Its not a surprise that a lot of Real Estate businesses are constantly looking at online opportunities and ways to get new leads from the search engines organically. However the basic problem with many of these sites are, they aren’t properly optimized for the search engines. Some of these sites use excessive flash content, fancy navigation & images which makes them visually appealing but very poor for the search engines.

So I’ll be sharing some basic On-page Optimization techniques that you can use on your existing site to improve your search rankings.

• Optimize your Page Titles: A site’s title is till now the most important ‘on-page’ factor that determines your search rankings. One of the ways Google’s check your site’s relevancy for a keyword is via your Page’s Title Tag. So it is really important that you write unique title for each of your site’s pages and not just your Home page. So for instance, if you are wanting to rank for the phrase “Virginia Real Estate”, you need to make sure that this phrase is inside your title tag.Title tag is also very important for your visitors to identify you. When a user performs a search via the search engine, a title tag & description is all that a searcher sees. So if you don’t have a appealing title tag, a searcher wouldn’t be interested to click on your listing, even if you have your desired ranking.

  

• Optimize your Meta Description Tag: Unlike other meta tags, Meta Description tag still holds a significant importance in terms of SEO and usability. Search engines uses meta description as a snippet of a page along with it’s title. Your meta description should be unique for each of your page and it must contain your primary keywords that you targeting with that particular page. Don’t just stuff your description with keywords – it won’t help! Try to naturally write a compelling description that has your keywords & related words on it.
• Optimize your Content with Keywords & Synonyms: Your Real Estate site will definitely have a lot of content inside, for instance – Description of different properties & assets, their details, location etc. Definitely you would want to rank for as many terms as you can – especially the long tail keywords. In order to do so, you will have to keep in mind that, the content that you are writing will also need to be optimized for the search engines. Now I’m not saying that you should stuff your content with keywords and make them primary for the search engines. Your content’s intended audience will always be your visitors. However in order for the search engine to understand what is your page all about, you should include some of the ‘terms’ that are related to your page. Now how should you choose your keyword? One of the most easily way to look at your existing website/page and brainstorm for words that your visitors might use to search for you. Once you come up with a healthy list of words, refine those using a good keyword tool like – Google Keyword Tool External. This tool will show you the popularity of that keyword, how any searches does it generate and how much paid competition does the keyword has.

  Here is a screen shot of the tool:

  

• Optimize your Internal Linking Structure: It is absolutely essential to optimize your internal links for the search engines as well as to give your visitors a better site navigation. When you are linking to a page within your site, always use descriptive Anchor text. So for instance, if you are linking to your New York Real Estate Page, make sure your anchor text contains the phrase – “New York Real Estate”. Try avoiding those non-descriptive link text like – click here, view more etc.
• Optimize your Images: When you are adding different images & pictures of different properties in your real estate website, make sure that you optimize them properly so that they can give you a healthy boost in terms of your ranking. Google would love to rank a page which contains relevant information of all types – text, video, pictures etc. So adding images with your content is always a good practice. Images can make your site look more visually appealing and helps the user to understand the context better. However if your images aren’t optimized properly with proper Alt & Title tag then search engines won’t be able to make any sense out of them. Always use the keywords of your page in your image name, title & alt text. If the picture is about a completely different subject, add a appropriate name, title & Alt text that can independently describe the content of the picture.

So I hope these basic on-page optimization tips will be useful for your Real Estate SEO efforts. We will definitely cover more topics related to Real Estate SEO in the near future. Stay Tuned!

Tags: optimization, SEO