A good search engine ranking means that your website will come up first against someone's search.  This isn't an easy accomplishment and certainly can't be done with a "generic" website.  The trick is make sure your website is LOCALIZED.

Here's how it works... If someone in Plattsburgh, New York, goes searching for a realtor using some simple search term like "real estate" or "realtor" or "new homes" the search engine is going to attempt to provide listings that are local to the user.  If your site has little or no local data, it won't be recognized as a local site -- hence, your site gets left out in the cold.

Localize everything on your website. If you in Plattsburgh, make sure that the term Plattsburgh is used frequently, make sure you have links to and from other local businesses and restaurants, and make sure that you have pages created for key neighborhoods or landmarks around Plattsburg. It's that simple.

If you don't localize, you get treated as just one of 1.5 million realtors on the continent.  If you do localize, your visiblity goes up from there.