Real Estate SEO and Technology Blog

Randy Eagar, CRS

Do we really understand the power of real estate SEO? Okay, raise your hand if you know that 87% of all home purchases include the Internet. Wow, impressive. Okay, now raise your hand if you are doing something about it . . . come on . . . anybody? Just as I thought. We all know that buyers are almost all using the Internet, but we have a paralysis to action. So what can we do? Here’s a few simple steps that YOU can do to make your website more effective:

1. Create a Landing Page
   What’s a “Landing Page”? It’s just a simple one page website that offers some sort of service or product to the viewer for free. While this could also be a blog site, blog sites get more complicated. Don’t get me wrong, I strongly endorse them, but for different reasons and purposes. The two things about the Landing Page is that it should be on a separate server with a separate domain name, and with a link to your website. The reason for the later is that the search engines will follow it to your website and your viewer will as well.
2. Create Fresh Content
   Want to know one of the things that Google absolutely loves? Fresh content, and updated frequently. How frequent? Daily if you can, or at least several times a week if you can’t. The biggest gains for you here are if you update posts on your blog site regularly. The reason for this is that the blog site is read by the search engines MUCH more regularly.
3. Content Writing with SEO Keyword Phrases
   One of the most important things that you can include in your text is to remember your Keyword Phrases (like “Denver real estate”, “Boston luxury condos”, “Tampa waterfront homes”, etc). There are three main areas that you should focus on your Keyword Phrases:The most important area is in your Title to your website. In fact your Title should be built with your Keyword Phrases.The second most important area for your Keyword Phrases is to be sprinkled throughout your content. Fill your content with about 2% to 3% of these Keyword Phrases per page of 100 words. That means that an average page of 500 words should have about 10 to 15 Keyword Phrases sprinkled throughout.

   In addition, you can use these Keyword Phrases very effectively by using them as links to other areas within your website.

4. Keep a Logical Progression
   I’m making this a separate point as I think it’s critical. Google and the other search engines make a natural assumption. They figure that whatever you lead off with in your website must be the most important. And therefore, they give it greater value. So here are a few tips:Make sure that you start off your first paragraph with your best Keyword Phrases in a “strong” bold text. This tells the search engines that this is really important. Next, take your second best Keyword Phrase and put it up near the first of the first sentence. Continue this all the way down and it will make it easier for the search engines to classify the content.

   Think up plural and other forms of the same word within your Keyword Phrases.  This will help in your Keyword Phrase rankings as well as your Page Rank.

5. KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)
   Some of the best websites that I’ve seen are simply elegant and not flashy with Java script, multimedia and slide shows. Keep in mind that the more of this you put on your website, the slower it will load, and that will effect the search engines ability to read your website.