SEO For Real Estate Websites

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the use of techniques to get your real estate website ranked highly in Google and other search engines. SEO is something that anyone serious enough about it and who is willing to lean can do. The first thing to do before starting any efforts is to learn about it because what you cannot afford to do is start an SEO program and do something wrong.

The benefit to you is that you can increase the traffic to your real estate website. We all know that real estate is a numbers game. The more people you get on your site, the more leads you can get. Having said that, you can have a highly ranked site and build it in such a way that you pick up few leads. This hub will not only talk about SEO, but building an effective real estate website.

By the way, I will build this hub over time beginning with the basics and adding more advanced material later, so come back often.

One thing you need to understand is how Google works. Google’s search algorithm (search program) is closely guarded, but from what I have learned from others and my own research I can offer an overview of how I think Google words.

Think of how a human thinks when searching for something. If it is a major grocery run, does a human go to a small convenience store or a large grocery store? A human will go to a place that will have a large variety of items. Google likes websites with a lot of pages of unique and original content.

Why unique and original content? If you go to a truck dealership and see 500 white, 2-door pick-ups, which one do you remember? If you go to another and see 499 white pick-ups and one red one, which one do you remember?

What about a human doing a web search? Say that someone types in Austin real estate. They quickly click the top result and scan the page. If they see things of interest they stay and read more. If they don’t, they leave and quickly open another website. If the site is good, they may bookmark it to come back to later.

The goolebot, which is the robotic program that crawls or spiders the internet opens a website and does a quick scan. It tries, just as a human does, to see what the page is about. If the googlebot determines that the page is about Austin real estate, it remembers that. As the googlebot returns to the site over time, it checks to see if the site is still original and unique and is still about Austin real estate. It will also, over time, click other pages on that site and see if they offer something relevant about Austin real estate, real estate in general or about Austin.

How does the googlebot first discover your website? There needs to be a link on another website pointing to your site. The link should use a term that accurately describes your site. In the example we used, an appropriate term would be Austin real estate. Other good terms would be Austin homes, Austin, TX real estate, real estate in Austin, search Austin homes for sale, etc. This text is called anchor text and this is an important term. Anchor text is the text in which a url is embedded. More on that later.

How do you know if Google knows your site exists? Copy the url from your home page and place it in a Google search box. If your site is returned, you’re on the map. If you have a brand new site, you need a link pointing to it. You can also copy some text from the site and put it in a Google search box with quote marks at both ends. If your site comes up, you are off to a good start.

Google and other search engines have something called an index. When Google goes to your site, it takes a snapshot of the page. If Google thinks the website is of value and it has aged appropriately, it files the snapshot in the index. Think of the index as a big filing system. Your goal is to get as many pages of your site into Google’s index as possible.

A very good resource for understanding how Google works and for their webmaster guidelines.

There are several components of effective SEO for your real estate website. Lots of pages of unique content is a huge factor. Inbound links (IBLs), which are links pointing to your site, are a huge factor. Internal link structure is important. Effective use and placement of keywords is huge. The age of a site and how long the domain is registered for is big. What your site points links to is important. The architecture of the site is important, but I will get to that in a more advanced discussion.

Before going into more detail I want to talk about why people visit real estate website and what makes them come back. People go to real estate websites to search for homes. Few actually go to look for a Listing Agent. They usually get an agent to list their house by asking friends. If visitors find a real estate site with a great property search, they are likely to come back to the site and continue to use it.

As people get deeper into a search and closer to a move, they are more likely to go deeper into a site. They will probably click on links about schools, recreation and other things that interest them. They may also click the page that takes them to your bio because they will want to know who you are.

Writing effective content for your home page and any other page on your real estate website is very important. This will be the page through most people enter your site when your site starts to rank for your most important keywords. Remember that although you are doing SEO, you are really writing for human visitors. More on effective content in a minute, but how do you choose your main keywords? Use Google's free keyword tool. Notice how I used appropriate anchor text? Remember that for later.

