For over a decade Real Estate SEO Pros has been working behind the scenes with Real Estate Agents to teach them SEO. After some discussion we decided that it was time to unveil our SEO training for the general public and let all Agents access to our free video series.
Many modern day Real Estate Agents are realizing that Search Engine Optimization or SEO is fundamental to their on line and off line success. More and more buyers and sellers (80% according to USA Today 2007) are going on line to investigate their market and pricing before they even pick up the phone to call an agent.
SEO is generally broken down in to two central applications that are appropriate to a website. There is onsite and then there is offsite optimization. In order to decide where you should be placed, the search engines will look at your site from numerous angles so both onsite and offsite SEO is needed.
You can not separate these two aspects of SEO and achieve long term success with your on line marketing campaign.. Our Real Estate Agent Free SEO Training videos will show you aspects of both of these. Lets have a discussion about our onsite Optimization video at this point in time.
Our onsite optimization video will be mostly primarily concerned with showing you what are the important factors to your onsite optimization. Our free videos offer anyone with a rudimentary level of website understanding with a way to manipulate and improve your site so that you can enhance your sites standings in the search engines and show that your site is worth visiting.
The principal step to onsite or On page optimization is applied to your sites, page titles. This is an often disregarded but important onsite factor in search engine algorithms. Folks frequently have the same titles on each page but page titles are looked upon by search engines as a over view to a pages subject matter. A good title should be key phrase rich and be specific to the content of the page. This is the beginning of good information architecture (a sites layout). It is ideal for every topic within your website to have its own page.
If you market beach front acreage, have a page for that. If you market in Miami have a page for that, if you promote Lofts have a page for that. This allows you to optimize a page for a very explicit set of key phrases. The Search engines most important job is to deliver web pages to users that are directly related to the terms that they are typing in to hunt for. This means that the more specific your web pages are to a search term, the more likely you will achieve good rankings. More importantly, Real Estate is local, so don’t just use the term “real estate’ as a keyword. use “Miami Beach Front Property Real Estate” in the title and content of your page and you will get way more hungry buyers that are specifically seeking just that information out.
Next comes the core page subject matter and this should also be defined and clarified by the nearby subject matter. Writing good quality and unique content is a talent and as with anything it takes practice to get good at it. You know your market better than most, so you can really articulate your views in a unique way that can draw clients to you. It is important that you remain professional and be sure that your content reads well. You don’t need to over do the mentions of the key phrases you are optimizing for but do have it at the beginning and end of your contentIf you seek to use your key work phrases over and over the search engines can detect it as they look at the density of your keywords. This tactic will only lead to reducing the quality of your website visitors experience and therefore the search engines will likely penalize your website with a lower quality score. Poor experiences on your site usually end with your prospects leaving your site quickly, this is called bounce rate..
Using relevant keywords in your URL is another way to get the search engines to look highly at your site.. But if you have a site name already don’t worry as your content and page headers should make up for this over time. If you elect to develop a number of sites, as many top sellers do then next go round bring in key phrases relating to page content. It is useful if your site names can be both short and memorable. Have your main phrase at the start of your site URL, MiamiBeachFrontRealty.com means you will show up for clients that are searching for Miami beach front property not San Diego beach front property.
Use of alt text for images on your site is often overlooked in onsite optimization, but is a powerful tool. As the search engines come to your site they index your images along with the text on the page, so it is worth using keyword phrases in alt text on your images. There are readers that are used by the visually impaired that read the tags on your images, so using alt text is also a courtesy to people have web accessibility issues. Once again, more is not better so do not go the path of ALT tag stuffing, which would not only impede usability for the visually impaired but would hurt your standing in the search engines as much as keyword stuffing does.
In the top of your page unseen except search engines and people that are interested in looking at these things, are your header tags. These are called Meta Tags and should incorporate key phrase variations such as pluralizations along with a keyword rich explanation of your site that web surfers will read on the search engine page results. Since these specify the subject of your page it is seen by search engines as an indicator to the key phrases being targeted for that page and that page only.
It is important to know that each of these onsite SEO factors are helpful. So as you build your page, or have your web master attend to it, or the kid down the block, begin at the top with the URL purchase then move to your header tags and the page titles. These are weighted the most by the search engine algorithms. Then focus on your content as in the end all factors need to be considered if top rankings on the search engines are to be achieved for the most competitive key phrases.
Want to learn about SEO? Stop by our free training at Real Estate SEO Training blog.