About Me

I was recently contacted by Sound Capital Investments because they were looking to better their online presence.

Who is Sound Capital Investments

Sound Capital Investments is a Real Estate Agent in Houston, TX and also a Mortgage Investment Lender in Houston. Sound Capital Investments offers a variety of loan programs with a focus on the end result and helping you get the best deal possible.

Website Observations

With regard to the Sound Capital website, there is a lot that can be improved. When looking at the code of the website, you’ll first notice that the meta tags and titles are appropriately targeted for keywords. Excellent!

Each page, however, has the exact same title. Each page should be given it’s own title. The title of the page should include a keyword or two, but not duplicated across the entire site. This could be a problem of the coding (php includes) or it could have been an oversight.

However, after the meta tags the site begins to fall apart. After the meta tags you’ll find approximately 97 lines of Javascript. While I’m no Javascript expert, I do know that search engines don’t index javascript and therefore it should be used as little as possible. The javascript powers the loan calculator and dynamic mortgage rates. I would recommend moving the calculator off the main page since it already has it’s own mortgage calculator page. I don’t see the need for so much code especially when the calculator is duplicated on an internal page.

Further down the code are tables, yuck! Since the site uses CSS styling, the tables should be dropped and additional CSS added to keep the same layout. For any mediocre developer this is easy work and should take less than 10 hours. Great developers should be able to do this layout in about 3-5 hours.

The header logo has the following alt code, “alt=”Real Estate Agent for Loans Financing In Houston”“. I would like to see that similar to the main keywords of the site. Something like, “Houston Texas Real Estate Agent”. That keeps the keyword theme of the page consistent while not abusing they keywords. Changing the order a little keeps search engine bots in the right arena for keywords without using them exactly all the way down. Other than that alt tag, most of the others are perfect.

Something else I don’t recommend is using comment tags to hide code. Instead, just remove the code and clean up the HTML. That will also increase the text to code ratio, which is currently at 11.26%. For a site like this I would like to see the text to code ratio closer to 40-50%. That is very achievable especially considering the removal of the table and adding of CSS.

Another issue that I foresee with this site is duplicate content issues. Currently the index page is /index.asp. By using the “Home” button on the site you go to the index.asp. Correct linking should take you back to the root domain, http://www.soundcapitalinvestments.com not http://www.soundcapitalinvestments.com/index.asp. This could also be accomplished with a .htaccess file or even a robots.txt. Speaking of robots.txt, the site is missing one. Instead of not having one, the site should have one that instructs robots to index the entire site.

From what I can tell, the site is fully indexed in Google. In order to make sure it stays that way, I would recommend a sitemap (sitemap.xml). Since the site is fully indexed and it’s a static site, this isn’t 100% necessary right now.

All of those issues can be fixed with a talented developer. My main concern is the affiliate banners for “Ty Coughlin’s Reverse Funnel System”. I don’t know how this spammy looking affiliate site is related to Sound Capital Investments, but is really is turning visitors off to the site. Instead of a professional looking website designed with a goal (real estate loans and sales) in mind, the site now has a second purpose of turning potential prospects away from lending and real estate and into this website that is very ambiguous at best. I would highly recommend removing the advertisements and letting the purpose of the site remain real estate.

Search Engine Observations

While unfortunate, I didn’t expect the site to rank for very many keywords. The site has a Google Pagerank of 0 and very few backlinks. Mainly backlinks from sites that have scraped Sound Capital Investments text. With those stats in mind, I wasn’t able to find the site ranking for any keywords including long tail. That doesn’t mean the site doesn’t actually rank for any, just none that I could find. One of the first keywords the site should rank for is the domain name and company name. It ranks for neither.

Another part that I mentioned that should be repeated is the title tags. They’re all identical as shown by Google in the following screenshot.

Well there you have it.  Sound Capital Investments is off to a good start, but definitely needs some work if they want to compete in such a strong market like Houston Texas Real Estate.