Choosing keywords to rank for can be difficult. If you selected Austin real estate as the main term you want to rank for, keep in mind that will be extremely competitive to rank for. Having said that, if the keywords you want to rank for are hyper-competitive and you want to go after them, prepare for a challenge. You may want to choose a niche line downtown Austin condos or a specific neighborhood. Just do the research to make sure people are actually searching for the keywords you select.

The content you will write must be about your subject and related material. If it is about Austin real estate, you should talk about Austin real estate and Austin. Your keywords should make up between 5 and 20% of the keywords in the entire amount of text. And they have to be used in natural language, not stuffed in ways that don’t look like the page was written for human visitors. There are ways to get your keyword density higher without having them in paragraphs and sentences and that will be addressed later.

Updating of content is also important to SEO. The most effective way to have fresh content is to have a blog hosted on the website. Some people are also using Blogs by themselves and that is an entirely different discussion.

Speaking of updating, try not to date things on the site in ways that require you to go back and change things. You will never keep up with that. In other words, don’t write about current real estate market conditions. Write about real estate market conditions in the summer of 2010. Don’t talk about existing home inventory. Talk about home inventory in May of 2010. Get the picture?

Every page on your real estate website should have a call to action.  There should be a big bold link in a prominent location that says something like Search Austin Homes and by clicking on that, visitors should be taken directly to your property search feature.  Visitors need to be able to see this call to action within 2-3 seconds or they may leave the site. 

Your phone number and email or contact me link should be prominently displayed.  Keep in mind that most people who visit real estate websites are like car shoppers.  The last thing they want to do is have a sales person jump them as soon as they hit the dealership.  People will contact you when they are ready and on their terms.

Study your competitors sites to look at their calls to action to get ideas for yours.

The time it takes a page to load is crucial. Making people wait even as much as 5 seconds can cause them to hit the back button and move to the next site that appears in the search results. Many people like to load photos on their home pages. This is fine as long as the photos are not too large.

Have you ever emailed a photo of over 1 megabyte and seen how long it took to send? Page load time is affected in a similar way. Keep your photos to 350 pixels tall or wide at the most. A good resolution is 150 dpi. Also, unless you are building a photo album, keep the number of images to a minimum. That goes for logos as well as photos.

Adding a featured listing box to a page may also slow load time. If you add one or more featured listings, test the before and after load time of the page to make sure they are worth adding.

Also, to speed up load time, don’t use flash or music. They can slow load times, which is bad for SEO. And one thing to absolutely not do is have a little movie playing or musical slideshow while there is a countdown for the site to open. That drives people nuts and they will exit your site quickly.

A real estate agent without a great search feature might as well not even have a website. What makes a great property search feature? I can only give my opinion of that, but here goes… It should load relatively quickly. It should allow people a variety of ways to search. I like a property search feature that allow people to search by map, MLS Area, subdivision, school district, city or zip code. These should be in addition to regular search criteria like price range, number of bedrooms etc.

In addition, I like property search features that let users save multiple searches. I like features that allow people to save listings as favorites. I like a feature that gives you the choice of forcing people to register to use your search feature and that allows you to configure when they are forced to register.

I also like search features that notify you when someone takes a specific action. If someone registers to use the property search feature, you should be notified. You can choose to contact the person or just know that they registered. I like it when a search feature notifies you when someone saves a search or listing as a favorite or when someone emails a listing to a friend. If you are already in a relationship with the user, you can track activity and better understand what they like.

By the way, a good website provider should be one that allows a third party property search to be used.

As I mentioned earlier, inbound links (IBLs), which are links pointing to your site from other websites, are a huge factor. There are several things worth knowing about the value IBLs will be to your website. First, think of links as votes for your site. The more the better. However, some links are more valuable than others. The first thing that is important for any link pointing to your site is appropriate anchor text. The second is the site pointing the link to you. If it is relevant to the real estate industry, this is better than if it is some random site that has nothing to do with real estate.

