If you’ve had the pleasure of running Realtor websites – whether it’s a real estate blog or a company real estate website – you know that content is king to keep visitors engaged long enough to make a sale.
Properly sprinkle a few keywords into your Realtor website content and you’ve got the ball rolling. But how can you make your Realtor websites more SEO friendly beyond the content?
1. Set the meta tags on each of your Realtor website pages
Do some keyword research before writing content for your website and establish what keywords will be targeted on each page. Every single page on your real estate website should be targeting 5-7 keywords – those keywords should be sprinkled throughout the page content and set in the title, description and keyword meta tags.
2. Keep navigation simple
Can users easily find what they’re looking for on your Realtor website? If you’re tempted to get fancy with your Realtor website navigation, think twice. The point of the navigation is to help visitors get to the information they want. Keep your navigation simple, consistent and mostly text. This not only helps visitors, but the search engines as well.
3. Build a sitemap
What do you reach for when you’re lost or looking for a quick way to something specific? A map. This is why your Realtor websites should have a sitemap, which is basically a link map of your entire real estate website. Be sure to include all top level and sub-level pages on your website. A link to the sitemap should be on the footer of every page.
4. Avoid getting too ‘flashy’
You may be taken in by the “wow” factor of having a flash intro – or even an entire Realtor website built in flash – but search engines aren’t as fond as flash, Ajax, frames, or heavily imaged Realtor websites as you are. As fun and eye-catching as they can be, they do you more harm than good and usage should be kept to a minimum (especially in your Realtor websites navigation).
5. Don’t forget canonicalization (www vs. non-www)
A search engine may recognize http://www.mywebsite.com and http://mywebsite.com as two different pages, which can effect SEO rankings. Canonicalization is simply whether or not your Realtor websites URL includes the ‘www’ prefix. Use a 301 Redirect (permanent redirect) to redirect users to the URL version you want (non-www or www) and prevent search engines from seeing multiple versions of your website and breaking up your Realtor websites SEO rank as a result.
6. Consider where your Realtor website is hosted
Is your Realtor website on a shared hosting server? Consider investigating to see if any of the other websites on your server have previously been black-listed by search engines. Having your Realtor website hosted on the same server as another website that was blacklisted can tarnish your Realtor website’s reputation, so be careful.
As always, keep search engine optimization in mind as you design and build your Realtor websites to make sure they are as search engine friendly as possible. Your real estate website should not only be easy to read and navigate for visitors, but for search engine spiders as well.
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