine community, it is now the recommended strategy. The reason many people delayed implementing this approach is due to the fact that it is very labor intensive and thus expensive to implement.

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Local Exposure Through The Internet

As clients have found through my conversations with them, I have consistently spoken about receiving exposure on the internet through multiple sources. No one should depend on only one source of advertising. There are of course sources where you focus your efforts but they should not be your only source of exposure. Below, I have listed some of the top sources to generate business:

1. YOUR WEBSITE: The most cost effective method is having a search engine friendly website. As you all know, by investing in the custom website with custom content and properly optimized, over time your website will generate exposure via the internet.
2. PPC(Pay Per Click): The second most effective source is through having PPC campaigns running on the top 3 search engines which account for over 90% of all searches in the USA.
3. BLOGS:Utilize a blog to communicate to your current, former and future clients. Having a blog only for SEO purposes is NOT an effective use of your time. In that regard, I believe that once you have a website up and running, SEO is secondary, but must be considered in regard to all your online activities. What this means is that SEO is time consuming and you normally will not see the results of your SEO activities for 6-8 months. In regard to a blog, it means that having a Blog can be a powerful SEO tool but that must be a secondary reason for using a BLOG. The real power of a Blog is that by using a Blog and promoting your blog, you are able to communicate your thoughts, ideas, information or activities to a larger audience. Being a small business person, there is only so much time in the day and using a Blog allows you to reach more people with that limited time frame.
4. FORUMS: In the same light as Blogs, Forums are an effective SEO tool, but participating in Forums only for SEO purposes is not an effective use of your time. The primary reason one should participate in forums is from a networking perspective. From a real estate agent perspective, look at forums as your online farm. Just as all real estate agents are told to work a farm in their neighborhood, Forums are an online farm for real estate agents.
5. DIRECTORIES: Before search engines were developed, the best way to find what you were looking for online was through directories. Some of the biggest directories were Yahoo and DMOZ. With the advent of Google, directories have been used for many purposes including SEO, however, SEO is not the primary reason to be listed in directories. Most search engines have reduced the value of being listed in directories, however being listed in a directory is not going to hurt you from an SEO perspective. Once again, there is value of being listed, however the value must be more than only from an SEO perespective, or it is not worth your time. In tihis case, the added value is exposure. As most marketers know, you receive most of your clients from your primary marketing sources. On the internet, that also remains true however, their is a phrase in SEO called “chasing the tail”. What this means is that through the SEO process, you receive traffic from searches you would not think about . For example, last week a client told me that one client found them by typing in the term “claim jumper”. Because of the SEO process, their website came up under that term. It was not a term they were focused on, but because they have a Search Engine Friendly website, the couple found saw their website and liked what they saw, so they contacted the client in regard to their real estate needs. Directories work in much the same way. By being listed on multiple free directories, those websites receive exposure and being listed in those directories allows you to receive additional traffic to your website. Is it significant? In most cases no, which is way you shouldn’t pay to be listed in directories except for a very view.

So This gets me back to the title of the article. Local Exposure Through the Internet. There are a number of ways to gain local exposure. Over the past few years, the search engines have offered a local search as part of their search options. One of the main ways they create these results is by cross referencing their global results with directories they have agreements with. It is important to get listed in these directories. I have listed a number of them below:

• Superpages.com - You can add your listing on this page: SUBMIT
• Yellowpages.com - You can add your listing on this page: SUBMIT
• infoUSA.com - You can add your listing on this page: SUBMIT HERE

Once you have set-up listings with these online phone directories, then go to the search engines and set-up your local account here:

• Yahoo: SUBMIT
• Google: SUBMIT
• MSN: SUBMIT( They Partner with Citysearch.com)
• Local.com: SUBMIT

These will get you started. Remember, no one submission will bring down the house in delivering traffic to your site, but over time, all these various methods add up. Just remember to do a little each and every week or month depending on how quickly you want to see results.

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