Also, the importance of the site in the eyes of Google is a big thing, but how does one know this? Google likes sites that are related to real estate, have a lot of content, a lot of links pointing to them, get a lot of traffic and that are considered authorities in the business. Getting a link from the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M is good. Getting a link from a high ranking site in another city is very good. Getting a link from a real estate related page with a Page Rank (PR) higher than a 3 is a very good thing. More on PR later.

External, also known as outbound links, links are links on your real estate website that take visitors to other websites. External linking is great because you can link to pages of value and because you can’t possibly have everything on your own site. Some of these sites will also contain copyrighted information so you will not be able to frame the pages on your site. If you don’t know about framing

One important thing not really for SEO but for you is how what happens when people click on external links. When you use the linking tool on your website, a box should open up with a place for the link. There should also be a tab or something else that allows you to select for the link to open in the existing window or a new window. If you take a visitor off of your site, always choose in a new window. That way when the close the window on the other site, your site is still in front of them.

As a rule of thumb, do not have more than 100 links on any page of your real estate website. This includes your login link, tabs, image links, outbound and internal links. Google does not like to see more than 100.

By the way, and this is important, you need to check all links on your real estate website every 3-6 months to make sure they are not broken. This is especially true as you take visitors away from your website. Some addresses may change and others may just go away altogether.

The internal linking structure of your real estate website is also very important to SEO. Have you ever gone to a real estate website and seen literally dozens of tabs down the side or hundreds of links on the page? That is not what humans or the googlebot likes to see.

Think of your real estate website sort of like a book. The title describes the book. The index describes the chapters. Subchapter headings describe different parts of a chapter. Think of it like an outline. It might look something like this:

Austin Real Estate is the title of my home page. A major tab at the top links to my Lake Travis Real Estate page. When the visitor is on my Lake Travis Real Estate page, he may see a link that says About Lake Travis. Clicking on that takes him to that page. Other links will take visitors to other pages. Try not to take visitors more than three layers down because Google rarely crawls and indexes pages that deep.

Get the picture? A well optimized website will have an internal linking structure that will easily guide visitors through it. Google likes this as well. Notice how each link above had appropriate anchor text?

Photos and other images can be a great addition to a real estate website. Properly optimized photos and images, such as logos, should be small enough not to take up too much of any one page. They should also be at a high enough resolution so they don’t appear pixilated or grainy, but they should be at a low enough resolution so they don’t significantly slow the load time of a page.

Many visitors who find real estate websites from internet searches are not from the area they are searching. Depending on what your city or area of specialty is like, photos may be a great way to help visitors understand where you are. For example, I put a number of photo album pages on my Austin real estate website to show people how Austin is so different than other parts of Texas.

Keep in mind also that if you insert an image that has text in it, search engines cannot read that text. This brings me to something important. Google will see an image, but will not know what it is unless you tell it.

When you insert an image into a web page, a box will probably open up. I have seen variations, but this should be a close description of what you will see and what you should do. When the box opens, there will either be a button to click to insert a url or upload the image from your computer. If it asks for a url, you must have the image online somewhere else like Flickr or another photo sharing site. What you need to do is go to the photo, right click on it and click properties. You should see a url with the name of the photo and a .jpeg, .gif or another extension on it. Copy that and past it into the url box.

If you see a button to click to upload, do that, navigate to the photo and select it. Before you click load or save, you should see a box called alt text. This alternative text is what you type in to describe to the search engine what to describe the photo. Have you ever hovered your mouse over a photo on a web page and seen text pop up? That is alternate image text. This is another excellent way to get more keywords on a page.

There may also be boxes to define the size of the image in pixels. Make sure you keep the proportions if you enter numbers there. This may all sound a bit strange if you have not ever loaded a photo, but try it and look at the results. You’ll get the hang of it.

So if one of the most important ways to get your website to rank is picking up inbound links, how do you do that? This is an ever-evolving thing.

