Building a custom website is an exciting experience.  You finally get to have everything exactly the way you want it.  Just don’t get so caught up in the process that you forget the most important attribute – an SEO-friendly website.

You need to make sure that your website will work for you as a lead-generating marketing tool.  Otherwise, all you’ve got is an expensive online brochure.  In order to generate leads, you must first generate traffic.  For the long-term health of your site, that means you’ll need to develop and implement an on-going Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy to get your site ranking in the search engines.

So, start your custom real estate website project by addressing issues that relate to SEO.  For example:

• If you want to do SEO on your website, it needs to be SEO-friendly.  That means NO FRAMES, NO FLASH intro pages, clean code, and easy access to page titles and meta tags.
• You need to work with a web designer who understands SEO, and how to build a search-engine-friendly website.  You may be surprised to find that many web designers are very uneducated when it comes to SEO.

Making your website SEO-friendly from the start is so much better than trying to change it afterwards.  Have fun, but make sure you end up with a website that will pay for itself.