So you want to do SEO for a real estate website? What do you need?

Well generally speaking your going to need to be a bit of web designer, content developer, blogger, researcher, link builder and have a techie bent to name a few of the general job functions. You should enjoy getting under the hood of your website like your Dad used to like to get under the hood of the family car. If you don't like to do those things then obviously just like you would hire a mechanic to fix your car you are going to want to hire an SEO Company to work on your site.

Beyond that you are going to need some tools. Assuming the basics: Decent computer and internet connection, you are going to want to see what to see how consumers search in your marketplace. For that I recommend the budding SEO specialist to use the Free Wordtracker Service. You can enter in your city name or community and see what types of keywords are put into the search engines.

In addition you'll want to have the Google Toolbar installed in your browser with the PageRank feature enabled. When looking at your competition you'll be able to do a rough estimate of their competitiveness in your marketplace by looking at their PageRank. Typically the higher the PageRank the better they are at competing online. It doesn't mean they are optimized however Google rates content on sites with higher PR as more authoritative then sites with lower PR. You'll also be able to review who links to their site by checking backlinks with the toolbar as well.

As you review your competitions website you can put their site into http://www.alexa.com/ and check how much traffic they are generating. Most real estate website will have alexa traffic ranks in the millions however from time to time you'll find a site that is 500,000 or less which means they are generating a significant amount of traffic on the site and ultimately if the site is built properly generating a significant number of leads as well.

Want to see what your competition is ranked well on? Check out http://www.seodigger.com/ . This site will let you know what terms your competition is ranked under as well as the traffic from those terms and where they rank in their search engine positions.

Ever wonder what Google is looking for relating to the terms you are optimizing around? Try out Google Sets. Even though it is in the Google Labs it will give you an idea of what Google is expecting to find when you put a couple of the cities you are optimizing for in sets. Ussually go with a small set since the larger the set the less targeted the key phrases that Google will provide via sets. I've used Google Sets for a number of years. It also gives me a good idea of who I might want to try to get a link from. If Google is expecting some content relating to another neighbor city then I should pursue a link from agents in that city as well.

I know the guys, Gabe and Kirk, use a number of other tools to quickly evaluate competition for a given market, however the above are ones that I use for my quick research and site buildouts.

Using the Mechanic example above... We are Real Estate SEO experts. Just like you wouldn't want a jack of all trades mechanic to work on your Porche, you don't want just anyone who claims to do SEO doing your Real Estate SEO. That's what we do... Real Estate SEO!

Labels: SEO Strategies, SEO Tools