Online Real Estate Marketing Ideas for Agents on the Internet » SEO Mistakes

5 Basic Tips to Optimize Every Page of Your Real Estate Site

Jeroen van de Peppel — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 09:01:23 +0000

How much time and money do you want to spend on optimizing your real estate site for the search engines? If your answer is “not much”. then you should at least review the 5 tips below for every page of your website and give them all an opportunity to reach a respectable rank on the search engines.

Yes, I said every page. Optimizing only your home page would be a little like the tourism council of NSW only promoting the Sydney harbor bridge, bringing visitors to it direct from the airport and after a quick visit and a photo taking them straight back so they can catch the next flight home.

Every page of your real estate site has unique content and must be optimized accordingly. Take a little time and make some notes on every page to establish what the theme is. The theme will become the unique title for that page.

So here are 5 tips to optimizing every page of your real estate site.

Page Title - Create a unique page title for your webpage incorporating the pages theme and other relevant keywords. Ensure that every page has a unique page title.

This is the page title of a web page

Title Tags – Every page should include a visual title (different to page title). This title can be a duplicate of your page title and must be visual. This title should be wrapped in
Title
tags to let search engine spiders know that this title displays the relevance of the page.
Descriptive text – Every page must include at least a brief description of its content. I would never publish a page that has images only. Search engines love text and this is what’s used to determine relevance and rank.
Internal Links – Ensure that every page inlcudes links to other prominant pages of your site. If you use a CMS like wordpress there are many “breadcrumb” style plugins that you can use too. These are great for internal linking and allow search engines to review your site with ease.
External Links – Use keywords, relevant to the theme of each page as anchor text to link back from other websites.

By following the above tips for each page you will give them all a chance to increase their rank in search engines like Google and Bing. This will obviously see more visitors to your site.

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Black Hat SEO or White Hat SEO, What’s the Difference?

Jeroen van de Peppel — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 08:39:00 +0000

Whilst researching your search engine optimisation and online marketing techniques for your real estate website you may come across the terms “White Hat” and “Black Hat” SEO. What do they mean and what happens if you employ both strategies?

Let’s start by defining them both in simple English.

White Hat SEO – means following the guidelines set out by the search engines. Basically, search engine spiders crawl through the internet and read website content. White Hat SEO techniques ensure that what the spiders read will be the same as what real visitors to your site will read and see.

Black Hat SEO – means trying to trick these search engine spiders by hiding content in the coding of websites. For example using text colour the same as the background colour of a webpage.

If you outsource SEO for your Real Estate website then ask the question. Do you use Black Hat SEO? If you’re not convinced then look elsewhere. Google does punish.

The most infamous case of Google punishing a website was that of the BMW site in 2006. They were removed from the index for employing Black Hat SEO. Click here to read the article. German BMW Banned From Google

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SEO Mistake 5 – Keyword Research

Jeroen van de Peppel — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 01:35:00 +0000

Every real estate office would like to rank high on Google for the search term “real estate (your suburb)” yet, so does every other agency, portal and other real estate industry related businesses. This makes it nearly impossible for you to rank on the first page for this phrase.

By researching your keywords and phrases extensively you will probably find that search phrases like “property for sale (your suburb” or “homes for sale (your suburb)” also attract a lot of searchers.

A great tool to use for researching keywords is the Google adwords keyword tool. It is free and it functions by you entering a search term and pressing enter. The tool will then return alternative suggestions and will also display how often these search terms are actualy typed in to Google.

Good Luck

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SEO Mistake 4 – Images used for Titles

Jeroen van de Peppel — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 01:52:00 +0000

I see it all the time, a great looking website with creative and innovative titles and banners. The problem here is that the title text is embedded into an image and can not be read by the search engines.

Basically all this means that the productivity factor of the message you want to communicate is 0.

Web developers are great at making your site attractive for visitors to view but unfortunately on many occasions they fail to make your site attractive for the search engines. This is the essence of SEO.

There are many ways that your titles can look similar, if not the same as how they are currently displayed. A good web developer will use style sheets to create the same effect and make it a search engine friendly website.

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SEO Mistake 3 – Abreviated URL

Jeroen van de Peppel — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 01:07:00 +0000

This one is very common amongst real estate agencies.

When real estate businesses consider the options available for a URL (a unique address for their website). A lot of real estate business owners would choose an abreviation of their business name.

From an SEO perspective this is not the smart thing to do. In fact a longer URL incorporating the type of service provided and the area it is provided in would make much more sense.

Why not have a look and see if there are names available like www.homeforsaleperth.com.au or www.propertymanagementgoldcoast.com.au. Names like these will rank much higher than www.rep.com.au or www.profgc.com.au (these are not real offices by the way. Just examples.

This link will take you to a site where you can check availability of .com.au web site addresses.

Good Luck

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SEO Mistake 2 – Flash

Jeroen van de Peppel — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 01:31:00 +0000

Consider this, It is just as important for Google to find your website easy to read as it is for your visitors. Google does not read flash and there for can not index it.

I know flash looks great and is vissually apealing to your visitors. But let’s face it. If your not ranking well in Google and other search engines you are not going to attract visitors anyway.

My advise is not to not use flash at all, just be a little conservative and don’t forget to add real content and images to your web pages.

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SEO Mistake 1 – Page Titles

Jeroen van de Peppel — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 02:34:00 +0000

One of the very first item I look at when I visit a real estate agency website is the Page Title. This is the text displayed in the blue bar at the very top of your browser.

A majority of websites I view will only display something like “Welcome to ABC Real Estate” or just “ABC Real Estate”

Among other items, the Page title is used by Google and other search engines to index your site for users to find in their directory. By only displaying your agencies name you are limiting to being found only by people who search for “ABC Real Estate”

In the page title you should use around 10 keywords, words that are relevant to real estate in your local area. Include suburb names and other words that people are likely to use when searching for real estate.

Now repeat this process for every page of your website. Use different titles for different pages and stay relevant to the content of that page.