One of the earliest ways to get links that is still being used today was paying for links from online real estate directories. The International Real Estate Digest and Real Estate ABC were huge. Unpaid directories generally required a reciprocal link and were used quite a bit. These days it is generally taboo to pay for links. The Open Directory Project is a free directory and a link from DMOZ was considered to be huge.

Another early linking technique webmasters used to get links was to partner with other real estate websites in other cities. A webmaster would point a link to an Austin and the Austin site would reciprocate. This was called reciprocal linking. Many webmasters created huge directories with individual pages for each state and would have hundred of reciprocal links. Google’s engineers figured out this grey had SEO strategy and not only devalued these links, but also penalized some very high ranking websites to set an example for other webmasters. Many webmasters quickly removed their directories. Reciprocal links can look more natural if done right and many webmasters still use them sparingly.

Article writing became very popular a few years ago and is still considered to be a good strategy for getting IBLs. Ezines. Go Articles, The American Chronical and other article sites are good article sites. What a webmaster needs to do is create an account and start writing artless. Some sites will allow links in the body or the article and some will only allow them in the author or signature box. If you want to post articles, which I highly recommend, make sure you understand the terms of service. Regarding what to write about, you can write about neighborhoods, real estate market statistics for your area, parks, schools, etc. It is a good idea to look at your article stats to see which ones are getting the most traffic. That should give you ideas for similar articles.

Blogging is a great way not to only have frequent fresh content, but also to point links to various pages on your website. Just make sure a post does not look spammy by having an excessive number of links. Generally speaking, you don’t want to have more than 3 links back to your site.

Linkbait is a term that has been used quite a bit over the last few years. Linkbaiting is writing great content that other webmasters find and want to point a link to. This is a great way to get IBLs because they are free and come from a variety of sites. Links can be a result of a great page on your site or a great blog post.

Images can b picked up by search engines. If you post an image that gets a lot of views, Google may index it. When I do a Google search for Lake Travis in Google Images I find a good number of my photos in the results. If I click on an image it takes me to the page on my site that image is on.

Guest blogging is an excellent way to get inbound links. If you are a decent writer and can write about something real estate related that isn’t necessarily related to your area, contact bloggers with well ranking sites and blogs in other areas. Ask if you can write material for their blogs. Many will love this as it gives them fresh content that they don’t have to come up with and in return for the material, they will allow the post to have one or more links back to your site.

Deep linking has become very important. In the beginning, most webmasters only tried for links from their home page. This doesn’t look natural to a search engine. Now it is important to have links pointing to second and third level pages. As Google does not index as many deeper pages, pointing links to them gives a webmaster a better chance of getting these pages indexed.

Making comments on other real estate blogs has become a popular SEO technique. The best blogs to comment on are ones that allow anchor text to be used instead of your name and those without the nofollow attribute. This is something in the html that tells a search engine to disregard the web address that is left with the comment. Dofollow is an attribute that tells the search engine to follow the link and see where it leads. Click for a list of dofollow real estate blogs. If you choose to comment on real estate blogs, make sure you are actually adding something of value. Most bloggers moderate comments and will delete any that are not of value.

How many and how fast? If you go crazy with a linking strategy and get hundreds of links in a short period of time, this may be a red flag to Google. Posting something with great linkbait that gets a bunch of natural links is OK, but getting your links by other methods should be slow and steady.

After you have built a lot of pages and have done a lot of blog posts, you will find out that only 15-20% of your traffic will be coming from your main keyword phrases.  The rest will be coming from what is called long tail results.  Think of a large bookstore like Barnes and Noble.  Only a small part of their sales come  from the best selling books.  A much larger percentage of their sales come from hundreds and hundreds of other books.

A real estate website or blog is a lot like that.  My main search terms are Austin real estate and Lake Travis real estate and results from those terms make up around 18% of my website’s traffic.  The rest come from people searching terms like Austin MLS map, registering a car in Texas and title commitment.  You can get code to measure your website’s long tail traffic at http://www.hittail.com/.  As you begin to see your top long tail results, you can optimize for those terms.

