Is 1 design better than another?

[jjwelu]

I'm tracking two of my sites  joeandcindy.com and minnesotashortsaleteam.com, both sites were done in wordpress however by different web designers.  the Minnesota short sale site has gotten high rankings for several key terms without doing any link building or really any other off site optimization.  I'm getting ready to have another site built and I'm wondering if there is something simple in the basic architecture of the site that is superior with the minnesota short sale site vs the joeandcindy.com site.  If you could take quick glance and point me in the right direction I would appreciate it.  Thanks

www.Joeandcindy.com

www.Minnesotashortsaleteam.com

[AlanBleiweiss]

Joe,

I've done extensive SEO work and numerous audits in the real estate market.  This is a situation where you're comparing apples to Honeycrisp apples.  (yeah, apples to oranges wasn't appropriate for a Minnesota site )

Consider the shear volume of search and number of sites competing for the very generic "real estate" related phrases.  Then do the same for the much more refined focus "short sale" related phrases.

JoeAndCindy.com is competing in a much more difficult market online, and it's trying to target many more keyword variations.

[jjwelu]

thanks for the note,   I was just curious if something in the design/navigation did better with the short sale site,   I agree those terms are much easier to rank for but it just seemed like maybe something was working better on the short sale site to shoot up so quickly when it took me forever on my other site.   would you agree wordpress is the way to go?

[AlanBleiweiss]

As long as it's set up with SEO in mind at the admin level, for blogs and for building core sites with integral blogs, I recommend WordPress to my clients.

[DavidLenehan]

I prefer the second site but I would be careful about using lots of links in your footer.  It doesn't look good and is seen as a negative by some search engines.