If not, here’s the easiest way to optimize your site for Bing:

• Consider editorial links (those links that come from within the body content), as Bing seems to prefer them when considering rankings. Although all links are valuable in the eyes of Bing, it seems as if editorial links are the most valued.

• Consider the relationship between your site and your links. In other words, make sure your site and the site you are linking to has some kind of relevance.

• Consider using domain names that utilize keywords. In other words, your real estate domain name will be all the more relevant to Bing if it includes keywords (realtor, real estate, etc.). However, don’t try to cram as many keywords into your domain name; instead, choose a primary keyword phrase that best relates to your website and business.

• Make sure your website has lots of good content. Bing doesn’t seem to favor smaller sites when it comes to ranking, so fill your website will useful content.

• While you’re at it, make sure your pages have at least 300 words because Bing seems to place a higher value on those pages.

• Don’t forget to use relevant keywords throughout the body of your text; but at the same time, don’t flood the text with keywords.

• Make sure each page contains its own theme. Covering more than one topic on each page does not do well in terms of ranking with Bing.

• Make sure the content on your site is completely original. Any plagiarized content will likely be picked up (regardless whether you cite your source) by search engines, and your ranking will suffer.

• Don’t overlook your business listing on local search engines like Google Maps, Yahoo Local and Bing Local. First and foremost, it is the easiest way to gain free exposure.  Second, it gives your real estate business validity with clients. Finally, it improves your chances at ranking higher. In short, you are missing out if you don’t claim your free business listing.
• Don’t overlook the “other” data providers. Sure, you know about Google, Yahoo and Bing, but what about Localeze, infoUSA and Acxiom (through UniversalBusinessListing.org)?  These data providers boast their own databases, which are then used for the foundation of the search engines. These data providers are the source – the beginning and end, essentially – of all local search engines.
• In addition to the major search engines, think about distributing your content across second and third-tier search engines, as well.  Don’t forget that ignoring a presence on smaller search engines and online directories is like ignoring potential customers.
• Make sure your real estate business is listed in the proper category; otherwise, your business likely won’t appear where it’s supposed to when people perform targeted searches. If you claim your listing, you can update it and, more importantly, make sure there are no mistakes or discrepancies.
• Don’t use your business contact information to attempt to cram in keywords. In other words, your real estate contact information should be the same, across the board, through Google, Yahoo and other data providers. In addition, make sure your contact information has a QR code attached to it on your website so that a search engine can easily identify your business’ name, address and phone number when they crawl your site. At the very least, make sure your real estate business contact information is in HTML format so search engines can see it.
• Use your real estate business name in the title tag of your contact page. Doing so allows Google to assign your website as an “authority document” for Location Prominence. While you’re at it, use geographic keywords in your title tags; in particular, your city and state.
• Use Analytics to best view your real estate website’s past performance. In short, Analytics help you understand which keywords are bringing traffic to your website and which pages are viewed the most. In short, they allow you clearly see what is and isn’t working with your website and its content. After all, you can’t improve your website if you don’t know where you are going right – or wrong.
• Don’t forget to keep an eye on your competitors. If you have high-ranking competitors, then by all means see what they are up to. Check out their organic and local search results using some of your common target phrases. There are a number of cool tools like Linkscape and Yahoo Site Explorer that allow you to see why websites may be linking to your competitors and not to you. In addition, check out Google’s Place Pages, as they are displaying all categories publicly. There may be quite a bit you can learn about your competitors using this tool.
• If you’ve done your job and ensured your real estate business’ contact information is correct and accurate, now it’s time to make sure you have fully optimized your profile. A fully optimized profile can make all the difference when it comes to your local SEO efforts, to make sure you have created customized fields and business descriptions. Go to Google Places and pick categories that best fit your real estate business, and don’t forget to provide maps and other details to your office location. If possible, add photos and video and, by all means, make sure your descriptions are rich with keywords.
• Remember that online reviews of your real estate business and real estate services are a great way to gain more customers. In other words, the trust factor is always important. If you have online reviews and encourage reviews it gives your business validity and immediately sends out an air of trustworthiness. In addition, studies have shown that many people trust online consumer reviews. Plus, this content generated from consumers ultimately impacts how search engines will rank your website!

