Site Review: The Ashton Real Estate Group

My friend Gary Ashton has volunteered to participate in the latest site review. I especially wanted to include this site, because we have not discussed a real estate site yet in our site reviews.

The Ashton Real Estate group is a leading a group of real estate agents in the middle Tennessee area. NashvilleMLS.com is seeing great success in search engine rankings. However, all sites need improvements and tweaking.

Below are my initial observations. As always, I am just scratching the surface and getting the conversation started. I would love to hear your thoughts on NashvilleMLS.com.

1. Many Page Title Are Too Long
   The page title is the most essential element for search engine rankings. Because of that, it’s mandatory that page titles are optimized completely on every page. Page titles should be unique per page. It’s also recommended to stay under 65 characters on the page title. As seen below many of the titles look identical because of the extended character length.
   
2. Lack of Social Media
   I am usually not one to have social media buttons overshadowing a website, but in this case I would bump up the presence. Facebook and Twitter information seems hidden at the bottom of the site. A more prominent indication of your social media accounts is recommended. In fact, I would pursue social media even stronger than the current efforts, but that’s outside the scope of this site review.
3. Low Quality Backlinks
   The quality of backlinks is low. Influential external links adds more weight to the site’s overall value. Educational and government sites are considered high reputation sites, thus a link from those sites are valuable to the web presence of any site.

Additional Note: The site moved really slowly for me. I don’t know if that was on my end or a network problem. It’s worth pointing out, to see if anyone else had this problem.

Now, is your turn. Please share your thoughts with Gary and the Ashton Real Estate Group. Add your comments below.