Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
If you have a real estate website, following basic search engine optimization techniques is critical for generating traffic and attracting home buyers. While some aspects of search engine optimization are more complex, on-page keyword optimization is easy to understand and easily fixable, even to real estate agents with little web or SEO experience.
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But what is on-page optimization exactly? Simply put, on-page optimization refers to those aspects of a web page that can have a direct effect on its natural search engine results. Examples of these items include the page title, meta-description, filename, H1 tag, and the actual content within the page. Ensuring each published page on your real estate website has adequate on-page optimization will only benefit your overall web presence and drive more traffic.
In order to know whether or not your web pages have correct on-page optimization, simply follow these straightforward guidelines and you’ll be well on your way to website success:
1) Select a long-tail keyword phrase to use as your primary keyword for each page. For example, if you’ve created a page focused on condominiums for sale in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood, you may want your keyword phrase to be “Chicago Gold Coast Condos For Sale.”
2) Add your keyword phrase to the Page Title. Search engines generally consider page titles to be one of the most essential places to identify keywords and associate a web page with a specific topic or set of keywords, such as a long-tail keyword phrase.
3) Use your keyword phrase as your H1 tag. A properly SEO’d webpage should only have one H1 tag, and with that, make sure this tag incorporates your keywords.
4) Apply your keyword phrase within the content naturally. Depending on how much content a specific web page has, your keyword phrase should be used throughout the page between 3-4 times. Be careful not to overstuff your keywords, however, as too much keyword usage can harmfully impact your search engine rankings.
5) Include your keyword phrase in the meta-description. A web page’s meta-description is highly viable to users running a search and search engines will even bold matching search terms within the meta-description on the results page(s). But much like the content of a web page, be sure not to overuse keywords in the meta-description, as search engines will quickly associate your website with spamming and over-optimization should there be an excess of keywords.
6) The filename (URL) of a web-page should match your long-tail keyword phrase. Ideally, your URL should be under 76 characters, so if your long-tail keyword phrase exceeds this limit, try to adjust the URL and include only your main keywords, however.
7) Bold and italicize your keyword phrase. Although search engine weigh bold and italic keywords much less than in the past, it still doesn’t hurt to incorporate this strategy into a web page’s content.
Joe Heath is a graduate of Indiana University and also holds a Graduate Certificate in Real Estate Development from Drexel University. After working as a Market Research Associate and writing published Market Snapshots for Hanley Wood Market Intelligence in Chicago, Joe now works as a Web Marketing Specialist and is a managing partner at Real Estate Web Creation, LLC.
