Real estate sales is about knowing what your customers want. Keyword optimization for your real estate website means knowing what keywords your potential clients use in their searches. Search engine optimization is how you use your best keywords in your real estate website’s file and page titles, content and alt tags.

In the good old days of several years ago, everyone used the Overture tool to research keyword popularity. Yahoo purchased it and now Overture’s link goes to Yahoo’s paid keyword and marketing tool.

However, the good news is that software companies who have commercial keyword research software also offer limited-use free versions. That limited use is all you need to check your keywords’ popularity.

When you are using any of the keyword optimization tools, be both a little general and rather specific in your search. Then your search results allow you to get a feel for the keyword search spectrum from heavily used terms that target too big a market to keywords very specific to your site, but seldom used.

Google Adwords is a marketing arm of Google that allows you to type in a list of keywords and then check how often they are relatively used in Google searches. I say “relatively” since Google doesn’t give you a number, but a bar chart depicting usage. After you submit your keywords, a Google Adwords report comes up. Click on the Search Volume column header to sort the column from most used to least used. You are more interested in the Search Volume - what your clients are using - than Advertiser Competition, which is what your competition is using.

Wordtracker is a keyword research company that is independent of any of the search engines and uses the metacrawlers (search engines that search other search engines instead of the web) Dogpile and Metacrawler. Its site allows you to do free keyword searches. Besides usage, Wordtracker uses a Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI). The more popular keywords with less competition have higher KEIs. Using the KEI, you may find a niche for yourself and a higher search engine ranking using that keyword more than one that is more popular, but with more competition.

A third research company, similar to Wordtracker, is Keyword Discovery. They have a paid service that searches 200 search engines, including search engines in the UK, Japan, across Europe, and Australia. They offer a limited free keyword research tool.

A final gold mine is in your backyard. Check your real estate website’s log or ask your webmaster what are the keywords that have sent traffic to your site. You may be surprised. If there is a major keyword that is not driving traffic, you may need to rewrite your pages to better use those keywords. If you are in a very competitive keyword area, follow all the main SEO strategies of adding web pages with content, building more links in that area and improving your titles.

Using these keyword research tools allows you to fine tune your real estate website for greater visibility and traffic. A few more qualified leads will make it well worth doing your keyword homework.

In the competitive field of real estate, be outstanding in your field in a planned way. By defining yourself with niche markets, you allow potential sales leads in those markets to identify with you, especially if your niche market is also your passion. Internet Marketing Consultants has worked with Realtors to tailor their real estate web site’s keywords and position to capture that market that matched their passion.

Any real estate market can be divided into many niches. Think of the clients you have helped the most. Were they first-time homebuyers, commercial property investors, foreclosure buyers, or families in the market for a vacation getaway property? Any market that you have a natural affinity for is one that can be quickly developed and targeted on your website. If your passion is horses, then your experience in dealing with pastures, acreage for sale, and homes with outbuildings and fenced land is greatly valued by people moving to the area with their horses.

Your niche marketing of yourself should establish in the minds of your potential clients that there really is no other person to work with, except you, in that market. Make sure the testimonials you gather talk about the benefits that clients received in those particular markets. A great niche market testimonial may read like “We were worried about moving our three thoroughbreds to Colorado, but Don Keye helped us find the perfect property: lovely house, spacious horse barn and riding arena. It is the house of our dreams and our horses are happy too!”

With specialization on a niche market, will you specialize yourself out of the broader real estate market? With Internet marketing, the opposite is true. With your Internet presence, your real estate web pages focus on specific real estate markets through keywords and valuable information content. This draws the search engines and thus your visitors that may be fewer in number, but more qualified to your market. Watch your leads-to-close ratio improve.

Think well about your niche market, since this is part of your long-term personal branding strategy. As you gain knowledge and experience in a market, be it a neighborhood, handling particular real estate obstacles, or a specific type of commercial building, you will become the expert in that area. Not only prospective clients will think about you first, but other real estate agents will rely on you for advice.

By adding a blog on your real estate web site, you have an outlet to continually comment and educate about your niche market. Your blog entries then provide business journalists quotable material that furthers your brand awareness in the marketplace and cements your position as an expert.

One niche market well developed can provide you with all the leads you can handle.

