Real Estate SEO

The real estate industry is one of the most difficult for a search engine optimization specialist to tackle.

Some reasons:

• Fierce competition. More real estate agents daily are realizing the Internet is the place to be, and there are hundreds if not thousands of people selling real estate in most locales.

Old, sometimes spammy, domains that are grandfathered into the SERPs. Google is taking a closer look at these when they are poorly designed and slow to load, but it's still hard to knock them off the first page.

Limited number of keywords available. How many ways can you say 'homes for sale'?

Dynamic templated sites that don't allow for proper optimization. Some of these companies are making their templates more SEO friendly, but they are still usually cumbersome and make a difficult goal even harder, if not impossible, to achieve.

Lack of money, especially now with sales down. The more you can spend on link building and advertising, the easier it is to get rankings and traffic.

With most web sites web design especially national ones, a good SEO can hit a home run pretty quickly. When it comes to real estate, it's a struggle every time. Not only that, when and if it comes, it takes a long time...often 6-12 months of dedicated hard work.

The following steps are important to follow in the optimization of your web site.

First: extensive keyword research on how buyers search in your area

Your site should be impeccable:

Clean code
Proper navigation - no broken links
Keyword targeted titles - no duplication within the tag
Original titles on every page
Meta description that includes keywords and draws visitors to your site
At least 5 pages of original content with targeted keywords
Reasonable keyword density in content
H tags and alt tags that include keywords
Photos that are named using keywords
Contextual links to deep pages within the site
Footer links
Unique IP address if at all possible
Domain name registered for at least 5 more years
No invisible text, cloaking, or anything else that Google frowns upon

Listings in all local directories:

• Submission to Yahoo! Directory, Business.com, Best of the Web, and other paid directories that are smiled upon by Google.
Submissions to niche directories.

Regularly updated blog (at least 3 posts per week): on-site if your web site is hosted separately, off-site if you are with a templated site.

Submission of your blog to blog directories.
Participation in Social Media networks.
In an extremely competitive market, like a large metropolitan area, consider Pay per Click ads. They work.

There are no guarantees when it comes to getting on the first page of Google. An SEO specialist can do everything right and still not get there; after all, in reality there are only 5 slots for each keyword. Pay Per Click ads take hard cash, but there aren't many types of advertising that don't cost money.

Kay Frenzer is an SEO Consultant,