You may at some point hear the terms white had, grey hat and black hat when learning about SEO.  Remember the old black and white cowboy movies?  The guys with the white hats were the good guys.  The guys in the black hats were the bad guys.  White hat SEO techniques are those considered to be legitimate.  Black hat techniques are techniques used solely for the purpose of tricking the search engines into making a website rank higher.

Never use invisible text.  One of the earliest black hat techniques was loading tons of keywords that search engines could see, but humans could not.  Unscrupulous webmasters would put white text on a white background in what looked like empty spaces on a website.  Google will ban your website for life if you do this.  Some webmasters started using light colored text on a page with a similar background.  The text was not invisible, but it was close to it.  This is sort of a grey area as some webmasters do it because they think it looks good.  Not a good idea.

Use bold, underlined and italicized text sparingly.  It is OK to use this kind of text in order to make something stand out, but too much is not good.  Don’t stuff keywords in images, meta descriptions and meta tags.  Don’t place tiny images like spaces or dots and use them to place keywords on a page.  Humans may not even detect the images, but a search engine will see them.

Most people will type their main keywords into a Google search box to see where they show up in the results, but there are some great ways to measure how you are doing with your SEO efforts.

If you want to see how often Google visits your website, how many pages have been indexed and how many inbound links you have you can do this.  Your best source for seeing how your site is doing is Google Analytics.  Go there, set up an account and place the code on your site.  There will be instructions as to how to do this.  After having the code on your site for a while you will be able to see what pages get the most views, entrance pages, exit pages, what search terms you are being found for, time spent on the site and more.

You can also learn about your site’s performance by typing site:http://www.yourwebaddress.com into a Google search box.  Clicking on the Google’s cache link will take you to the latest snapshot of the page that Google has indexed.  Clicking on the link to link will show some, but not all, of the links Google sees that point to your site.  Clicking on the from this site link will show you the number of pages Google has indexed.  Clicking on the contain the term link will show you how many times Google has seen your web address.

To know the real number of inbound links your site has, go to Yahoo and enter linkdomain:http://www.yourwebaddress.com into the search box.

Of course the best way to measure your SEO success is by the number of registrations, email and phone calls you get.  If you ask people how they found you, most will not remember a particular search term, but it is good to ask.

As you start getting deeper into SEO you will be able to find a number of good resources.  If you do a Google search for SEO Wiki, you will find a good overview.  If you visit the Real Estate Webmaster forum, you can learn a lot.    There are a variety of other resources if you just start doing internet searches.

Social media can be many things, but it basically gives people a way to interact with each other online. Social media can also be used to get information out to people and allow visitors to respond. A blog is a good example of this kind of social media. Blogging is another subject altogether.

Many people have Facebook pages and have loved connecting with people from the past, but Facebook is only one social media outlet that can help your online presence. Facebook is a great way to let people know what you are doing, share photos and connect with people from your past. Myspace and Twitter are also used for this.

Other forms of social media are things like Digg. Digg allows people to link a blog post to the Digg site and people can vote on the posts as they read them. The more votes the posts, the better for the blogger.

Should social media like Facebook be used for your real estate business? In my opinion, real estate should be secondary to keeping up with friends. Real estate agents posting listing after listing look spammy and that turns a lot of people off. Infrequent post like: “I’m showing Lake Travis waterfronts tomorrow” or “I had a closing yesterday“ and similar posts are fine. It allows the person posting to send gentle reminders that they are in the business.

I may end up selling a home to a girl I went to high school in Alaska with later this year. After not having seen her since 1974, she found me on Facebook, found out I was in real estate and contacted me. We had lunch and I showed her and her husband around Austin this spring and it was great. That is how you get business from a social media site.

Written by Austin Real Estate Guy, Sam Chapman.