Custom content is a vital part of a successful real estate website. In
addition to its benefit to your search engine marketing efforts, custom content
tends to have a more significant impact on your site visitors as well since it
is more pertinent to your business and, ideally, also more pertinent to their
real estate problems. To add custom content to your site...
- Open the page you wish to edit in the page
editor.
- Be sure to name the page if you have not
already done so.
- Scroll down to the Page Content section of the editor and
select the appropriate language from the drop-down menu to the upper left.
- Then, use the tools in the Content
Editor to create your custom page content. Here are some keys to
successful page content.
- Avoid talking about yourself or your company - Instead
of using words like "me," "my," "I," "we," "our," and "us," talk to your
customers. Use the words "you" and "your" frequently. The one page of your
site where you can AND should talk about yourself and your company is in
your staff directory or an About Us page.
- Talk about your target customers' problems and your
solutions - Try to relate what you say back to its significance to
your target customer. This forces you to think of and provide good reasons
for someone to contact you once they get to your site. By doing this, you
also prove that you understand your customers' needs and concerns.
- Reword any provided content - While the stock content
provided with XSites is good, it lacks certain specifics about your business
that only you can add. Whenever you use a page of our stock content on your
site, first comb through it and reword it to include specifics about your
business and your language style. Not only will this dramatically improve
your search engine exposure, but it also tends to improve your lead
generation efforts.
- For "entry" pages on your site, be sure to work in some
keywords - If the page you're editing is one you intend to use as a
marketing tool (to be found in search engines), read through the page and
look for places where you can substitute words or sentences with keywords or
phrases that someone might use to find you online. This improves your search
engine rank and as long as you use these keywords and phrases naturally in
the page (avoiding long lists of words), you can expect a better return for
your time invested.
- Focus your page - Each page should have a clear purpose
whether it is to lead your visitors deeper into your site, educate them, or
prompt them to contact you. If you can't identify the purpose of the page on
your site, it's probably best that you don't offer it. In the pages that you
do offer, remember to keep each page "laser-focused." Diverging into too
many different topics in one page makes it more difficult for your visitors
to identify the purpose of the page or what you want them to do.
- Include a call to action - Once you know the purpose of
a page on your site, you can include a "call-to-action." In other words,
once you know what purpose the page fills, you know what you can ask your
visitor to do. For instance, in a page written to first time home buyers,
you might offer a way for them to sign up for tips or a report on buying
your first home. Just be sure that the call-to-action is very specific.
Rather than something like "contact me," for example, you might say "click
here to e-mail me."
- If desired, add any dynamic content
tools, contact forms, or RSS/ATOM feeds to your page.
- Tweak your search engine
settings for the page.
- When finished, click Save and Close to save the page.
Then, be sure to check the page and click Save in the My Content step to active the page on your website.