I am often asking my clients to recommend a good template website.  That's a much more loaded question for me now after having some personal experiences recently with a couple of these companies.

The first one is a very popular company that many people know.  In the past year they have had quite a few problems with the big Search Engines.  Then to make matters worse their system crashed for several days, and people still seem to have lagging problems receiving their emails.  Coming from someone more accomplished in the computer field this troubles me a great deal.

Agents sign up for template websites because more often than not, they are not experienced enough to maintain a website.  They also do not have the experience to know that you can buy your domain name from one company (I stand beside GoDaddy and their outstanding customer service).  They also do not know that you can actually have your email hosted by someone other than the company who is hosting their website.  This would mean that you were not counting on one company to keep your web identity running.  In general the agents who sign up also do not understand how troublesome problems with search engines can be.  If a search engine does not index your site, then to that search engine, you do not exist.  So in turn, someone searching the Internet for property in your area wouldn't know you exist, because the search engine doesn't know that you or your website exists.

Another template company that I have dealt with recently has even bigger problems.  It's not was well known, but they sell their services as more of a custom-designed template service.  I recently obtained a client who dropped $4000 in January for a website that she STILL doesn't have.  A "template" that was supposed to be "custom-designed" within a week of her payment.  The big catch--they got her to pay for Search Engine Optimization BEFORE she had her site.  Well you can't optimize a site that doesn't exist.  And of course, it's past her 30 day money-back guarantee. 

The moral of the story....research, research, research before signing on the dotted line. If you are thinking about going with a company try to find other customers of the same company online, and email them to see how satisfied with the service they are.  Next, set up and use the site immediately!  This means you will be able to review the functionality of the website, hopefully before any money back guarantee runs out.  Don't pay for extra expensive services upfront, before your site is set-up.  If they offer you a special price on the big-ticket item when you sign up, ask to speak to someone who has the authority to give you that same price after your site is set up.  Lastly, remember you can break up services.  You don't have to have (and probably shouldn't have) the same company totally in charge of your web existence. 

Yes, search engines LOVE, LOVE, LOVE content. Their bots index all your text, and search for keywords/phrases. So what do you do when setting up your site? You repeat and repeat stuff, over and over to make sure the search engines understand that you are a real estate agent working in your area. To bad all your visitors get indigestion from reading your redundant copy.

You have got to find a balance between impressing upon the search engine bots and not turning off visitors to your website.  What are some tips on how to accomplish that?

1.  Display rather high up on your page what area(s), counties, city you practice real estate in.

2.  Display a longer listing of the areas, cities, and town within your coverage area in the footer of your website.  Have it displayed on every page on your site, along with your contact information.

3. Develop dedicated community, neighborhood, or subdivision pages.  On the page give a description, display pictures, and tell people why they may want to live in this particular area. 

4. Give your visitors information relevant to real estate, your area, relocating, and moving.    

5.  Arrange your website so that information that may be redundant is displayed in a way that is supports each other.

6.  Monitor search engine bot hits and your rankings on the search engines.  Notice a climb in your ranking, and see if there have been any recent changes that you made that may have paid off. 

7.  Don't repeat the same phrase over and over.  Change up the wording, and/or create different context that will enable you to repeat the phrase.

Remember, your goal is to keep visitors on your website, and get them to come back.  Focusing on only impressing the search engines way turn visitors away which negates the whole effort.