Are you ready to get serious about your websites performance?

So many say they are, but when it comes down to brass tacks, when the rubber meats the road, when you separate the boys from the men (or girls from the women) the truth becomes clear that effective use of their personal website as a marketing platform or lead generation and incubation tool is really something they don't understand, they view it (yes even now in 2009) as an area where corners can be cut and areas in which trial and error is an effective technique.

For less than a single closing commission your website can become an effective tool!

We often find ourselves drawing parallels between our industry in web design and development and Real Estate. The most glaring is in how we often are required to sell our services to curious clients who hold onto the idea that they can do it just as well themselves without shelling out any fees, and the truth is sometimes they can although in the end they often utter the words "Next time I'll pay someone to do that!"

Our question to you is this; What is your career path? Do you want to be a Realtor or Webmaster or SEO specialist?

Before you can make any educated decisions about how to optimize your website you require one key ingredient, visitors, visitors, and more visitors.

Along with site traffic you need a system with which to analyze the traffic patterns of your visitors, a good start would be integrating an analytics system such as the popular Google Analytics,  utilizing enhanced traffic analysis software such as ClickTale which provides a visual heat map and click through statistics to gain an understanding of your sites regions of visual interest can be quite enlightening if not down right shocking in revealing the visual elements that are the most successful in funneling traffic into the targeted website content, whether it be specific information or specific lead capture features of the site.

Not only does our experience show that most Real Estate professionals are unaware of their traffic levels they have less idea of what content visitors are viewing, how many are leaving as soon as they get to the site, how long they are staying, how many pages they are visiting, how frequently are visitors returning to their site, or even what keywords they should be optimizing their site for.

Now don't get me wrong, this is not a criticism, that most Realtors are ignorant of their websites performance and effectiveness, in fact our point is that this is the normal state of things, our criticism is that while ignorant they still try to do it themselves.

I equate this to me selling my own properties, sure I could take the time research the market, establish an appropriate market values, post some listings online, put an ad in the paper, put a sign in the yard, answer the phone, show the house, call a lawyer, sign some forms, move and save thousands, sound like an over simplification? if so then we're on the same page, at effective realty sites when we buy and sell properties we use Realtors, why because we're Webmasters, SEO, SEM and Web Design specialists, that's what we do and to stop doing what we love and focus our energy on real estate would not only cost us our sanity, but financially we would likely lose, or possibly break even, assuming we managed to sell for the same price that a qualified agent would have been able to fetch for it.

Are you tired of the website performance that results from hiring a Realtor to do your webdesign and SEO? Ready to be the Realtor who spends his days working on Real Estate deals? Do you have a Why Hire a Professional page on your website? Does the irony completely miss you? Does your website see at least 2000 unique visitors per month (based on average market size of 150,000 - 200,000)? Do you even know how many visitors your site has had in the last 30 days?

If your site has less than 2000 unique visitors per month, you likely are generating very few leads that convert from your website, likely your website is losing you money rather than making it.

Does it seem ridiculous to waste your time working on your website when you could pay someone the equivalent of a single sales commission to increase your traffic, your  increase your leads, increase your conversion of those leads and subsequently increase your sales commissions coming your way? If it doesn't please don't call us, as we're not sure we can help you.

At Effective Realty Sites we find ourselves frequently explaining what the factors are that we analyze in order to establish a decisive plan on how to take a site that does not currently rank well with the search engines to a high ranking site for competitive search terms, this article we’re simply going to expose what most of these factors are, so let’s jump right in and list them for you.

Read more: How to Optimize your site