Adding depth to your website is very important element to your real estate website design. To make a long story short, adding pages is important for two reasons. First, generally speaking, the majority of real estate website visitors don’t enter through the main page. I have conducted tests on a few real estate websites and have found similar results with only about 10-20% of website traffic reaching the main page. The rest of the traffic went to blog posts, property listings, maps, articles, agent bio information and so on. Secondly and equally important, search engines will pay you very little attention unless you can compete with your competitors on the shear volume of website content. This is why real estate professionals need to understand their new role as a publisher in our new technology driven industry. This content can be in the form of articles, property postings, about us pages, or blog posts. It doesn’t matter how you get the content, but it needs to be relevant, unique, helpful and you need a lot of it and often.

To show you the importance of internal pages I have run an operation through the following very helpful keyword analysis tool.

http://www.mcdar.net/KeywordTool/keywordtool.asp

This tool allows me to see how we rank in terms of backlinks, pages, and PR amounts my competition for certain search terms. Our company “paperclipcms” ranks 3rd in Google for the search term “real estate CMS”. We have 72 pages that Google has indexed but that is a lot lower than the 100+ that many of our competitors have. As we add more pages we notice our website climbing in the ranking. This is also because we believe that Google treats favorably websites that update content by adding articles, properties, blog posts and so on. Your goals as a real estate webmaster is to do everything your high ranking competitors are doing, except you need to aim to do it better. If they have 100 pages of internal content, you need 200. If they have 200 banklinks, you need 400. If they have a PR of 3, you need one of 4. etc.

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