This is a sponsored review.

Agents and brokers looking to market their listings online can set up a website similar to TexasGulfCoastOnline.com.

This website is what I refer to as a "feeder site", one designed to do two things: capture traffic from search engines and direct it to its parent site, and to boost the page rank of its parent site.

In this case, the parent site is AliceDonahue.com, of Alice Donahue Real Estate.

The most successful feeder site is one that actually enjoys a lot of popularity for itself. Not only will that increase the amount of visitors going to the parent site, but it will distribute more page rank to its parent site. The trick to building popularity for a feeder site is to offer useful content, useful tools, but doing it in an automated fashion so that you can build several feeder sites and never have to maintain them.

The subject of this review, TexasGulfCoastOnline.com, does offer news content, and a subscription service to notify buyers of new listings, and it also offers some eye pleasing artwork.

I really like the map of the Texas Gulf Coast positioned above the fold, and in the center. The first thing my eyes rest on when I visit this website is that map. And considering that real estate is a geographically oriented market, a map like this makes a great navigational tool when positioned like this.

But from my vantage point, whether it is actually doing its job of funneling visitors and distributing page rank to AliceDonahue.com is not clear.

I ran a search of "texas gulf coast real estate" on Google, and found AliceDonahue.com at #7. Not bad, but not great in the field of real estate.

However, I did find AliceDonahue.com ranked #1 for "south padre island texas real estate". Perfect.

Here are some other Google searches...

"galveston texas real estate" - not found in top 50
"corpus christi texas real estate" - not found in top 50
"port aransas texas real estate" - not found in top 50
"matagorda bay texas real estate" - #11
"port lavaca texas real estate" - #16

I think Alice Donahue Real Estate is having some success with this feeder site, but the fact it's not getting more success is perhaps a reflection of the highly competitive real estate market on Google, and perhaps that the brokerage could do some things better...

1. Link directly to the parent site - That is, the links on the map image takes the visitor to another page on the feeder site. Rather, create landing pages on the parent site for each region "Galveston", "Corpus Christi", "Port Lavaca", etc., and link directly to those. That will distibute more page rank to the parent site, and get the parent site ranked higher in Google.

2. Find a way to incorporate the word "real estate" in the file names. For example, instead of naming the Galveston page, "galveston.aspx", name it "galveston-real-estate.aspx". Trust me, it really does help. Note: if you already have "real-estate" or "realestate" in the domain name, you don't need to add it to the file names.

3. Create more feeder sites that link to this feeder site. This is one area where blogs really shine. If you can create several blogs, perhaps one for each region of your market (Galveston, Corpus Christi, Matagorda Bay, etc), and then link to TexasGulfCoastOnline.com from each one, it will boost its page rank. The nature of the Web, as Google sees it, is a top down pyramid, where 100's of websites link to 10's of websites, that link to a few websites, that link to 1. That 1 website at the bottom is going to rank very high. So, create lots of feeder sites and link to your parent site using the same top-down pyramid. Don't have all feeder sites linking to your parent site, do it through a pyramid-style chain.

Visit TexasGulfCoastOnline at: http://www.texasgulfcoastonline.com

Labels: Website Review