Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not as sexy to talk about as social media. But the reality is that the best and fastest way to increase leads and decrease costs is to make sure your site is optimized properly. Here's some marketing steak to go along with the sizzle.

At this point, the cat is pretty much out of the bag that website drive-bys turn into leads for Internet Listing Sites. Is this happening to you? Here’s how to tell: Type in the name of your community and then the name of your community followed by the city and state abbreviations. If you see organic and paid search results ahead of your website, it's time for an SEO tune up.

Below, find three major SEO mistakes I find on property management sites that limit their ability to rise to the top of search results when people type in their community name . . . and how to fix them.

Tune up your title tag.

The title tag populates the title bar, which is what you see at the top of your browser window. In addition to being a vitally important piece of the SEO equation, title tags are also used as the heading of search engine results.

If you don't have the name of your community as well as the city and state abbreviation in your title tag, it will be almost impossible to show up before your ads on ILSs. Having extra words (e.g. the name of your property management firm, the address of the community) can dilute the effectiveness of your tag. Get them out of there. There is no magic equation to creating a title tag. Take a look at pages that are showing up before you and follow their lead.

Refrain from putting the name of your property in an image.

It may look nice, but when you put the name of your community in an image, it negatively impacts your SEO results. Search engines can't read text in images, so to them, it's like those words don't exist on the pages.

Get rid of the images and have your web developer type the community name in. Even better, make sure your community name is formatted using a heading tag. It's widely believed that names formatted with heading tags and other attributes get more credit.

Don't forget the meta description tag.

Meta tags are text that appears behind the scenes in the code of your page. While the keyword meta tag is ignored by major search engines, the description tags are picked up. In addition to being a critical factor in SEO, description tags also allow you to better control your marking message. For instance, if you have a description tag, Google will use this rather than random bits of text in your search results.

Make sure you have a unique meta description tag for every page on your site. Check that the name of your property, the city, and the state abbreviation are all in the meta description tag.