Getting your real estate website ranked by the search engines, especially Google, is done by what is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Earlier we covered the positioning aspects of SEO, such as valuable page content, descriptive file naming, and a picking a good domain name. The other aspect of SEO is the DON’Ts. As great as your content may be, transgressing a search engine’s line could “delist” your site from the search engine’s index of qualified web sites. A delisting would make your site invisible for your potential customers who use search engines (most of them).

Search Engine Ranking Mistake #1: Over-using keywords in the meta tags, article content and alt tags. The alt tag is the alternate text for a graphic if people do not download the graphic. Search engines check the keyword density as well as keyword relevancy on each page to detect bona fide informative pages versus pages where people are keyword stuffing. A keyword density of 3 - 5% is the rule of thumb keyword density.

Search Engine Ranking Mistake #2: Using hidden text to add keywords to a page. Search engines detect the html and css code that hides text from being seen by the browsers. Hidden text is legitimately used to make notes about the layout or code changes. But layout notes traditionally do not have an over abundance of keywords stuffed in them. The search engine algorithms can easily check the content of the hidden text against the keywords. Another trick to make writing invisible or look like a dotted line is to use white lettering on white background or 4 point font size. Don’t try to outsmart a relentless word cruncher that lives in a world of code - it does not work.

Search Engine Ranking Mistake #3: Don’t create doorway pages. These are pages that aren’t linked to your navigation buttons, so they are not seen by your site visitors. They are seen by the search engines crawling your website. These pages are there just to add keywords and content, sometimes exact copies of legitimate pages (mistake times two), for the search engines, Again, the algorithms check all the links and if a page is not integral to the site, your site gets negative points.

Search Engine Ranking Mistake #4: Don’t continually submit your site to the search engines. Submit it once and then concentrate on adding content. Better to follow basic good website design and SEO practices to arrive on Google’s first page naturally.

All of these mistakes can fall under the heading of “trying to fool the search engines”. Do not waste all your good effort adding content, researching keywords and adding links. Any new tricks are discovered sooner or later and then the search engines take all the sites that are found with the new trick out of their index.

As a Realtor, how do you position your real estate website to stay relevant in a sea of constant changes? The nature of the real estate market is that it is constantly moving. Houses go up for sale, houses get sold. Match your website marketing to your real estate market.

According to the US Census Bureau, in 2005 - 2006, 61% of the people who moved in the United States, moved to another home within the same county. Since someone you helped move three years ago may be ready to move again, position part of your website marketing to the target market of past clients. Does your website have something to attract former clients or their referrals?

Remember, your real estate website’s key asset is its ability to target specific markets through the use of keywords and key phrases. A keyword is simply a word internet users type in to a search engine to find your website. Make a list of all the possible markets and check to see if your site has a page that addresses that market. A sample list might read:

• retiree market looking to buy a smaller home closer to grocery stores and safe evening activities;
• growing families looking for larger home in area with good schools;
• counter culture herbologists looking for large basements; (OK, take a pass on that)
• aging families looking to move to neighborhood with better high school or closer to the university;
• successful businesses ready for bigger quarters or a new store near a growing market; or
• job change related moves - closer to mass transit.

Each of these markets can be addressed with a content-rich web page, out-bound links to local community and school information websites, or in-bound links from sites that are highly ranked by the search engines, such as a chamber of commerce.

Discipline your marketing to only address one real estate market per page. If you target several real estate markets on one page, the search engines do not discern one clear keyword to rank on which to rank the page.

Once you have your list of markets, develop a list of keywords for each market. Use a search engine, like Google or Yahoo, to test and refine your keywords. Type in the keywords and see how many pages come up. You can also research with Google Adwords or WordTracker. An example of keyword refining is to see if more people in your area search for a home under “California real estate” or “California homes for sale”. It may seem that the keywords would rank the same, but we have found that the East Coast and the Rocky Mountain states tend to have very decided preferences on their keyword searches.

Your real estate website is the rock in the stream of property changing hands. Cast as many fishing lines into that stream as you can think up. Make sure the stream doesn’t pass you by.

Is your real estate website causing you to miss valuable real estate sales leads? Correct the seven common real estate website mistakes that hurt your search engine rankings and are relieving you of valuable income. Search engine optimization should always be on your mind as you add content and pages to your site.

