Effective Web Sites

Most of the visitors to our site are Point2 members, which is not unusual as we target specific keywords and phrases to ensure that the majority of our visitors fit this profile, yet another example of our SEO work in action for you to see, I liken it to the local transit bench advertisements that state "You just proved bench advertising works!"

So in this article I thought I would share some insight into two of the most beneficial SEO and Point2 website makeover techniques we utilize, following reading this article I would highly recommend you head to our A la' Carte Section and purchase these for your site, or if you are very savvy with your Point2 editing and very competent with HTML, CSS and Javascript impliment these changes on your own.

The first element is the creation of custom page URLs within your site, which is not too difficult provided you know which search terms you are targeting on each page (hint: they better be related to that pages content!). In order to accomplish this you simply log into your sites backend, navigate to the page editing interface and page by page change the page name from the typical "Home", "Listings","Contact" etc to something along the lines of "Home of Manhatten Luxury Condo Real Estate", "John Doe's Manhatten Property Listings", "Contact John Doe, Manhattens Top Realtor"

Ok I think you have the idea, and I'm pretty sure you've grasped the increase in value of this type of page name, but there is a problem here if you are using your Point2 websites navigation system, the text simply doesn't fit in the little template link area and now your pages navigation looks like amatuer junk and while you may see an increased amount of traffic to your site, you will also see a jump in your bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who leave immediately after landing on your site).

So the second element that is absolutely necessary to clean up this mess is the Custom CSS Navigation System. Custom CSS Navigation is immensely flexible, it can appear as a basic unordered bulleted list, it can be a drop down menu with parent/child categories either fixed or infinite, it can be a vertical flyout, an accordian style expansion menu, it can incorporate plain text, images, flash animations etc, so neither the look nor behavior are restricted, whatever you want you can have. The important thing is that it be CSS based and implimented in a manner that while it may use Javascript to create animated behaviours it is not javascript dependent and degrades gracefully and functionally in situations in which visitors browsers may not be Javascript enabled, this allows the site to allways be funtional and allows and encourages the Search Engine spyders to follow the page links and index the subsequent pages and their full content.

There is a second and equal if not greater benefit to the addition of the custom navigation to clean up and present longer page links, which is that they no longer are required to be the same text as with the stock menus. This allows for significant keyword/phrase based SEO optimized link texts to be used on the page including long descriptive sentances with an image to be used in place of "Home" for example a small image of the Manhatten skyline followed by "Welcome to the Joe Blows Realty Home page, featuring regional info, demographic charting, industry news as well as Residential and Commercial Real Estate Listings" all hyperlinked to the home page containing teaser content for all the keywords or phrases used in the link text.

Yes with a little research and learning anyone can gain the know how of manipulating the Point2 templates, Keyword Identification and Analysis, HTML, CSS and Javascript and subsequently can impliment these solutions themselves, however our clients are Real Estate Agents who are in the business of Real Estate not Web Design, SEO, SEM and programming.

Effective Realty sites has these skills and offers them to you the Effective Realtor who's interest is in having an effective business tool working effectively to generate new prospects for them.