By sending a press release you had the potential to gain additional exposure from new sources. Whether it be from radio, TV, or print, the more exposure you got the better chance you could increase your business.

Print media who picked up and liked your press release would likely either run the information in the release, or contact you for an interview. The additional benefit from print media, especially those online, was the backlink potential to your website from the publication of your press release.

But recently in the United Kingdom, Google has bared its fangs at the linking process of major online news publications. Through the natural selection process of consumer demand, newspapers have been forced to shut down much of their paper distribution and create a news website where readers are picking up most of their news nowadays. But to pay the bills and to keep their website content free to readership, newspapers have practiced selling ads and accepting paid links for their article pages.

This practice of selling links is frowned upon by the search giant, Google. According to Google, links on another site to your website should be legitimate, not paid. Google blogger, Matt Cutts, says about the practice:

“Whether the paid links are in an “advertorial” or somewhere else on the page, that would violate our quality guidelines and Google would take action on those violations, both so that the link buyers wouldn’t benefit and so that the link sellers wouldn’t be trusted in the future by Google.”

Unfortunately this process of selling links has landed newspapers in hot water. Thus, they are removing these links to stay in good graces with Google. And, unfortunately, press release links seem to be categorized as a “paid” link and are also being removed. If this is true and Google continues to demand and enforce press release links to be removed from online news sources, real estate agents will have a much more difficult time indeed with public relations SEO.

How We Can Help

We know that there is not a “one size fits all” approach to SEO services. Your real estate business has specific needs and desired outcomes, as well as particular competitive constraints and challenges. We have developed a series of various SEO techniques that can be customized to your specific needs.

Here are just a few ways we can help:

• Website Audits – We will take a careful and thorough look at your current website. We will observe your themes, navigation, keyword usage, content, and all other information.  Then analyze everything to determine what works and what could be improved. We will provide you with detailed advice and steps you can take to improve your website SEO in order to get noticed by more major search engines and achieve higher rankings.

• Keyword Research – We have the experience and tools you need to get the right keywords for your website content and paid search advertising. Choosing keywords can be tricky. You may think a specific keyword is exactly what you need to attract customers, but your chosen keyword could get lost in the midst of millions of search results, or have a very high bid from other paid search marketers. We can help you narrow down your choice of keywords to the ones that fit your needs and budget.

• SEO Copywriting – We can provide you with unique, original, and pertinent SEO content in the form of articles and blogs that help you attract more visitors and convert more leads into clients.

• Web Design – We can also design the perfect website for you using themes you like that make your website stand apart not only visually, but has all the SEO elements to ensure maximum traffic from search results.

If you think we can help your online SEO efforts, contact us today and let us help you get started improving your online presence with immediate results.

The first factor revolves round the reinforcement value. By linking to your website how would the linking website benefit? After all everyone wants to know “what’s in it for me?” By linking to your website, your link partner should benefit in any one of the following ways.

Recognition – By linking to your website, will your linking partner get any special recognition? Is your website part of the top 10 or top 100 lists in your niche? Such websites will get their links much faster.

Resource – Does your website provide useful information? Will it be a useful resource to the linking partner and to the visitors of the linking partner’s website? You will have a good reason to link to a website that offers exclusive information that is related to the concerned niche.

Association – What is the association value in linking to you? Are you a member of any of the online consortiums, any directory of businesses, etc? This will make more sense to link to your link partners to have an affiliation with your website.

Reciprocation – Will your linking partner get a link back to their website and if yes, will your link be of any value to them? How relevant is your website to the linking partner and his or her niche? It makes more sense if two real estate portals to link to each other. This will facilitate easy sharing of knowledge and information on the real estate industry belonging to a particular region.

Besides the above factors on the benefits your linking partner will get by linking to you, there are other influencing factors such as Action, Interest, Desire, Attention, etc.

Your link request emails should be very carefully drafted so that you will be able to get the desired results out of your efforts.

Grabbing the attention – You must remember that the webmaster that you are contacting will be getting a number of similar mails like the one you are sending to request your mail. Unless you get their attention, it is not going to work because they will not have the time to review all the link request mails that they get. Here are few tips that will help you grab the attention of your prospective linking partner.

