Hi there,
I've had my website up for about six months now and get 4 or 5 leads a week from it. Most of the leads (users are required to fill out a quick registration form with their contact information to access the MLS) usually provide false contact information in order to get the information they want from the MLS and not be harassed by a real estate agent. I suppose there's not much I can do to stop that, besides I know a lot of other agents don't even have a lead capturing registration page to access their MLS.

My site, which is about six months old, has a Google PR of 4 through the use of a reciprocal links manager program which I've generated about 400 backlinks from. I've recently read the SEO tutorial on this site and have started to work on the structure of my pages also but I'm still not sure I know nearly all I need to about proper structure. I don't come anywhere near the top of the results for my keyword search "orlando real estate" but do show up on the first page of the sponsored results for that same search. I've began working on my content and keywords. My content pages all have url's that have a bunch of html in them and was wondering if this will pose a problem with the search engines (I.e. instead of bennetsebastian.com/1031exchange.htm I get http://www.bennetsebastian.com/defau...hange&thepage=.


One of the things I'm planning to do in the near future to improve my PR is to exchange links with other agents who have the same or higher PR directly from my home page. If you are interested doing this please let me know. As I mentioned earlier, I have a link manager program that keeps all of my links on a directory which is two or three clicks from the homepage. I recently read a SEO article explaining how PR is calculated and so this just seems to make the most sense. Otherwise you could go to http://www.bennetsebastian.com/links/add_link.html to have your link place in the appropriate directory.

My main competitor, who usually comes in top 5 for the same search, has nearly 9,000 backlinks according to a search I did on marketleap.com. Needless to say I'm not going to be able to compete with that anytime soon. However, I beleive my website is more user-friendly and visually appealing to the customer so I think that if I can drive more traffic to it I'll be OK. With that said I would still like any comments from this community on ways to improve the design, SEO, and usability of the site. I know that even the smallest, most obscure items can sometimes make all the difference. Sorry for such a long post.

Thanks in advance for your help.
Bennet S.

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Bennet Sebastian
Southwest Orlando Real Estate & Luxury Homes

That's definately a problem. What you see is what you get.

Also, the word on the street is that PR is on life-support so keep that in mind when formulating your strategies.

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