How to Move Your Real Estate Website to Top 10 on Google
According to a recent report from Borrell Associates, the real estate industry spent more than $7 billion on Web site design and maintenance, an expenditure that is anticipated to grow to more than $11 billion in the next three years.
The web has revolutionized how Americans buy homes. The number of homebuyers using the Web has risen steadily, climbing to 84 percent of all buyers in 2007 (up from 80 percent in 2006), according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR); Supplemental studies reveal that nearly 75 percent of Internet homebuyers drive by a home based on their Web visit. Nearly one out of every three homebuyers first learned online about the home they eventually purchased.
It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that to do well in the real estate business may require that one has a satisfactory online presence – most preferable, their own website. However, having your own website is not enough because most web searchers only search through the first 10 listing in Google. This means that to get noticed your website must show up in Google for the frequently search real estate keywords in your area; for example, Huntsville Alabama real estate, if you live in Huntsville Alabama .
Here is a list of things you must do to be TOP 10 in GOOGLE:
Buy a good real estate domain name
A real estate domain made up of real estate keywords related to your niche, city or state is best. A domain name like realestatenewyork.com is better than johnbrown.com as the keywords real estate and New York (if you sell real estate in New York) are part of the domain name.
Age of Domain
Google and other search engines assign a low ranking to domain names that are only registered for one year. This is because there are many online businesses that buy domain names just to test them for a few months, if not days. Buying your domain name for 5 to 10 years sends an indication to Google that you are serious about business – that your real estate website is no fly-by-night operation.
Domain IP address
If you have more than one domain on the same server – with the same IP address assigns to all your domains the result could be a decrease in your page rank, if not overall traffic. There is a possibility that if Google suspects that one of the websites on this server is serving excessive spam, the entire list of websites on this particular server could be blacklisted.
If your real estate website is maintained outside of your operation, check with your webmaster to ensure that you have a unique IP.
Webpage optimization
Ensure that your title tags, description, meta keywords, internal links, photos, and content is fill with real estate keywords that are relative to your industry and mirrors the search term that home buyers are using to search for homes. Do the following:
1. Make each page title tag be made up of most frequently used search terms and keywords used in your real estate niche that is relative to your page. To get these keywords visit Google tools or wordtracker.com.
2. Use no more than three search term per title; keep your title short, no more that 60 characters, with your main search term at the beginning
3. Write good Meta description with solid copy, filled with the most suitable key phrases.
4. Add no more than 7 keywords to you Meta keywords. Keep the keywords relevant to you topic. Although some search engine does not require them, it can be still useful
5. Add alternate tags that are made up of keywords to your photos
6. Bold and add internal links to keywords in you main content
7. Build your heading (H1) with keywords
Link building
Although internal links are essential, external links are incredible valuable. Google has recently clamped down on excessive two-way linking that verges on the border of cloaking. Therefore, I highly recommend three-way linking. That said, it would be a plus to your linking strategy if you had more than one website: one as your main site for receiving incoming links and the other as a directory or a blog via which you could link to others. That way, you will avoid the possibility of being penalized by Google. Remember to always add rich keyword phrases to you link title.
Use the tools from the guys at buildpr.com in your linking strategy. If you do not mind spending a little to promote your site download the tools from IBP, this tool will show exactly what your real estate competitors are doing. Submit to free directories like www.realout.com . If you have the extra dollars to spend on marketing, I would recommend that you place text ads on reals.com and its affiliate of websites. For $99.00 you can have your text ads placed on these 12 sites for a year:
Reals.com
RealEstate4.com
LinkRE.com
RealEstateYellow.com
iRealEstateDirectory
DirectoryRealEstate.com
NetSavvyAgent.com
Realestatebig.com
RealestateAward.com
RealestateRegional.com
RealestateKey.com
RealestateBest.com
5 of the best free directories include:
Open Directory Project (http://dmoz.org/)
World Site Index (http://www.worldsiteindex.com/)
Domaining.in (http://www.domaining.in/)
Web World (http://www.webworldindex.com/)
Search Sight (http://www.searchsight.com/)
5 of the best paid directories include:
Yahoo! Directory (http://dir.yahoo.com/)
Best of the Web (http://botw.org/)
Business.com (http://www.business.com/)
Aviva (http://www.avivadirectory.com/)
Ezilon (http://www.ezilon.com/)
Submit articles to article directories
Submit well written articles on subjects in your real estate area. Imbed links pointing to your site on these articles and submit them to articles directories. Every link will provide a back link to your page. If your articles are very authoritative – filled with useful information it becomes more likely that other webmasters will add it to their pages, thus increasing your back links even more. Here are some reliable directories:
365articles.com
amazines.com
article99.com
articlealley.com
articlebiz.com
articlecity.com
articledashboard.com
articledepot.co.uk
articlehub.com
Articlesender.com
bigarticles.com
biz-whiz.com
buzzle.com
ezinearticles.com
ezine-articles-planet.com
ezineplug.com
ezine-writer.com.au
freezinesite.com
goarticles.com
ideamarketers.com/writers.cfm
ideaviewer.com
ireprint.info
isnare.com
linksnoop.com
pnnonline.org
Searchwarp.com
simplysearch4it.com
Press release
Submit 2 press releases every month to online press release directories. Here are a few that I find reliable:
prleap.com
clickpress.com
pr.com
express-press-release.com
Pr-inside.com
pr-gb.com
pr-usa.net
live-pr.com
bestsyndication.com
americanchronicle.com
RSS News
Add two sets of rss news on your front page with no more than 10 stories per feed. If you are for instance, in the Huntsville homes for sale market you can add one RSS from a Huntsville local TV or newspaper source and the other RSS from a real estate source. Use an RSS reader that converts it to HTML rather than JavaScript. That way, the search will see actual text when Google crawls through your site. Because these news sources update daily, if not hourly, Google will crawl your site often, looking for fresh content. My website www.huntsvillepr.com is crawl through every day or so by Google. Check out rss-info.com for converting any RSS to php or html.
