Beating the big Real Estate sites at SEO for geographic keywords

One thing I've noticed in trying to optimize my folks site for search engine results, its that there's a whole lot of competition out there when you search on a city and state along with other Real Estate terms. This is true even for towns near where I grew up with vey small populations and limited Real Estate opportunities. It seemes that some of the big players apparently utilize some "post office mailing address" type databases, and generate pages such that they appear to be your Real Estate solution in your loacl town for everything, even though they've never been there. One trick I've found is to focus on geographic terms that may not be available in such a database. When searching on area lake real estate, many of these players drop off, although there are some others that step up to the plate. In my case things like "Irish Hills", which is a geographic area, but the mailing addresses there appear to be local towns in the surrounding areas. Trying to get ranked for searches on county names can also be difficult, but townships appear a little less competitive as search terms. Of course, the trade off is that folks from further away that want to look in your area may only know villages, cities, and counties, so the battle goes on. Getting your site address included on other sites is still important, and having lots of good content too. Also, I found that when you can get links to your site posted, put descriptive words inside the link.

So Hillsdale County Michigan Lake Properties is a good bit of text to hyperlink in my case.

Hiding Ugly URLs

This isn't necessarily a Real Estate related tip, but I've seen a lot of sites that have pages with URLs that expose a lot of parameters, which makes the address hard to read and type, and also tends to make the URL less preferable to search engines, so I thought I'd pass on a tip that a friend gave me recently. I'll give the example for PHP/apache, but you can also do this in other environments, though the specifics might be different.

Lets say that you have an URL such as

www.yoursite.com/entrygenerator.php?id=42

In PHP you can edit the .htaccess file,

and put in the following:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([0-9][0-9]).html RewriteRule ^entrygenerator.php&id=$1
Now, you should be able to present the URL as simply www.yoursite.com/42.html

To also support 1 and 3 digit parms you'll need to add the following 2 entries:

RewriteRule ^([0-9]).html RewriteRule ^entrygenerator.php&id=$1
RewriteRule ^([0-9][0-9][0-9]).html RewriteRule ^entrygenerator.php&id=$1

This technique can also help to improve the security of your site by obscuring certain details such as the real name of the executable file.
Give it a try, and if you have trouble, research mod_rewrite (for PHP/apache at least)

An Overview and Rating of Free Real Estate Posting Sites

Since I first posted some listings for my folks on craigslist.org, it seems some other free posting sites have gotten ahold of my email and been so kind as to let me know about thier sites, so I thought I'd give a rundown of the pros and cons of these sites for folks.

craigslist.org - The presentation isn't real professional but ovverall I'd say it's still the best free Real Estate posting site I've found so far. The site functions very well, and it's intuitive. In addition, you can drill down to all the listings, which means that the search engines can find the listings. In addition, it seems to have some significant traffic, and it allows me to script my own html into the listing entry. Another nice feature of the site is that it doesn't make you register and then remember an ID/PW, but uses your email account for this type of purpose. You click the links in the emails sent to your email account to "confirm your identity". Who needs another password to remember. One of the real drawbacks is that it only lets you get as specific as the nearest major city, which leaves out a lot of geographic areas where Real Estate is concerned.
3 out of 4

craigsworld.org - This one had a real strange interface that I had trouble with. It seemd to want to keep refreshing. Also, when I posted, it came out strangley formatted and I couldn't figure out how to edit it. I did like that fact that it looked like they were trying to keep the posting simple, but I think this site needs work.
1 out of 4

myhouseinfo.com - This site had a real professional look butit assumes I'm the realtor, which creates some issues for me. It also doesn't appear to have any drill down capability, so its likely that the listings are hidden from the search engines. The other thing I noted was that when you search for listings, the resulting list gives no general description, so its hard to tell what you have untill you click on each one. This one might have some potential but I'm not sure of the traffic volume so far. It's worth keeping an eye on.
2 out of 4

local2local.org - This one also has some potential, but I think needs a lot of work. I posted, then had trouble finding my posting to view or edit it. I did find it to edit finally, but it wasn't real intuitive. The screen didn't seem to indicate my logged on/logged off status very well either. Still if they work on it this site might have some potential. It does have drill down capability, and this site also kept some stats on the number of views.
2 out of 4

One big drawback to all of these so far is that most of them that did have the drill down only catered to major urban cities.