I had a friend who I met a while back at a PAPEN meeting contact me recently. Her daughter is a real estate agent and she was trying to put together a website for her business.

She had paid someone to design her site over a year ago and still has nothing up. The designer told her that he would start to work on her site as soon as she sent them some content (which she still hasn’t done).

My friend had jumped in to help her daughter and went about researching the subject of website content and SEO. She has come up with an impressive list of reasonably current and accurate information. Unfortunately there is just so much there she doesn’t know where to start.

It’s hard to give advice about this kind of thing when you don’t know the site owner or the designer, but I did think she should consider a couple of things.

1. I have written about this before. Decide what you want a visitor to your site to do once they arrive! Then decide on content.

2. Make a “contact me” page for her site. That’s pretty simple content that she has readily available. A contact me page will do a couple of things for her. It will get her a page on the web, which is one more than the empty folder that she currently has. More importantly it will get her started by giving her a template page that she can use for the rest of her pages.
My friend told me that her daughter has a lovely business card which should probably be the starting point for this page (colors, logo, etc). “Any journey starts with a single step.”

3. She currently has her listings on her real estate companies web pages. I advised her to find out what kind of tools that her company provides for their agents for their own site. I have learned that many times companies will provide good resources for their agents to use in their own personal sites.

I also pointed her to a post on the search engine land site by Jill Whalen. It’s called “You Can’t Fake Real Content” where she points out a simple truth that content is only good if it’s relevant to your human visitors.

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