Real Estate SEO – Getting Your Brand and Website Visible in Search Engines

Posted on 12. Mar, 2009 by Jason Steele

As we have introduced the new Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate franchise brand, one of the challenges we face is making sure our website and our brokers’ websites (Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate – Wilkins & Associates, Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate – Laviano & Associates, Better Homes and Gardens  Real Estate – The Masiello Group, Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate -  Gloor Realty, Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate -  Executive Real Estate, Better Homes and Gardens Ventura Barnett Properties and Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate – Mary Holder) show well organically (non-paid) on search engines.

The problem we face regards the way search engines index new websites and where in the ranking they reside despite our desire to see our site at the top of a result query.  We have seen several cases, including our own website www.bhgrealestate.com, where past (GMAC) brand and franchisee websites rank higher than ours even for our OWN brand terms.  This demonstrates how much emphasis search engines place on historic information including links and web page meta data to determine your organic search ranking.

We also face stiff competition for non-brand search keywords from Trulia, Zillow, Homes.com, HomeGain, Move.com and many other competing websites.  These sites have worked hard at Search Engine Optimization (SEO), making their website content very attractive to search engines –  in some cases, using our listings more effectively for SEO than we do!

All the sites you see at the top of the free results have invested a lot of time, effort and expense getting there.

Below are the top four SEO fundamentals you need to focus on to build a solid foundation that will return favorable search engine ranking results:

1. Target the right keywords, such as “real estate search” and “homes for sale in <your city>”
2. Present content that contains those keywords in a way that search engines favor, such as in title tags, headings and text on the web page.
3. Use a website structure that allows search engines to find and index all their key pages, including “clean” links that do not use JavaScript or parameters (the stuff after a ‘?’ in the URL).
4. Build up links to the website, which search engines count as “votes” to help a site rank higher.  Good sources for links are partners, press releases, community websites and social media sites.

In these tough economic times, free SEO traffic is a wonderful thing. But what if you don’t have the budget to rebuild your website? What you can do is get up to speed on SEO and determine what you can do to optimize your site without breaking your budget.  You can improve your rankings by finding out what keywords to target, changing or adding simple content on your website, spending some time getting links to your site, linking your site out to other important places, creating a blog, requesting a better implementation from your IDX listings vendor, and other things that won’t cost an arm and a leg.

The first step is to get educated on SEO, and start working on those things that help your site rank higher:  keywords, content, structure and linking.

Here are a few great sites that hopefully enlighten you to the wonderful world of SEO:

Google has a very good starter guide:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html

This site also has a good guide (though not updated in the last year, it is still useful):
http://www.websitepublisher.net/seo-guide/

SEOMoz.org also has a good starter guide (and lots of much more advanced articles as well): http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization

Over the next few months I will be doing some additional posts on SEO, including how real estate brokers can use their brand, local focus and other advantages to compete.

Posted by Jason Steele in Marketing, Technology Tags: Executive Real Estate, Gloor Realty, GMAC, HomeGain, Homes.com, IDX, Keywords, Laviano & Associates, listings, Mary Holder, Move.com, Real estate, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, The Masiello Group, Trulia, Website Marketing, Wilkins & Associates, Zillow