Mistake #1. Not enough content. For all your real estate website’s eye-catching graphics, it is your content - the written words - that the search engines use to rate your site. Real estate websites are easily populated with images of homes for sale, logos, Flash title banners, and physical addresses that have little or no word content. Add informative web pages seeded with keywords describing topics such as neighborhoods or pitfalls of buying and selling your first home.

Mistake #2. Your content is not seen as relevant. Steer clear of using too many acronyms or pronouns. Think “keywords” and “key phrases” when you are writing and place a balanced number of them on the page. Don’t overdue it (Mistake #2B). For instance, say “my Chicago real estate website” instead of only “my website”. The first example targets your specific market, the second is too general to help your keyword ranking. By only putting “my real estate website”, you put yourself in competition with websites outside your targeted area.

Mistake #3. Nondescript web page titles. A page titled “nov12.2007.html” may help you keep track of a page, but tells the search engines nothing. Better to title your pages like “chicago_real_estate_news.html”. This has keywords in the title that the search engines catalog. Remember to put the underscore between words, not spaces!

Mistake #4. Your keyword targets are too broad. The nature of marketing on the internet is to get as specific as you can with your keywords. You want a higher percentage of qualified hits rather than a huge number of visitors with only a few really interested in your services. A page dedicated to “Denver foreclosure commercial real estate” will draw specific customers from a smaller market, but the likelihood that the sales leads are hot is higher.

Mistake #5. Your web page is attempting to capture too many markets. Keep your keyword targets tight to a specific market. Add more pages to capture other marketing keywords. This is doubly beneficial, since more pages on a website (as long as they are on the subject) also helps to boost your ranking. Break up markets such as commercial real estate, residential real estate and new housing real estate into different pages.

Mistake #6. Stealing copy from other real estate websites. Sure the Internet is huge and the site you “borrowed” from may not bust your chops, but search engines have data crunching power to spare and they are the new Big Brother. You are penalized when the search engines find identical text on your site as on another’s. You may still rank, but lower than you would without that great article. So if it is a good idea, quote some and paraphrase the rest. As Goethe said, “The most original authors are not so because they advance what is new, but because they put what they have to say as if it had never been said before.”

Mistake #7. Use your meta tags! Your basic three meta tags are the title, description and keywords that are listed in the head area of the web page, outside the body area that is seen by the website visitor. The title tag should reflect the document’s html title (or vice versa) and be kept to seven or eight words. Too often, title tags are left with a default title, like “Adobe GoLive”. The description is your succinct and descriptive 25 word summary of the page. It is beneficial if the first line of the page’s content is close to if not the same as the description. The keywords meta tag is the list of all your keywords used on the page. Even though Google does not apparently use keywords, Yahoo and other search engines still use them.

Work on these seven common mistakes and watch your website move up the rankings!

Generate qualified real estate sales leads and post timely updates with and effective and affordable real estate website marketing. Internet Marketing Consultants has designed and implemented real estate websites that are both attractive and profitable for real estate agents across the United States for years.

The first step in creating a real estate website marketing campaign is to decide what markets you are targeting. In the print and advertising media, an advertisement that appeals to a general audience may be the best approach, but with the Internet a more targeted approach is more successful.

Internet leads are instigated by a client’s keyword or key phrase search. Your website marketing plan is built on which of these keywords and keyword phrases you are targeting. The more specific you are, the more qualified your leads will be that the search engines direct to your website. Search engine optimization is the part of your website marketing, based on your target keywords, which is handled by your real estate website design company.

From your chosen target real estate market flows how you present yourself as a real estate agent on the “About Us” page and the homepage. This includes how you position your real estate company and your relationship to it, such as your training and real estate sales awards. One of the best ways to market yourself is to continually collect testimonials from your satisfied customers. Add these testimonials to your page or add a testimonial page if you have a score of top scores!

By using unique landing pages crafted for a particular niche market with keywords and key phrases, you position your real estate website and gain greater control of the quality of sales leads you receive. By watching the traffic flow to particular pages, you can monitor which markets you are reaching and which ones need more optimization work. As real estate market trends change, you can add pages to address those markets in a timely manner.