In addition, create your own site RSS feed and include it in the border of all your pages. If your site give updated real estate information, ask others to include your rss feed in their site
Create Blog
Blogs are a great way to embed links into content and to create addition back links and traffic to your website. Visit blogger.com – creating a blog is as easy as 1,2,3. What is great about blogger.com is that your content is instantly searchable in Google search engine. If you are not comfortable with the whole blogger phenomenon you can easy create an online presence with Activerain.com
Today real estate Listings are distributed broadly and indiscriminately to virtually every facet of the internet. A home buyer can find homes listed on sites as broad as Realtor.com and as targeted as BobVila.com. There are a myriad of real estate related websites that realtors can place their ads on for free, some for a small fee, some allow realtors to place links on unique pages.
List your real estate business on Yahoo! Real Estate, http://realestate.yahoo.com/info Zillow.com®, and Trulia.com. These companies have launched a standard multiple listings services, through which realtors and other listings providers will be able to distribute their listings data to several of the leading real estate sites in one common format, making it easier to get critical information to consumers faster and more efficiently.
Try creating relationships with some of most visited real estate websites:
Realtor.com
Move.com
HomeGain
Zillow
Rent.com
Yahoo! Real Estate
ZipRealty
Apartments.com
ServiceMagic
Trulia.com
MSN Real Estate
VisualTour.com
Homes.com
RealtyTrac
WhiteFence
ForRent.com
In addition, although it does not provide for link building and property listing, Yahoo’s www.kijiji.com is a free classified portal that provides an easy means of advertising and drawing visitors to your website, thus creating brand awareness.
Better yet, use a one-stop-post for all your real estate listings. Visit www.postlets.com and sign up for an account. Through postlets.com you can post your real estate listing to most of the well established real estate brands like Trulia and Zillow.
Social media marketing
The industry has undergone a remarkable shift. Layers of cyberspace connectivity are developing in numbers too numerous to list. An outgrowth of the MySpace social networking phenomenon, sites such as LinkedIn are geared toward linking professional profiles to garner career opportunities, consulting offers, new ventures, and job opportunities.
You must get involved in the top social media sites to understand them thoroughly. My thought process behind this was that the only way to start understanding the type of content that works is by being exposed to the stories, titles and content on a daily basis. Therefore this mainly involved using Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon and the like on a regular basis.
Well, at the end of the day, what really counts is perseverance. Rockerfeller once said, “persistency is the single most important thing in business”. If you post one blog a day, you will have 365 pages at the end of the year - more pages than the average book. THINK ABOUT IT!
Great real estate seo advice. I will keep trying these
Some excellent advice…most Realtors don’t know much about SEO. I have had an interest in it which helps me stay on top of what is necessary to be found online.
Wow, Excellent post. The information you have in this post is more valuable than tons of videos and e-books people sell for big bucks.
Thanks 345. I will try to keep this blog distilled and to the point
Bill, I am happy to hear that you are doing the SEO thing. Persistency is the key to real estate on the web
This is pretty good. Its lots of work and you will need to be committed. It will work.
Alex, you are right. Commitment is the key. If you post one real estate blog a day, you will have 365 at the end of the year. Each blog could take you on the average of only one hour, sometimes much less
Apr 29th, 2008 at 12:22 am
[…] wincing.at.light wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptAccording to a recent report from Borrell Associates, the real estate industry spent more than $7 billion on Web site design and maintenance, an expenditure that is anticipated to grow to more than $11 billion in the next three years. … […]