Walter Hardy's Blog

Not too many years—or even months—ago, there was a concept to “optimize” a website for search-engine positioning. Companies existed for the sake of providing Search Engine Optimization services. For a thousand dollars or more, a firm would perform a comprehensive evaluation of a website and offer a set of recommendations on how to better optimize it for best possible search engine ranking. These recommendations may include installing a comprehensive set of Meta tags in pages, writing content to include more repetitive key words, extending the domain expiration and much more.

Today things are quite different. To truly “optimize” a website for search-engine positioning, the website must be designed from the ground-up for this purpose. In addition, it’s not enough to remain passive and expect your visitors to come to you, but rather content must be “distributed” in various forms out to the Internet.

My firm recently had an opportunity to do exactly this. I was inspired after having attended Google Developers Day Conference 2007 to approach Search Engine Optimization in a new way. Following this conference last May, we set out on a large-scale development process for a major real estate firm: Vermont Country Properties Sotheby’s International Realty. The end result can be viewed now at: www.VermontCountryProperties.com (see screen capture below).

We found that to successfully achieve optimal Search Engine Positioning, we had to reinvent the website. Since this website’s key user experience is about searching for real estate properties (over 10,000 of them), we needed to do away with the old form-submission process and replace it with a set of actively-built links. Search engines don’t make form submissions, but they do follow links!

We engineered this new website so that thousands of links permeate from the home page. In fact, the software intelligently generates these unique content pages with pertinent Meta, Title and descriptive content. We achieved this by building a system that classifies real estate properties into major regions, towns, resorts, prices, property types and lifestyle choices. The software then builds a link for each and every combination of these. In addition, a back-end administration allows the client to further populate content by entering town and region textual descriptions and photographs. This staff-entered content intelligently builds into pages based on the user’s search.

The end result is that Google (and other search engines) will index a tremendous amount of content that is very specific in nature. An example would be a potential home buyer searching for “Lake-access homes over $300,000 in Southern Vermont”. The search engine will have already indexed a page fitting this description with content that exactly meets the user’s interest and need. There is a very good possibility that our page will appear first in a search, because our content so precisely matches the user’s search.

Another issue is that our client required a Flash-branded home page to match the Sotheby’s International corporate website. We initially experimented with displaying this link-based navigation system outside of the Flash, but it only served to complicate the user experience. We obviously didn’t want to build the navigation into the Flash, as search-engines stop dead at Flash, completely unable to read or index content!

The solutions we choose was to develop a CSS/JavaScript menu system that resides on-top of the Flash. We even added technology to provide a simplified link system for non-JavaScript enabled browsers in the event that some search engine refused to execute the JavaScript. We wrote code so that the Flash and CSS/JavaScript menu communicate with each other. One reason for this is that we wanted to stop the Flash movie (or complete a transition) when the JavaScript menus are opened.

VermontCountryProperties.com—Flash with CSS/JavaScript Navigation Open

The next step to further integrate content access the Web is to distribute content via XML. This is our next phase in building the site. It will allow real estate linings to appear in Google map directories and more. I’ll write more about this soon.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.