So you have your website up and running, you have some content, some great tools on your site for the consumer to use and an EASY way for the consumer to contact you.

The question of today:  How do you get your site to rank well in Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engine sites?

KEYWORD RESEARCH:

The first step is determining what Maine real estate related keywords you want to target.  The best free tool I have found is not surprisingly from Google.   Here is the link to this tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

When you type in a keyword, Google will pull from their database the number of times that keyword has been typed on a monthly average basis as well as provide many similar related terms for ideas.  Thus you can tell what people are typing and more importantly what they are not using, so as not to waste time optimizing your site for these words.
RULE OF THUMB:  You want to optimize a web page for no more than 3 keyword phrases that are 3-5 words in length. 

TITLE TAG:
The simplest and  most heavily emphasized by Google yet so often overlooked, is the title of your webpage.  Each web page has the ability to have its own unique title, use this ability!! Place 1-2 of your keywords in the title of the page you are optimizing for these keywords.  Keep it short, do not try to cram 30 keywords into this space.  Most search engines read the first 70 characters and may even discount for titles longer than 150-200 characters.  Be concise and be informative. For an example, take a look at my site MyMaineProperty.com   It has 3 phrases in the title “Greater Portland Maine Real Estate Agent“  “Mid Coastal Maine Waterfront Information” and “Coastal Southern ME Property”  The total word count is 15 and total characters, (including spaces), is about 120. 

For each page in your site you want a different, unique title. It is all right to use similar or even the same keywords on pages, but don’t use the same 3 on every pages as you will derive no benefit from it and perhaps even be harmed by the search engine algorithms.

KEYWORDS in CONENT:
Once you have the title set and ready to go, read through your pages and make sure your keyword phrases appear throughout the content as naturally as possible.   Sometime it is hard to make them fit and flow naturally, but it is EXTREMELY important that they appear in the exact version as well as various variations.

Example:  If your keyword was “Maine Coastal Real Estate” it could appear as “real estate on the Maine coast,” “coastal Maine real estate” or “coastal real estate in Maine”.

You want to be careful about not going too crazy with having the keywords and phrases appear in your content too many times as this will affect your keyword density. Rule of Thumb:  No more than 1-2 times per paragraph.

Next time we shall delve into a few more of the back end coding concepts including meta tags and header tags to further optimize your site.

Thanks for reading,

John

2 Responses to “Real Estate Website Optimizing 101”

1. 1
   randi Said: @9:51 am 
   

   this is a great article if you really want to go further in real estate, thanks

2. 2
   Maine Real Estate Education Blog » Blog Archive » Real Estate Website Optimizing 102 Pinged With: @9:29 pm 
   

   [...] Real Estate Website Optimizing 101 [...]

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