If you have a real estate website with a Content Management System, you have the ability to edit the content of the pages yourself.  That’s a very useful capability because you don’t have to wait for a webmaster to make changes for you.

If you don’t have a site you can change yourself, check out our top pick for real estate websites. 

If you do update your site yourself, there’s one important thing you need to know:  If you copy text from a Word document and paste it into your website, you are also copying a lot of unnecessary code.

Now, I understand that you can’t see the code, but believe me, it comes right along with the words you copied.  Packing your website with unwanted code just isn’t a good idea, and here’s why:

• You might get unexpected formatting results
• Your page will be more difficult for the search engine spiders to read
• Your page will take longer to load
• When you return to the same page to make changes later, you may run into problems as a result of the unseen code from a Word document

You’ll usually run into trouble with anything that you copy directly from another source and paste into a page of your site.  Beyond the copyright issues, for example, you’ll have the same problem copying something from another website and putting it directly on yours.

Here’s the fastest and best way to copy from a Word file to a web page:

1. Highlight the information you want to copy in your word document
2. Press CTRL-C (this copies the highlighted text - if you want to copy an entire document, use CTRL-A to highlight all the text, then press CTRL-C to copy it)
3. Open a document in a plain text editor.  If you use a PC, you’ll have the program Notepad already.  You can access Notepad by clicking on the START button, then selecting Programs, then Accessories, then selecting Notepad.
4. Click in the Notepad window to anchor your cursor there, then press CTRL-V (CTRL-V pastes anything you’ve copied to your clipboard)
5. While you still have your cursor active in the Notepad window, Press CTRL-A to select all the text you just pasted there, then press CTRL-C to copy it.
6. Open the editor in your website, click in the editor to anchor your cursor there, then press CTRL-V to paste the text you copied from the Notepad window.

It’s really a lot easier and faster to do than it is to write about!  Now, you have just the pure text you want in your web page editor.  Use the editor’s formatting tools to bold, make lists, center lines, etc.

Since you started with pure text, and you’ve used your website’s editor to do the formatting, there will be no conlict between your site’s editor and the formatting code in Word!

You can also use the toolbar to copy and paste (Edit-Copy and Edit-Paste), however, getting comfortable with CTRL-A, C and V will make the job go much faster.