“Hey, This is a Great Website!”

That’s what a lot of people say right before they frame the site into their real estate website.  I’ve seen real estate sites with a range of other websites framed into one of their pages, including:

• School and Board of Education websites
• City and/or County websites
• Chamber of Commerce websites
• Parks and Recreation websites
• “Things to do” websites
• and the list goes on and on

Here’s What You Should Know . . .

FIRST, it is illegal to frame many websites into a page on your real estate site.  The fastest way to tell if an organization prohibits framing their site is to look for a link in the small print at the bottom of the site’s pages that says something like Legal, Terms, Terms of Use, or anything else that sounds like information you are agreeing to by using the website. 

Read that page carefully.  A lot of it will be legal mumbo-jumbo, but somewhere in there you will find the conditions under which you may use the website and the information it contains.

If you’ve never noticed a link like that, just do a search on any search engine for the search term Terms of Use.  The search I just did on Google returned 1,480,000,000 results.   No, that’s not a typo, it really is 1.48 billion.  So, there are just a few sites out there that publish their terms of use.

And, besides being illegal to go against a site’s terms of use, I don’t think it fits into anything you’ll find in the NAR Code of Ethics!

SECOND, you’re not doing your site visitors any real favors when you frame in another informational website.  Visitors come to your website for information.  They don’t stop in to find out where to spend another 15 minutes trying to find information.

If you want to tell your visitors about things to do in your market area, write an original content page to summarize it.  Original content – that means you write it in your own words.  It’s not copied from a city website or stolen from the site of another real estate agent in your neighborhood who took the time to write it down.

You can always provide a link to other websites for more information, but don’t expect your visitors to get excited about the prospect of wending their way through your Convention and Visitors website to find out what’s happening in the area.

THIRD, keep in mind that search engines don’t read content that is framed into one of your pages.  If you want the search engines to consider your website an expert resource on Smallville, USA, you better have original content pages that talk about Smallville.

It takes more work to create a content-rich website, but it will keep you out of trouble with the law and the regulators, your visitors will love you, and the search engines will, too!