Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Real Estate Agent Web Sites Penny Wise and Content Rich

Do you need a Realtor website that manages all your leads? One that streamlines your work for efficiency, and has the automated real estate marketing solutions you can rely on while you're busy working all your leads and clients?

Let me answer for you. Yes, you do!

Whether you're starting a new real estate agency or are looking for a new design for your real estate agent web site, some other things to consider when designing a web site include the level of support you'll receive from your site builder, the resources that a web designer offers and the search engine friendliness of your web site package.

Well designed sites allow agents to receive vital information about their visitors and facilitate immediate follow up! A few Agent and Realtor tools offered by the better sites included the following

Lead Generating Guest Book Package
VIP Home Buyer Program
Community Subdivisions
Online Home Loan Prequalification
Virtual Tours
And Much, Much More!

Many companies also offer automated email follow up systems, aka drip systems, for sales agents who wish to augment their lead follow up process with a tool that automatically stays in touch with potential customers. This is a pretty cool feature, as once you set up the email messages you can put it on automatic and it'll automatically follow-up on every lead that emails for information.

Content Is King!

Your web site should include lots of relevant content to increase your chances of being found in the search engines. You should also be able to customize titles, descriptions and keywords. And the ability to generate reports and perform FREE Auto/Manual submissions to select search engines is a must. If not you'll end up having to extra for what some web site building programs provide as a free service.

Don't have time to create content for your site? Join the club, as many other real estate agents are in the same predicament. They need web content to increase site visits and boost search engine rankings, but don't have the time to devote to everything else that they need to be doing. So, they use pre-written content, which I highly recommend!

Good Web Site Design

Good web site design is a critical element of designing a user friendly web site. The design and layout are important features that actually bring users to your site and keep them there.

A major aspect of your web site design is the web site navigation. If the navigation of your site is poor the user will leave the web site quickly, without taking the time to look at your content. If your web site is difficult to read, or has unappealing font size and colors and is otherwise unappealing the visitors may leave because of it, too. Consequently, a good, clean, simple and easily navigated web site is the best type of site to create.

Some people like to use side navigation bars to guide visitors through their sites, while others like to use navigation bars found at the top of the web site pages. But placement is not as important as consistency, so that whichever you use it is consistent and visitors will always know where to go to move to another page. I don't have a personal preference, and am usually guided by the look and feel that I want to project.

The most successful real estate agents and brokers realize the value of agency websites and are constantly working to improve them. Still, many have web sites that are difficult and costly to maintain. Some of the questions to ask are:

Should your agents have access only to certain parts of your administration panel, and not others? How will you manage listings? Are you using a Multiple Listing Service (MLS)? How Can A Real Estate Web Site Boost Your Business? These are just a few of the questions you'll have to answer as you move forward with building or improving your web site.

Summarily, the most successful real estate agents usually have lots of leads, buyers and sellers. And one lead generating system that works well is online marketing with Real Estate Agent Web Sites. They're relatively inexpensive these days, but can give a serious boost to your real estate marketing result

Visit Real Estate Marketing Talk for more information about Real Estate Agent Web Sites.

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