LivingNorthwest.com
How I spent my July 4th weekend.
My websites and blogs have been generating considerable visitor traffic, as least from an agent’s point of view, but very few leads. I thought part of it was content and part of it was the “look” of my primary website - www.LivingNorthwest.com. Not to mentioned the fact that I had my face plastered on every page. So, I thought of a complete redesign.
In looking over the best real estate web designers out there and contemplating the costs, I decided to hunker down and do some of my own coding. I’m certainly not a developer or designer, but I’m not a novice either having worked in e-commerce web development for five years. So, I decided to learn CSS and do a “make-over” on my tables and navigation links. I did the tables in CSS since Firefox doesn’t display HTML tables nicely. And, that always bothered me since I don’t use IE.
Anyway, I think turned out ok. I also cleaned up the home page and moved my mug to just the “About” page. I added a few more content pages based on the search terms people used in Google that landed them on my site, as well as making it easier to get to those content from any page.
I’ve also been contemplating getting rid of the adsense stuff at the bottom. As they’re hidden, no one see’s or clicks on them. Plus, I have to keep filtering out the competition.
On the very plus side, the SEO guide, tips and info I learned from Real Estate Webmasters and a couple of other sites have paid off fantastically. For most of my main keywords I’m on the first page of Google’s organic results, some on the 2nd page. And on one search term, I’m a little miffed that my ActiveRain profile returned #5 while my website returned #6. Most of this occurred after Google’s Big Daddy update. As a result the number of visitors have gone up 50% in the past couple months and I was able to suspend my adwords campaign.