Poor Web Architecture is what Real Estate Agents are not trained to catch – after all they are not programmers they are Realtors. They rely on the expertise of Programmers, SEO Experts, and Web Designers who work at the Real Estate Website Vendors to do it right.

In a blog post yesterday I tried to demonstrate the importance of Internet Scale, as well as bring into focus the competitive forces on the internet over these important ideas – in this post I want to shame some Real Estate Website Vendors (without naming them) into this realization and share with you some basics they are not doing. If you are a Real Estate Agent who has bought a website from a vendor who does offer The Proper Listing Architecture then you ought to do something about it – in fact you will be able to tell whether it has been done right or not by looking at it yourself.

In this Blog Post I will only discuss: Poor Web Architecture on Listing Pages. There are lots of other problems but let us eat this elephant one bite at the time.

When someone visits your website, performs a Search, and sees a listing, they will click on it to view more pictures and read the details. What I want to focus on are the Meta Tags and URLs; the coding that is not easily viewed by Humans but crawled by Search Engines.

There are two Tags that are considered crucial – of course there are hundreds of others but two of them are the beacon of visibility. The Title Tag, and the Description Tag play a crucial role – let me show you why a think the architecture is poorly designed for many if not all:

1. Go to your Website, perform a search, and click of a listing. Let us assume the listing is for a property located at 123 main Street in Any town Alabama.

2. Now look the address bar, the URL of the said page, it starts with http://… What does look like?

Does it look like: http://www.yourdomain.com/real-estate/property/123456-123-main-street-anytown-alabama-37767 or a version of it with the address somewhere in the URL; or are you seeing a bunch of code with lots of question marks (?) equal signs (=) and (&) etc…

If it is the first one then you have a properly URL driven website that has a chance to become scalable – if not it is going to be a very challenging.

I am not done…

PS: When viewing a Web Page you can go to the View and scroll to Source or Page Source and you will see the primary Meta Tags (Title and Description) along with all the HTML Code.

3. While you are still on that page, let’s look at the Title Meta Tag: it is the short text, usually 10 to 15 words that you can read above the URL.

Is it driven by the page you are looking at it? in other words does it reference the address of the property, the Listing Number, etc…

Or is it generic – let me explain: Website vendors would create a Generic section for the Title and Description and then use the same one on every page of the website; this means every page on your website has the same Title and the Same Description; pure laziness and lack of Web Architecture Understanding. (I consider this basic NOT SEO!)

4. The Same goes with the Description Meta Tag: is it generic or does it take its information from the description of the listing that comes from the MLS.

I know for some of you who are not interested on how the sausage is made may find this blog boring, and I must admit it is… but it is this Bad Type of Web Architecture that is making your Websites stagnant. I expect, I demand, I vociferously request that Website Vendors step up and realize that these are the basics and they must fix them!!!

PS: If you are a Real Estate Website Vendor and you wish for me to talk about the shortcomings of your platform publicly, and have a commitment to correcting said shortcomings do contact me… I doubt any will take me on but the invite is out there… We need to give our agents and brokers the best possible tools to take care of their clients.

Happy Blogging – Key Yessaad, Real Estate SEO Trainer