Just yesterday, I came across a recently published article that seems to maintain that all you need for Real Estate “SEO magic” is lots of content. The author writes “I keep telling people – most of SEO is not rocket science, it’s just taking the time to think about what you have and who you want to read it.” To be fair I believe that the author knows better, but some readers seem to think that is the entire lesson in SEO and point of the article.  So, let me say that if all you have is good content, you may need magic. Successful Real Estate website SEO requires the balance of well crafted content and optimum site structure.

As I have written before Real Estate site content including your listings is vital, but no amount of additional content is going to help a donkey of a website get to market.

Here is a case in point. I have a new client for a real estate website, a very smart experienced guy. In 2007 he spent a good amount of money to have a website created and at the same time he spent many, many hours creating great content Over 70 pages of original, keyword rich, interesting, targeted, useful, local real estate information. And his website is virtually invisible. The content that he spent over three months creating, while in Google’s index … is inaccessible. Unread. Really, in over a year his site has received fewer than 20 visitors. Professionally developed and with great content, why? Because the structure could have hardly been worse.

In getting acquainted the new client asked me to research why his site was not working. One of my first steps is to use an SEO browser to “see” the site the way a search bot might see the site. Here is what a search bot sees as his site content, the total readable content of the home page of his website, from the search bot’s perspective.

“Your browser does not currently have IFRAME support. Please upgrade your browser to the latest version.”

That is it. No more content than that. And what potential Real Estate client might search on that? Although Google has over 80 pages of the site’s content in it’s index that is all that is available. For some reason the professional website developer choose to use javascript menus and place all the the content in what is called iframes.

Like a good real estate transaction requires balancing price and terms, good real estate website search engine optimization SEO requires the balance of content and structure. Balance of the two is strength and beauty. Or real SEO magic.

If you want to see a SEO text browser view of your home page just visit http://whois.domaintools.com and enter your URL. Another useful free site evaluation tool is Hubspot’s website grader. Just enter your url and it will, after a short while, return a score and analysis report indicating the search marketing potential of your website. If your site does not score above 30, you likely have some structural website problems.