The biggest flaw that I see in a lot of real estate websites is the sheer lack of originality and unique content. Now there are a few that stand out from the crowd and really offer something different but for the most part everyone seems to be working off of a few templates and providing the same content. Because of this user experience AND SEO placement are both being hurt. When a potential customer comes to your site do they think this looks like the last 10 sites I just visited or is there something extra here? Do the search engines find the same news stories and generic information that 100's of other sites are offering? There are some things that you can do to make your site stand out to both engines and users, which can lead to better rankings and more customers.
User experience is very important and Google even says build your site for users not spiders. Of course you need to consider some technical issues for the spiders but for the most part this is true. If you are offering good unique content users and spiders will like your site. What can you do to make your site stand out? Well many here already know about blogging and that is a great way to have constantly updated content. Other ways to stand out would be to add content about the places where you have listings. Stories about historically significant events, detailed information about specific neighborhoods, fun things to do in town, etc. Use your imagination. You want potential customers to see that you are very knowledgeable about the are where you are selling and providing this kind of information can go a long way. Add maps to your site or at least some functionality that will allow users to get easy directions to all of your listings. As far as listings, the more information you can provide the better you will be. Put up plenty of images (make sure you use those alt tags too) and any relevant text that can be used to describe the house. Make your listings stand out so users keep coming back to your site and recommend their friends. I have even read a few blogs here where some agents are using video in their listings and this is a great idea too. Be creative and really try to think of ways to make your site stand out from the rest.
On the search engine side there are many off page and on page factors that can help you rise in the SERPs. I want to discuss the on page factors that can be dealt with by most site owners. The first step is to make sure you are using unique title and meta-tags for every page on your site. Meta tags are not able to influence rankings like before but they still give the engines information about each page so they know what it is and where it should be ranked in terms of searches. I still see way too many sites that are not using proper meta-tags. Your meta and title tags should be concise text about the content of each specific page. Do not keyword stuff or try to spam the tags, just use the overall theme of each specific page. I always use my companies name in the title tag for branding purposes but some prefer just to use the theme of the page. Write a short description in the description tag that explains what the page is trying to convey. Now keyword tags do not really seem to help a lot anymore for Google, although it seems they may be giving the keyword tag some weight lately but that is just conjecture right now, it is still a good idea to add them. Yahoo uses them and it is a good place to use common misspelling of the keywords you are using. I know that some sites that I have worked on have received a significant amount of traffic on misspellings because of this. Again no spamming, just 10 to 12 keywords without repeating the same keyword over and over. Content is king for engines just like it is for users. By adding content like I mentioned earlier the spiders will want to keep coming back to your site to get that new content and you would not believe the quantity (and surprising quality) of some the terms on which you can get ranked. This is where the long tail can really take off. Make sure you are adding header (<h1> <h2>, etc) tags to your most important on page keywords so the engines know what the most important terms are.
I suppose I could go on and on with this but the few ideas I presented can be fairly easily implemented and they benefit both users and help SEO efforts. Be careful not to spam with hidden text, keyword stuffing, and other tricks. You want to present the same site to users that you do to the search engines and any tricks to show additional information to the spiders will cost you in the end. So build up that unique content and make sure you are taking advantage of alt tags, meta tags, and headers and you should be able to stand out from the crowd and make your site a desired destination for potential customers.
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