Hoping for opinions

[rostrander]

Hi guys,
I am a Realtor in Michigan and have a website I would like your honest opinions on. My daughter originally designed it and I have went through and made my changes to where i am comfortable with it. I didn't want the same old design of most realty companies. I haven't input all of my listings yet so I linked to my other site where they are already on. Do you see any major design flaws or seo errors? I rank very well in the search engines for my keywords but my page rank on Google dropped to a 3. I would appreciate any opinions. Here is the site: www.bigrapidsexit.com

[judyo]

Personally, I feel your welcome content is in a difficult to read font and is not broken up enough. Looks like too much to read as it currently stands. Web surfers want to be able to quickly browse what looks interesting. Your current set-up might scare them away.

Your first paragraph can be broken up at least into 2 or more paragraphs. I think your content is just "too wordy." Same with your second huge paragraph.

In fact, it's best to break up the content and use H2 tags to give a descriptive title/heading for the paragraph(s) underneath. Helps with ease of reading and seo.

My suggestion would be to edit these paragraphs and lighten them up. Next, you might want to put some links in the paragraphs to bring your readers into your site without just relying on your side nav menu. Also, I would definitely try a different font. Maybe what you're using for your featured listings.

On your featured listings, not everyone will know that they need to click on the photo to get more information about that listing. Either tell them that under the photo or add another link to the text area of each listing.

It does seem easy to navigate but you need to study how to better use your meta description and keywords. As you currently have it, your description is just a list of keywords (it should just be a simple description of what that page is in readable sentences). Although it is said that the keyword meta tag isn't used by most search engines anymore, it still should be done correctly, IMO. Most suggest that you should only have 1-3 keywords in the meta tag for each page. You have so many it could be construed as being spammy as you repeat some. I checked another page & see that you have it written up better on that one. Fix the one on your home page to be more like the one on your Listings page.

[Solution]

I agree with judyo 100% - great review.
Maybe not all your body text should be BOLD. This sometimes implies shouting, like using all caps.
And definitely break up the 2 paragraphs into at least 4. Highlight a few words in each paragraph to make scanning easier, even if you don't interject some links.
And the meta tags, as well.

[Memphis]

I agree. Less is more!

Maybe hit the high lites with those paragraphs and expand it to another page. Definitely get rid of the all caps, at a glance the whole paragraph blends together.

Just an opinionated view.

[rostrander]

I appreciate all the replies. I have been struggling between making Google happy and making a usable website. I didn't notice the caps were still on. We didn't use a template and while writing the html I forgot to end the caps after my heading. The site is only a year old and I have made into the top 5 in most search engines so I have been afraid to change to much. I did take the caps off and make smaller paragraphs. I will see how it affects my ranking and slowly make more improvements. Thanks again

[nancychiri]

I would cut down the text by 50% - and use bullets. Many people only "scan" pages. This is way too much text to digest.

[webmaster]

Changing design will not effect your rankings if you have an SE friendly website assuming the same content (Or similar) is present.