For more tips and advice on how to optimize your real estate website, check out these SEO-related articles on our blog!
The following information will help to make your website more search engine-friendly.
Your website should be a valuable resource for a web users, full of useful information, and a great information resource that they can return to again and again. Maybe they'll even recommend your site to friends! All this can increase your site traffic, thereby increasing the chance for potential leads.
Just follow this guide, tweak your pages, and keep your information up-to-date, and of course remember to market your website!
The mandatory first step in Search Engine Optimization is to make your homepage search engine-friendly.
Search engines give a lot of weight to the homepage of a website when evaluating sites. Try to add at least 400 text characters to the page, and then concentrate on each inside page.
Also add in links to the home page that link to the other pages of your website. Keep in mind, though, that search engines cannot recognize flash links, flash buttons, or flash presentations, so it would be a good idea to have these html links on every page of your site.
The text and images displayed on your site and pages are very important. Make sure you add relevant content to each page!
Talk about your business, marketing plans, your experience or background, and other things such as your history, your community involvement, extracurricular activities, achievements and awards, thoughts about the market, etc… Feel free to fill up your web pages, as long as you remember to stay on topic. Make sure that everything found on your site are somehow relevant to you and your business, and the services you offer.
Wording is another very important aspect of Search Engine Optimization.
Look carefully at what wording you have on your homepage and inside pages. Make sure it’s up-to-date and relevant to your business and profession. One issue to be watchful for in this category would be having duplicate web-pages that have almost the same information. Search engines take this as spamming, and can penalize your site rankings for that, causing your site to be harder to search for.
Next, concentrate on keywords for your website, its home page, and its inside pages.
A “keyword” is a word somebody would type into a search engine when they are searching for something in particular. For example, somebody wanting to find a Magician for their company party might go to Google and type ‘office party magician ’ or ‘party mentalist’. When it comes to your business, it's important to recognize which keywords you should be using and apply it to your website.
As with all things, though, don't go overboard with the keywords! Search engines can usually tell if you’re overdoing your key words and again, this may result in a penalty for you, or they might even de-list your site from the search results completely... and all this regardless of whether or not you intended to overdo the keywords or not.
Next up, the title tags and page names are also important parts of your homepage and website as far as Search Engine Optimization is concerned (yes, on top of everything else, too).
You need to have your most important keywords in your title or page names, as close to the beginning as you can. All while keeping it sensible and inviting, of course.
This leads us to the page descriptions, which are ALSO important.
Page descriptions are the short blurbs of text that you see underneath links that come up with search results whenever you Google something. You want your title tags and page descriptions to be interesting enough, to entice people to click on the link to your site.
Another important thing you can do to increase your Search Engine Rankings is to have other, reputable websites add links on their sites that lead to yours. Whenever someone links to you, it is also considered good form to also link back to them as well from your own site.
These days, major search engines actually prefer to find your website on their own via their own "bots". Therefore, companies like Google strongly advise against using software or third-party services that say they will submit your website to a large numbers of search engines. This is considered spammy, and once it is discovered that you have been availing of these kinds of services, you again run the risk of getting penalized.
If you really need help with site optimization, consider hiring people or companies who will instead help you create quality content for your site, as well as help you determine the most effective keywords for your audience.