If you have not read Real Estate Optimizing 101, I recommend reading this before proceeding.

So now that we have done our keyword research, have created a solid title for the page and sporadically placed our keywords throughout our page content, what’s next?
META TAGS

Without delving too deeply into HTML code, the basic page layout consists of a HEAD Section followed by the BODY section. All content is in the BODY. In the HEAD section is where your TITLE tag appears as well as some Search Engine specific tags known as META tags, specifically the DESCRIPTION tag and the KEYWORD tag.

In early versions of the web these 3 tags (TITLE, DESCRIPTION AND KEYWORD) were all that one used to inform the search engines of what sort of information a page contained, but as the web has progressed, they have lost much of their credibility given their ease of manipulation. Nevertheless they should not be overlooked.

Basically you simply want to make sure these tags are included on each of your pages. Within the KEYWORD tag you simply list in a comma separated list the phrases you will be optimizing the individual page for. For example, my page on Southern Maine Real Estate web page has in its keyword list…”Southern Maine real estate, York county real estate and Portland Maine real estate” as some of its keywords.
Within the DESCRIPTION tag, you will want to write a 1 or 2 page sentence describing what is on this given web page being sure to include text that uses the same keywords you are optimizing the page for. NOTE: It is critical to make this description well written as this is generally the text the Search Engines display underneath the hyperlink when one is scrolling through search engine results and thus it is important to make it readable as well as enticing for a prospective consumer to click through to the site you are marketing. For a good example on a Maine real estate site that is META optimized, please visit http://www.portlandmainehome.com/.

HINT: If you are looking for ideas on keywords and descriptions, simply go to the websites you like and from your web browser (Firefox it is View>Page Source, Internet Explorer it is Page>View Source) you can view the source code of any page on the internet to see what others aka your competition is using for their sites. The code is always towards the top of the page with tags that will look like this: <META NAME=Description> and <META NAME=Keywords>

Next posting we shall begin to delve into where to find inbound links aka “back links” the holy grail of Search Engine success.

Thanks for reading,
John Herrigel
Maine Real Estate Agent

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