Getting started with SEO (search engine optimization)
Many SEO firms try to make search engine optimization or high search engine ranking an obscure lofty goal that only they can achieve. Granted, it can be very time consuming it’s still very easy to do yourself with a little time and knowledge. Below I will outline some strategic tips to optimize your real estate website that will hopefully get you up to the first page and the three biggies Google, Yahoo, & MSN.
SEO Success Ingredients
The biggest secret to getting top search engine placement is… Hard work. Other key factors to get you there are:
- Good content
- Good inbound links
Yep, that’s it. Sounds easy right…wrong. There’s no special tricks that you need to use or special programs that you need to buy. If you continue on, you’ll see why good companies charge big dollars for their services. Let’s start with some definitions…
What’s Good Content
If you’re talking about heaven and hell, “good” has to be absolute. When talking about search engines, good is very relative. What is it relative to? Well, it seems to be just about everything. The quality of your content is ranked based on a ton of different factors that vary from engine to engine. Google has their own algorithm and so does Yahoo and MSN. The quality of your site and content are valued based on both on and off page factors listed below:
Good content is unique, authoritative, frequent, and relevant
Make it unique
Unique means don’t go cut and paste text from other sites. If you don’t have any, at least use your own words to recreate the article with your own unique twist.
Make it authoritative
Who knows your market better than you do? You need to position yourself as an authority in your area. If you have the only information and the best information for your market, your readers will appreciate you and the search engines will move you up.
Having authoritative content isnt what moves you up but will result in more voluntary inbound links which will postion your site as an authority in the mind of most search engines algorithms.
Make Frequent Additions
Search engines love fresh content. This doesn’t mean just changing a title or adding a picture here and there. Change means adding new pages or articles as often as you can. These pages will let search engines robots know that your site is growing and will in turn visit more often.
The Google bot will visit much more frequently if you add new content daily. If you slow down, they slow down. This has played a role in search engine placement as well. The more frequent the changes, the higher the site moves in placement for certain keywords.
Make it relevant
Keep your content relevant to the theme of your website. If your site is about Cincinnati real estate your article should be closely related to this topic. For example, a properly themed article could discuss such things as market conditions, buyer tips, or seller tips.
What’s a Good Inbound Link
A good inbound link follows the same guidelines as above. It should be related to your sites content or theme. A link for a baby clothes site will not help your site very much. In short good inbound links are natural and highly related to your theme.
Change up your links
Sometimes you have to encourage people to link to your site. In doing so you may provide them with some HTML code with your keyword-laden anchor text with a great description that properly contextualizes your link. Unfortunately, if everyone uses that same link, search engines may mark it as link spam and likely devalue the link. Providing multiple linking options is the best idea.
Avoid Link Farms
Link farms are typically worthless when it comes to building links. They’re considered worthless by search engines and can often cause you penalties. So save yourself the time and dont get involved with any of these.
Make it plentiful
The more quality incoming links you have the better you will do and you can never have too many. Over time as you build youself into an authority in your market links will begin to occur naturally but until then you need to constantly work on getting more and more theme related incoming links.
Is that it?
Im afraid thats just the basics there are many more complicated and more technical details of search engine optimization and ranking. So for now work with the basics from above and then continue to learn and improve. Or if you have no interest in doing this yourself you will at least know enough to talk to an SEO firm and understand the basics of the strategy they should be putting in place.