True or false? “Search engines like big, dumb ugly pages”
TRUE! Search engines like plain text. Web crawlers index words and phrases that they find on a web page, and that is all. They do not recognize images, flash, splash or dynamic delivery. However, human visitors are uncomfortable with a screen full of text.
For this reason and many more, it is good real estate marketing idea to know web design basics in order to establish an online presence.
Website design is about satisfying visitors. And, it is important for your online presence to keep the site search engine friendly.
The following is a list of a few website options that enhance your online presence:
- Splash pages are usually heavy on graphics with virtually no text for the crawlers to index. Give your visitors at least a couple of hundred words on the home page.
- Drop-down menus are not navigable when written in JavaScript, instead use cascading style sheets (CSS) build drop down menus.
- In order to maintain a good online presence, never publish duplicate content. If you have similar websites, instead of using identical text, re-direct your visitor to a page at the other website. Or, if you have duplicate content within the same site, make sure that those pages are blocked from crawlers.
- Avoid flash pages. Flash pages often consist of only one page, with very little content. One page of content cannot rank for dozens of separate keywords like a multi-page website can.
- Stick with a three level structure; Site Concept (home page), Category pages, and Sub-category pages. And use hyphens in the file name instead of underscores.
- Every page in a website should have a strong title tag.
- Search engine crawlers index ‘words only’ and they pay the most attention to the content at the top of each web page. So place the non-essential graphics ‘below the fold’, or in other words, closer to the bottom of the page.
- In addition to the navigation menu, internal links are important to your online presence, not only to be used as short cuts for visitors and but also for crawlers to exploring your site.
It is a good real estate marketing idea to keep these web design basics in mind when you are establishing your online presence.
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