Real Estate Marketing: Sitemap pages – Giving Google a Roadmap

Broker Cafe
Published: 06/10/2012
Posted by: RET Staff

Providing search engines with a list containing all of your webpages can give you a leg up on the competition. The normal method for a search engine to find and list our various pages is conducted via a "crawl." Search engines use a program known as spiders to traverse the World Wide Web. In essence, the spider program tries to virtually visit every page on your website.

Depending upon the size of your website and what SEO strategies you have employed, a sitemap can make sure that the search engine indexes the most important pages of your website first and more frequently. In essence, search engines give each website a budget for spider resources. Upon every visit, the search engine spider will spend a certain amount of time on the site.

Many (most) real estate websites will have a limited number of 'content' pages and a large number of dynamically generated listing pages. The problem is, the spider can spend all its time indexing listings and not get around to indexing pages containing contact and promotional information in a timely manner.