• Make sure to use the name of the person you are contacting and not just their designation.
• Make your mails sound interesting and not the regular template based email that you copied from one of the link requests that you received.
• Let your subject line, starting paragraphs and closing lines be striking enough to get their attention.

Creating Interest
It is not enough to get the attention but it is even more crucial to get their interest to read through the entire mail. Every one likes to know how they can benefit from your mail so put that first. Make them feel important and special in your link request. Do not try to write elaborately about your services and features of your services.

Creating the Desire to Link
Your request mail should create the desire to link to your website. To do that you should now what they want and giving them exactly that. It can be an eBook, newsletter or even an RSS feed that they want others to subscribe to and before contacting them subscribe to those. This will influence them to return the favor.

Provide them with genuine contact details, email address and your businesses physical address. Be available if they need to contact you.

Tell them the benefits of linking to your website especially how beneficial it will be for their website visitors.

Make Them Take Action
The idea of your link request mail is not to send a thought provoking message that will make them think but they need to act right away. So provide them with the code to link to your website and ask them to send their code to reciprocate their link.

The next time you draft a link request, incorporate all the above factors and you will certainly see better conversion rates.

Therefore, before you start your link building campaign for your real estate website, you should know what matters and what does not matter when it comes to links. Without knowing this, all your efforts may turnout to be futile. Here are few factors that matter while building your links.

There are two basic requirements for a link to pass on its link value to your website:

The first important factor is that your link should be embedded using hard coded HTML. Though there are reports that say that Google is also takes into consideration links presented using JavaScript, it is best to stick to HTML. For example the link should be embedded in using the following tag: < a href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com” >

The second factor is that the page from which you are getting your link should already be indexed by Google. You will be able to find out whether a page is already present in Google’s index using the site operator in Google. Until a page is indexed, you cannot expect any good to come out of the link embedded in that page.

Factors That Affect Your Link Count

The following factors will block the search engines from taking the link into account.

1.Nofollow Attribute: Today many websites use this attribute to curb the menace of online spamming. Google disregards links that come with ‘Nofollow’ attribute. You must therefore whether a website uses nofollow attribute for its link before you spend your precious time in submitting your link.
2.Redirects – If the link value has to be passed on to the link, then the pages should use 301 permanent redirects in case there should be any need for redirects. If you are using 302 or temporary redirects, you cannot get any benefit for links that go through your temporary page.
3.Robots nofollow – If nofollow attribute is used in the Robot.txt file then all the links in such pages will not get any link juice.
4.Links presented through JavaScript – There are differences in opinions with regard to the status of the links presented through JavaScript. Some say that Google does not take into account JavaScript links while others deny it. It is best to avoid JavaScript links to be on the safer side.

Further Symptoms That Affect the Link Value
Low PR Sites – Google is very careful not to promote websites that try to manipulate the search engines. For example, it can penalize a website that sells links by reducing its PageRank even though the site may have all the other qualifying factors for good PR. Google may stop following links from such problematic sites.
Old Cache Date – This can be an indicator that Google does not consider a website important and that is the reason why its bots do not frequent them. As a result, they have old cache rates. If the page from which your are getting your link has a cache date that is longer than a month, then you should try to avoid such websites because this could also be a symptom of bad neighborhood.
Location of the link – This is yet another factor that affects the quality of the links. Links in sidebars are often devalued as they are associated with advertisements and paid links. It is best to get your links from within the content of the page.

Checking a Link for Its SEO Value

You will be able to check the link value by creating a link on the page with a unique modifier that is rather obscure. If your web page is ranked for that obscure keyword after few days, then it will indicate that the link juice is being passed on from the linking page.

Many Real Estate webmasters are new to the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). So they often visit different webmaster forums & groups to gain knowledge on SEO. But sadly not all forums/groups provide the accurate information about Search Engine Optimization. There have been cases where Real Estate Webmasters were misled by the members of these forums & groups.

There are lots of myths regarding SEO that are completely bizarre and false. So today we will be listing the Top 5 Organic SEO Myths that you may hear from people in the public forums & groups.

