Real Estate SEO Adviser

SEO-Friendly Website Templates

Summary: A guide to using website templates the right way, to ensure maximum search engine visibility of your content.

For a long time, I’ve talked about the perils of using real estate website templates to create an agent website for marketing purposes. Specifically, the target of my warning came from a search engine optimization perspective.

Many template websites come with content “built in,” which is one of primary problems with these products. Stock content is bad for two reasons. First of all, it couldn’t possibly speak to your target audience — because it is, after all, stock content.

Secondly, stock content will kill your chances for top search engine ranking someday. Search engines demote the value of websites with unoriginal content found elsewhere on the Web. And stock content, by its very definition, is normally found on multiple websites.

A lot of real estate website templates are just plain horrible for search engine optimization purposes. Many of the companies who peddle these things use frames to simplify their own maintenance, but these frames also ruin the SEO potential of the website.

So while frames might help the company who sells the templates websites, they certainly don’t help the agent’s marketing program.

Here’s the real truth about real estate template websites … and this comes from nearly a decade in web development and over five years as an SEO consultant:

It’s not the website templates themselves that are bad for SEO purposes … it’s the way the templates are used.

A template is simply a pre-built website that you can customize with your own content, logo, color preferences, etc. So when they are used that way, templates make no difference from an SEO standpoint (as compared to a custom-built website).

Let me stress that point again. A custom-built website and a properly used template website are exactly equal in terms of search engine ranking / SEO potential. It’s what you do with your website once it’s online that matters.

Note the difference:

• If you start with a real estate website template and customize it with original content, and then you pursue the SEO techniques outlined in my real estate SEO book … then there’s no limit to what you can accomplish in terms of search engine ranking.
• However, if you start with a real estate template website and use stock content from some kind of content “library” … or if your website uses frames to bring in content from other websites … then you have severely limited yourself in terms of search engine ranking, visibility and search-driven web traffic.

My Choice for Website Templates

Here’s a final tip for you regarding the use of templates. Don’t limit yourself to the so-called real estate website templates I talked about previously. Many of these products use frames, stock content, and other things that we just declared as being bad from an SEO standpoint.

The key is to start with a well-built template that is also search engine “friendly,” and then customize it with your own content, logo, colors, etc. In this way, you could have a professional real estate website up and running in less time, for less cost, and with just as much search engine potential as a so-called “custom” website.

I’ll go a step further and recommend a template product that I’ve been using for some time, and with complete satisfaction. I use a company called 4Templates.com because they have nice-looking website templates that are:

• Easy to customize (for somebody with basic HTML skills)
• Built with modern web coding techniques
• Professional in appearance
• Search engine “friendly” in terms of structure, coding, etc.
• Clearly worth the price

I’ve also written a more thorough review of these website templates if you’re interested.

So let’s sum up…

• Not all templates are created equal
• Some are terrible for SEO purposes, others are just fine
• You should avoid stock content and the use of frames
• Using website templates properly can save time, money and energy
• You can’t go wrong with the professional templates offered by 4Templates.com