Web Sites: Template or Custom?

Jay, any thoughts on PropertyMinder websites?

It’s funny how web prescense has changed over the years. I remember when I got into the business in 2002-2003 agnts were paying big bucks to have top placement in the search engines and now wit hthe right tags and content you can do it for much less if not free.

I also agree about fresh content. not only does it help SEO but it also gives people a reason to come back to your site and have your name in ther mind when they think Real Estate.

It’s all about the agent’s goals, and what sort of site will work with their time & money budgets. I’ve used nothing but template sites since I was first in the business in 2004 (google apps is $10 a year, you get several templates, ample email accounts, free hosting, intranet sites, & more) I’m now working on my first ‘from scratch site’. And honestly, the average consumer doesn’t know the difference. Another thing to note, sites with a lot of flash don’t display well on phones with internet browsers. A basic html site will. Consumers are on the internet for information about listings, you, and just possibly the community. The quicker they can find this information the longer they will stick around, and hopefully contact you.

I am amazed at how many agents have websites that the default content is the only content on the site. Many of these agents wonder why their site doesn’t produce traffic. Template or not, if you don’t have original content on your site you will not be found for you key search terms.

I’ve had my template site since ’99. I can customize it quite a bit with html and I make changes to the front page a couple times a week. The key is to provide info that the public wants. I’ve seen glitzy custom sites that only speak to how great the agent is, and don’t offer the consumer any market info. IMO, it’s better to have a site that provides info rather than advertises the agent, no matter whether it’s a template or custom.

The major fault I have with my site provider is that they submit basic keywords plus those we’ve added. We can’t de-select from their basic keywords to exclude those that aren’t appropriate for our market. I’ve complained to no avail.

Ines’ comment is the greatest!

Good SEO results can absolutely be obtained by a templated site. [Now, a framed site is a different animal altogether – and it would be virtually impossible to obtain good SEO results in a very competitive larger market.] If you work it, it can produce for you.

That being said, its not all about SEO. The other side of the coin that needs to be looked at is your customer experience (read:conversion of those leads to actual customers). Can a templated website provide a good customer experience? Sure, absolutely. But those persons that seem to enjoy the most success at least quasi-custom those templated websites to make it more suitable for their needs.

Want good organic search placement? Then you need to have fresh content. A site that sits for months on end with nothing done to it will drop in search placement over time, and I don’t care how Web 2.0 it is. This is one of the reasons that blogs “SEO well” — they are constantly updated with new, and hopefully good, content. A blog with a well-worn keyboard behind it will almost SEO itself.,/blockquote>

The fresh content mantra is a myth.

[Now, a framed site is a different animal altogether – and it would be virtually impossible to obtain good SEO results in a very competitive larger market.]

An even bigger myth. With a framed site, I owned the majority of the search terms for my major market as recently as June 2007 when I sold the domain. It was one of the top 100 domain sales worldwide in 2007 and it’s rankings in Google contributed to it value. You just have to know what you are doing.

Know that this is not the popular opinion with bloggers but fresh content is overrated for search engine rankings. Writing lots of fresh content everyday will not in itself cause you to rank better.

What fresh content will give you is an increasing large amount of terms that you might get found for. When blogging you tend to hit terms (longtail) that you would never have targeted when writing static pages. It also naturally brings in traffic from those that have subscribed to your feed.

As for templates, they can and will rank if people invest the time into making them do so. The biggest issue I have with them is they all look the same and the designs in general are very outdated looking.

Jay and Chuck, I appreciate your thoughts on PropertyMinder. I personally thought the design was thud heavy, meaning they loaded it up with as much “content” as possible to try to justify the price.

The problem is that the more information you have, the harder it is to find it. If visitors can’t find information quickly, they don’t think “I could spend days sifting through this treasure”, they leave.

And yes, I saw the PM post about blogging yesterday. I was waiting for an opportune moment to drop that into the conversation here. Perhaps Jay could use that post as a foil for his next Ag post. 🙂

Chuck – I read that Property Minder article about blogging too. I was amazed at how ridiculous the whole thing was. I use them for IDX.

I had a Property Minder template for several years. It was one of those things when one agent in the office got it, we all followed along like a bunch of lemmings. Recently when I wanted a new platform I somehow ended up on Point 2 – you know how surfing is. I found out that that was what Jay uses so I jumped on the lemming wagon again. I can’t believe how little I’ve done to the site and how much better the results have been – better than any other site I’ve had. I’ve gone from no results to some results. A little more work, a little more result – I can live with that.

As long as the template has some customizable features to upload your own image for example, I don’t see why I should really spend money on a customized template. Working the blog/website is the most important element – as every other commenter has pretty much discussed here.

Jay, yes, it’s really the meta tags which I keep reading are no longer used much by the search engines. Like others have said, I did away with all the canned content and I made sure to pick a design that doesn’t use frames. It has a PR3 and gets decent business Notice I said BUSINESS, not traffic! (what good is traffic if you don’t get any clients from it?)

Of course, my blog is the big hitter for business. BTW, per your request, my web site is just my name dot com. Your help would be welcomed.

I wouldn’t even be asking most of those “custom website” designers about blogs; they either try to discourage you because they don’t have one, or they try to sell you an overpriced propreitory blog if they do. Two readers signed up this week on my blog as new buyers wanting to search for properties and I have a self hosted wordpress blog. I did what you guys are telling me to do and it seems to be working..

Keep your independence and don’t start blogs on ActiveRain, Realtor.com and your IDX provider. Even Typepad, it scared me after I tried it for a couple of days..

Templates and SEO may or may not have anything to do with one another.

Conversion may or may not have anything to do with templates.

Content will most certainly determine your level of SEO, and your rates of conversion…

As far as SEO:
A free wordpress theme, with a static page set to the landing page and engaging content in posts written and updated regularly will win everytime over a glitzy site with no real content.

As far as conversion (having the visitor take action) I think maybe the $40, 000 site would be a nice thing to have 🙂 But again I have seen some very compelling calls to action on free wordpress themes (and Dreamweaver out of the box sites)…

If you really want to learn about this subject (and for free!) I suggest you start hanging around the google webmaster help group and read a few thousand posts!

You will find that as far as Google is concerned if you want to have only one goal, let it be the creation of compelling useful content for your site.

Over and over this is the one truth that shines through.
Save your site development dollars and create solid content.

This doesn’t mean you should disregrad things like valid code, alt tags for images, having two domain calls without a preference (www and no www) and 200 other important things; but first is content!