Myth 1: Guaranteed Top 10 Results

I’m sure you have heard this first myth many times from wanna-be “SEOs”. Some SEO firms will also advertise a “guarantee” to have you listed in the top ten rankings. But the hard truth is, No one can guarantee you any ranking. So don’t believe what they say. If you really want to judge their performance, you can look at some of their own results or results for other clients and then you will get a pretty clear idea how effective their strategies are. Always make your decision from actual client successes and not just from empty promises and guarantees.

Myth 2: Anyone can become a SEO. It’s just playing with Title Tag & Keywords anyway.

This is another misconception that many people have in the back of their head. Well it’s true that anyone can become anything provided that he/she goes through the appropriate training. Some professions require you to obtain more skills and have top notch academic background (e.g. Doctor, engineer) whereas for some professions you just need to be gifted with certain skills (E.g. Music, Art).

SEO is not all about playing with title tag & keywords, it sort of evolved there but has traveled in more depth. So now “Search Marketing” has become a huge part of any organization’s marketing effort and organic SEO deals more than just search ranking. If you are really serious about making a big stance online, you should hire a professional rather than saving cost by trying to do it yourself. If you at least get the initial steps right, you can slowly start learning and eventually develop your own team in-house.

Myth 3: Search engine traffic is useless and not as good as other kinds of targeted traffic

You will often hear ignorant business owners saying “Does people really use search engines? I don’t think people will search for my product & service in the search engine. I’d rather spend more money in display advertising, where I can show everyone the nice flashy advertisement”.

Display advertising is often called “Push marketing”, because you are pushing your marketing message to the general population without much targeting. Thus, a person can choose to ‘see’ your advert or can ignore it completely. You actually have to live on the visitor’s mercy. However, for search traffic the whole this is “Pull Marketing”. The searcher is looking for a specific thing, and when they see your site ranking for that term in the top of Google, they come to you. And they also know that it’s not an advertisement, thus your credibility also increases substantially. Search engine traffic is probably the most qualified traffic, because it comes from people searching for the exact products and services which the search engines have you indexed.

Myth 4: Adding the same keyword numerous times will help me with my search ranking

This is just not true! The keyword density factor doesn’t really make a major difference in your ranking these days. Your keyword should be placed on the right places to have the most positive effect, however if you over-do it and start writing pages for the search engines and not your visitors then you might even get penalized.

Myth 5: I rank No #1 for xyz, and its going to stay there forever!

Search engines keep changing their algorithm very frequently in-order to give their users more relevant search results and a better user experience. Even if you rank for a certain term today, you can’t be sure that you will be ranking for it tomorrow! So you will have to continue to work on your website so that you can sort of build a good trust with your users and the search engines. When you get a desired ranking for a term, check the other 9 sites that are with you in the SERP, and figure out how you can improve your site and help your user so that you can continue to be the ‘best’ among the rest of the sites. Keeping your content fresh & updated at all time is a must, don’t just put up some content and walk away from your site. You have to make sure that new content are added to your site on a regular basis and most accurate information is passed on to your visitors.

Can you think of any other SEO myths? Share them in comments!

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!

If you want to have a growing real estate business, you have to open your own website wherein you can publish your listing of real estate properties for sale. Real estate business can be possible to market online. However, you have to start optimizing your website first. Another thing, optimizing a website will require some time and effort. Hence, you must understand what Real Estate SEO is all about. Real estate SEO is one great strategy which we can use to improve traffic to your website. It is a high grade strategy to expand and enrich your marketing systems and tactics to be able to produce bigger prominence. The outcome of this Real Estate SEO is that an increased number of searchers may visit your real estate website. This event shall open a wider opportunity for you to market the different real estate properties listed in your website.

Yet another effective SEO strategy will certainly be article writing. It would be a wise idea to distribute real estate related articles which could arouse one’s interest. They are articles of quality based information which you could use as a way to maximize effectiveness of your real estate website. Consequently, search engines will receive information regarding your website, it will make your link-building ventures less difficult and most of all, it will greatly increase the traffic into your website; more visitor will come to check your site. This will open the doors for you to be able to offer your real estate properties to a great number of potential buyers.

You can also contact us regarding our Free websites and partnership services.