Web page optimization is often considered confusing to many of the Realtors I work with. In actuality, it’s a fairly simple process. What you need to do is follow a few basic steps. If performed regularly, you should see your site climbing in the SERPs rankings over time.

One of the first things you should do is make sure that your real estate blog or website is easy to use and provides a pleasing visual experience. By using clear titles and well spaced paragraphs in your posts, you’ll make your blog or website attractive to both web surfers and search engine spiders.

The following seven things will enhance your blog’s appearance and make it more search engine friendly as well.

1. Make sure your pages load quickly. Web surfers are an impatient lot. So, speed things up for them. Plus, the faster your pages load, the easier it will be for search engine spiders to index them.
2. Use a black font color and easy to read font style. This will speed up the time it takes for visitors to learn what you’re all about, and you’ll steer clear of the "off-white font color on a white background" SPAM alert from search engines!
3. Arrange page contents so that they’re easy to read. Using targeted headings, short paragraphs, and bullet or numbered lists will make things easier for visitors to process, and Header tags (H1, H2, H3) help search engine robots key in on important areas of each post.
4. Use the IMG ALT Tags for Images. Folks with images turned off will still be able to tell what the pictures are supposed to be of (instead of seeing blank spaces). This will also allow search engines to index the image tags, as they cannot index the images themselves.
5. Place targeted or important content above the fold. This keeps your key message in front of viewers without them having to scroll down to see it. Search engines will also index your important content faster, because it appears earlier in the HTML code.
6. Make sure your page titles are specific for each page. Clear page titles help visitors know where they are and are useful for bookmarking purposes. Search engines also like this, because the keywords in each page title help them know how to categorize what you’ve written.
7. Ensure that the URLs for each page are clear, concise, and descriptive. Create or set default permalinks for your URLs that tell what the article or page is about. Users don’t like to see http://yourawesomeblog.com/4265-jgwnt.php?7788121. Instead, change your links to read http://www.yourawesomeblog.com/why-seo-is-important. This helps search engines too, as they like to see keywords in your URLs. The search spiders tend to throw up and sputter a bit when they hit all those funny characters.

If you make it a habit to follow these seven tips when setting up and managing your real estate blog, you’ll be in good shape. Are there more real estate SEO tips you can employ? Of course. But we’ll save those for another article.