By steadily monitoring and experimenting with keyword optimization and website pages, as well as utilizing effective website tools, you will minimize the amount of money you leave on the table.

For strategies to use to maximize your website’s effectiveness, see our extensive real estate website tools entry.

Is your real estate website working with the search engines to increase your exposure to potential real estate sales leads? Internet marketing using search engines has two components:

• Search Engine Optimization that creates the free exposure of your real estate web site (organic search results) and
• Search Engine Marketing that utilizes the ability to pay for Internet advertising.

The improvement of your website’s ranking “organically” on search engines is achieved through Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Search Engine Marketing is commonly called pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and is done primarily with the search engines and secondarily with individual websites relevant to your real estate market.

The proof of a good real estate web site design is that your site gets highly ranked by the search engines. The most important search engine is Google. So many web searches are done with that search engine that “googling” has become a new verb! Search engine optimization is making sure that your web site has the inherent features such as title, content, keywords and relevant links to other web sites that search engine algorithms factor. Google offers some SEO tips to real estate web site designers, but third party SEO companies have sprung up to help web designers by trying to ferret out Google’s ranking methods.

Internet Marketing Consultants optimizes and submits all their real estate web sites to the major search engines. Then the web site’s keywords are monitored for their standing on the search engines. You, the real estate agent, get a report on your website’s standings and can track your new sites ascendancy on the search engines.

Pay-per-click or paid inclusion advertising is done most often with search engines such as Google’s Adwords or Yahoo’s Search Marketing, since they have the greatest visibility. In a nutshell, you target keywords relevant to your market and have your advertisement placed on the search results page using those keywords. How high you are on the list of paid links is determined by how much you are willing to pay for each click. When someone clicks on your ad, they are taken to your real estate web site and the search engine charges you for that lead. Once very popular, pay per click advertising suffers since viewers tend to click on organic search results more than paid links. One study estimated that only 30% click on paid links and another found six times as many searchers clicked on the first three search results versus click on a paid link.

Banner ads are similar to magazine ad placements. Size and placement matter and affect the cost. Many websites have a rotating banner position so your ad may be shown only every third time someone visits the page. Banner ads allow you to add images or Flash to attract attention and drive traffic to your website.

Overall, your search engine exposure begins with your web site. It is critical that your real estate web site design be search engine optimized. Even with pay-per-click advertising, your best opportunity to attract the largest amount of warm sales leads is from your web site ranking high in the organic search engine results.

Real estate web design is a critical part of the success of your overall internet marketing strategy. Internet Marketing Consultants provides real estate websites that consistently improve our clients’ market presence. A real estate web site has three “audiences” that it needs to appeal to:

• Search engines that use your web site content to catalog, rate and list your site,
• Persons who are interested in buying or selling real estate and are checking your background and listings, and
• You, the real estate agent, whose interest is getting solid real estate sales leads.

The primary test that your web site design needs to pass is the real estate SEO (search engine optimization) question: “Does the search engine rank your site on the first several pages of search results?” Search engines are the number one way your potential real estate sales leads will find your website. A simple way to check if your web site designer creates effective real estate designs is to check the rankings of their prior work. A high ranking means that the real estate web site design has been search engine optimized.

Once people arrive at your site, your web site design must pass the second test - is the site professional looking, easy to navigate and filled with useful content that captures the visitor’s interest? Internet Marketing Consultants (IMC) has found that sellers appreciate real estate marketing tips and buyers utilize educational guides, calculators, and checklists. A custom real estate web design also allows a real estate agent to personalize the site to emphasize their strengths and niche markets.

If the first two design hurdles are successfully crossed, then the third step for the web site should occur naturally. Like a prom date, a potential client may be attracted and available, but without a name and phone number the relationship is doomed. IMC web designs incorporate a natural flow with a balance of real estate information provided freely and that which is withheld until the contact information is given. An email with the warm sales lead’s information is automatically sent to you, but coded in such a way that spammers won’t harvest your email address.

IMC’s professional real estate web designs have collected awards and their websites continue to capture top listings for their targeted keywords. Each web site design has scalable options so that you can expand your internet presence and utilize greater optimization techniques.

With a web site design that passes the above tests, leads will come to your site, you can better utilize your marketing budget and not need to spend on pay-per-click advertising.