Who doesn’t want to live by the ocean? Well, me. But that’s only because I would rather live in a mild climate. I don’t do well with really hot weather. Plus, I weigh roughly the same as my 15 year old self. I haven’t filled out and love how I look in sweaters. They make me look big. However, when I took on this project—Perla del Mar—I started to think the beach might not be so bad. I even offered to work for a condo, but that didn’t fly. I wonder why?

When I started this project I was just trying to get the site to show up on search engines. I quickly learned the difference between a retrofit and a tear-down. After my initial attempt, the Perla site managed to sneak it’s way onto page 10 (using the keywords “manzanillo real estate” and it wouldn’t budge. The site just wasn’t optimized. It simply needed more than a meta tag makeover. That’s a good name. Someone should grab that domain: Meta Tag Makeover. You make a show and I’ll be the star?

Tough Audience

Your audience always needs to be considered. In the case of Perla del Mar, it is directed towards a retiring class of people who have extra money and are looking to either permanently move or spend winters in Manzanillo, Mexico in a very comfortable beachfront condo. There are simple things you need to consider for a 50+ crowd. Make the text size bigger. Create logical and intuitive navigation. The website is pitching to a somewhat limited crowd—especially in these economic times—and so it’s important if you have a potential buyer to keep him on the site and build value in any way possible.

So what did we do?

I called in my friend, business partner and web-demolitions expert Lee Robertson to help out. The design of Perla del Mar was well done. Easy on the eyes, had a good sense of flow. Not too much flash. But it was the foundation of the website that needed the work.

Foundation, Foundation, Foundation

I’ve said it before and I’m saying it now, you need to build a website with a strong logical and intuitive foundation. You need to structure a site so that it can handle additions and anything you might dream to throw at it. So I built a sitemap that followed a hierarchy. It’s a big site and though I hate third-level navigation, this site required it. When a site gets this big, it needs a strong sense of parent-child hierarchy—both for users and search engines.

The Code is the Key

Maybe that’s like the medium is the message. Another problem we ran into is that a couple companies had worked on this project and, by the time it got to us, the code had seen better days. Plus, lots and lots of tables. From my understanding—which is potentially incorrect—search engines don’t generally have the best time with tables. It can read them, but I believe the content will all be separated (meaning there won’t be flowing paragraphs of mappable text for indexing). So Lee took on the task of moving the tabled design to a stylesheet. And I worked on making the content a little more presentable.

Overall Updating

• Updates Area (blog)
• RSS & Email Subscriptions
• Search
• SEO
• Content optimization
• Easy to manage photo galleries
• Browser tested

Results

There were bumps along this process. There were several domain mix-ups (which resulted in the site being duplicated on search engines), domains being accidentally dropped from the server and a few other little fumbles. However, as soon as the dust settled, Perla was sitting on page 7 (on google.ca for “manzanillo real estate”). Which is already an improvement. Now with a bit of time and work, with regular updates and building some backlinks, I think Perla’s ranking will move up significantly.

The Future

We are looking at several options regarding directions for the future. They include doing a press release regarding the launch of their show suite (for SEO), offering a whitepaper on information about Manzanillo, Mexico and purchasing a property in Mexico and bringing more community information onto the site to create a hub of great, local information.

Update

Today, under the term “manzanillo real estate” the Perla Del Mar site sits on page 1. All it takes is time and persistance.