For me, developing an online portal has been a gradual process of evolution. Layout creation/modification, images, additional description pages, content, links and promoting the site have taken more than a year of taking 20-30 minutes here and there to accomplish small milestones. Today’s 30 minutes was spent registering my marketing site with many of the popular search engine’s “local” search directories.

Google Maps, Live.com and Yahoo all have options that allow people to search for businesses in a specific area. Results from these searches display more information about a selected business or service provider than the listing in a standard search result.

Typical registration will ask for contact information, hours, website etc.. and depending on how you verify your business (via phone or mail) it could take up to a week to activate your site in each of these local listing areas.

Tips before registering:

• really refine the keywords you want associated with your site, just in case a spider is sent out upon registration;
• make sure you have as many descriptive “alt” and “title” attributes as possible in your images, links and flash animations;
• if registering your site with multiple search engines, make sure you’re using the same information for each engine. =)

In addition to marketing sites and “local” listings, many of the larger firms (and some individual owners) have started posting video walk-throughs on YouTube (and cross posted on their own sites) of the apartments they have to offer. While not search engine friendly on their own, properly tagging videos can also generate quality responses.