Real Estate Search Engine Optimization

We have compiled a list of tips and resources for those of you who do or want to do your own search engine optimization for your Real Estate Websites and blogs.

• The first resources I want to discuss are blogs and social networks. RealTown and ActiveRain are great resources for Real Estate SEO. When you create blog posts though these sites, it is a very good chance that your posts will be picked up by Google.
• Press Releases and Articles – Having a quality press release or article written and then distributed to the top media networks can be a great way to not only bring in more traffic to your site but also a great SEO method. Press releases and articles generally have links back to your site and services and if written well the articles will be optimized to be search engine friendly.
• RSS Feeds – have an rss feed of your property listings programmed. Add a link to your rss feed to your blogs and add the feed to rss feed directories.
• Don’t use too much Flash or JavaScript. Search engines cannot index Flash or JavaScript. There are some great widgets out there but most of them utilize Flash or JavaScript technology. For example if you have a Flash or JavaScript listing widget that displays all your listings, search engines will not index that widget. But if you have an HTML widget of your listings, then search engines will index all the listings and the links back to your listings will also be indexed. So to sum it up, if you are using Widgets, Adlets or any other utilities/tools, check to see if there is an HTML version available.
• Keyword Hyperlinks – Link keywords in your pages and blogs and make sure and attach titles to your links. For example: create a hyperlink like Listing Widgets and link it back to the page rather then a direct url like http://www.classifiedflyerads.com/adlets.php
• Surround your main page title by h1 tags. You will need to be familiar with HTML to utilize this method.
• Properly code your web page title tags so the title tag in the HTML is relevant to the page. For example if your page talks about Email Signature Widgets then your page title tag should be something like . You will need to be familiar with HTML to utilize this method or contact your web developer and ask him/her about this.
• CSS/Hyperlink menus – use hyperlink/CSS menus on your websites rather then image, Flash or JavaScript menu. Ask your web developer if CSS hyperlink menus are being used.

There is a whole lot more in regards to SEO but the above list is some of the most important. Please feel free to ask questions and we would be happy to answer. We also welcome any tips anyone else can add to this list. If we get lots of good tips from ActiveRain members we will publish a web page of all the tips.