Make Your Real Estate Website Search Engine Friendly

Previously I’ve written about your real estate website covering all bases and while many of us manage to fill our real estate websites with captivating content we may forget one important thing – making the website search engine friendly.

After all, what good is your real estate website if it’s not being found in the first place?

There are a few practices you’ll need to put into play to make your real estate website search engine friendly and a great way to get the ball rolling is to use meta tags. The three meta tags related to search engine optimization are the title, description and keywords, so you’ll want to make sure you add them to every page on your real estate website.

Setting the Keywords Tag on Your Real Estate Website

Before adding keywords meta tags on your real estate website, you will want to make sure that you’re inserting keywords that are actually used on the page. Otherwise you will be doing what is known as “keyword stuffing”, which is just adding a bunch of keywords in hopes that it will help you climb the search engines. This practice is not only frowned upon, but a waste of time. Instead, select a few keywords (5-7 keywords max) and write the page content to include the keywords you’ve selected.

What to Keep in Mind When Adding the Description Meta Tag

Setting the description meta tag is important because it will be displayed whenever your real estate website shows up in search results. You will want to include keywords targeted on the page in the description if possible since page keywords matching the searched keywords will show up in bold, making your entry stand out more. Do your best to keep your description to 160 characters or less as anything more will be truncated.

Don’t Forget the Title Tags on Your Real Estate Website!

Last but not least, you will want to assign a title to every page on your real estate website. Why? Not only will the title tag show up at the top of your browser window, but is the first line that appears for your real estate website in search engine results. Again, you will want to include one of the page keywords in the title. Titles must be kept even more concise than description tags as there is a 72 character limit on them.

To review, here are the steps you will want to complete for EVERY page on your real estate website:

Select a few keywords to target on the page (no more than 5-7 keywords).
Write content to go on the page that includes the selected keyword(s).
Write a title that includes your targeted keyword(s) and does not exceed 72 characters.
Write a description that includes your targeted keyword(s) and does not exceed 160 characters.

[An example of how the title, description, and keywords play a role in search results results is pictured above.]

Once all of the pages have been mapped with keyword rich content (without coming off as “spammy”) with matching title, description and keyword meta tags, you can proceed to the next step of making your real estate website more search engine friendly. Clean code, a layout that’s easy to navigate, header tags and incoming links will definitely help your website find better placement on search engines.

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