BRER Real Estate Marketing Blog

Use this link to see all the posts in this series: Do-It-Yourself SEO.  

Blogging and SEO

If you blog on a regular basis, your blog will be a search engine favorite – search engines just love the fresh content.   And, if the information you post is useful, your site visitors will love it, too.

7 Tips to Make Your Blog SEO-Friendly.

1. Blog Frequently - Blog as often as you can.  Check the Real Estate Blogging category on this blog for ideas on how to be consistent with blogging, and where to find topics.
2. Optimize Your Blog - Use the same guidelines for the On-Page Optimization of your web pages.  On your blog, you can put keyword phrases in your blog’s title, post titles, post content, category names, tag names and the ALT text of photos or images that you use in your posts.
3. Maintain a Focus – You can blog about anything you want.  But, especially when you’re first starting up a blog, make the majority of your posts about real estate and your keywords.  That focus will help the search engines understand the theme of your blog.  If this blog had two Whimsical Wednesday posts for every post related to its keywords, the site would not rank as well.
4. Link to Your Website  – Use your blog as a way to get quality incoming links to the pages of your website.  This is a great way to get deep links to the interior pages of your site.  You can write about a variety of topics and link to your community pages, MLS search page, market condition page, etc. and it would make perfect sense within the post.  Use good anchor text in your links to get the most from them.
5. Link to Outside Resources – You don’t want to put too many outgoing links in your posts, but 2 or 3 links to quality outside websites that can be helpful to your readers is a good idea.  You may get a link in return, and the search engines will notice your choice of outgoing links, too.
6. Submit Your Blog to Blog Directories – One way to jump start your blog is to submit it to blog directories to help the search engines find it.  Just do a search for real estate blog directory, and you’ll find quite a number of directories that focus on real estate blogs.
7. Advertise Your Posts – Set your blog up to “ping” Update Services.  If you’re not familiar with pinging or Update Services, take a look at this explanation on the Wordpress site.

Typically, you can also increase the traffic to your blog by being active on other blogs.  If you read and leave comments on other related blogs, that may bring visitors on that blog to yours.  And, if you leave comments, very often other blogmasters will return the favor.

I hope you have found this SEO series helpful.  If you decide you’d like professional assistance, you can find more information about SEO for real estate websites, and please feel free to contact me!

Use this link to see all the posts in this series: Do-It-Yourself SEO. 

Off Page Optimization

Anything that doesn’t have to do with how your website and your web pages are set up is off page optimization.   Most often, the term refers to obtaining incoming links – also called backlinks or inbound links.

Incoming  Links - And Why You Need Them

An incoming link is a link from another web page to one of your web pages.  You need them because the search engines put a lot of emphasis on incoming links to determine the popularity of your web pages.  Each incoming link is counted as a “vote” for your web page.

What’s The Best Way to Establish Incoming Links?

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Use this link to see all the posts in this series: Do-It-Yourself SEO.

On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization refers to anything that you do in setting up the pages of your website that will have a positive impact on your ability to rank for specific keywords in the search engines.  This discussion will focus on seven key parts to on-page optimization.

1.  Page Name – Use the main keyword for the page in the name of the page itself.  You have to call the page name something, so you might as well include your keyword phrase in the name of the page.  So, if the main keyword for a page is Atlanta real estate, for example, don’t call the page About Atlanta.  Call it Atlanta Real Estate.

2.  Page Title – The page title is hidden away in the code on each page, but it does appear in several places, and the search engines use it as a critical component in determining what the page is about.

Many search engines will use the page title as the first line in your entry on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).   The Title will also show in the “information line” in your browser, and it is the text that is used as the description when someone bookmarks your page.

Think of the page Title as a short marketing statement explaining what the page is about.   There are several different theories on how long the Title should be, but you shouldn’t get too hung up on length.  A concise description of the page that contains your keyword phrases and is 10-15 words long would work well.

Keep in mind that once you rank in the SERPs, you will want to use the Title to encourage people to click through to your website.  Write the Title with the search engines in mind, but make sure it is informative and makes sense to human beings, too.
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Use this link to see all the posts in this series: Do-It-Yourself SEO. 

Do-It-Yourself-SEO: Part 5 - Create a Site Map

Now that you have a list of keyword phrases you want to be found for in the search engines, you need to create a site map, or an identification of the pages that will be on your website, and how those pages will relate to one another.

You can use this step to define the navigation for your website, too.  Easy navigation is critical to making your website “sticky”, meaning that visitors can easily find what they are looking for and are motivated to stay on your site to look around.

How Many Keyword Phrases Should Go on a Page?

It is really only possible to optimize a page for 1-3 related keyword phrases.  Using more keywords will result in a page that is packed with keyword phrases, and that is confusing to both visitors and search engines.

When you think of related keyword phrases, think about things like Atlanta real estate, Atlanta homes for sale, Atlanta homebuyers, etc.   The phrases “Atlanta real estate” and “Chicago real estate” are not really related.  They both contain the words real estate, but combining widely diverse geographic areas on a page isn’t a good idea.

Create At Least One Page for Each Keyword Phrase

The best way to serve both your visitors and the search engines is to create a page for each keyword phrase.  So, if you are focusing on marketing in Atlanta and the Atlanta suburbs of Roswell, Sandy Springs, and Alpharetta, it’s a good idea to create a community profile page for each of those neighborhoods.

One thing to avoid is creating one Community page that contains a brief description of each of your target neighborhoods.  This isn’t a good practice because it doesn’t give you an opportunity to provide much information for your visitors, and the search engines won’t know what to do with a page that has so many unrelated keywords in it.

Create Sub-Pages Where Appropriate

Think about the information that your site visitors would find helpful and create pages to address that information.

For example, a buyer might be interested in things to do in a particular area.  So, you could create a “things to do” page for each of your geographic targets.  Both buyers and sellers might be interested in market conditions in a particular neighborhood.  Rather than creating one page called “Market Conditions”, determine if it makes sense to have individual pages called something like Roswell Real Estate Market Conditions.  That page would give you the opportunity to provide fresh content  by doing monthly updates.

Define the Site’s Navigation
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Use this link to see all the posts in this series: Do-It-Yourself SEO. 

SELECTING KEYWORD PHRASES

What’s the Big Deal About Selecting Keywords?

Selecting keyword phrases is to SEO as selecting a location is to a retail store.

Let’s say that you were going to build a new greeting card store in your town.   You got plans for the store, you located a building site, built the store and stocked it with the widest range of greeting cards possible to meet any need .  Then, you waited for the customers to come flocking in.  But, no one visited your store.  Why not?

Well, the one thing you forgot to do was figure out how much traffic was on the road leading to your store.  Too late, you discovered that while you got a great deal on the building site, very few cars passed by your store.  And, the location was too far out of town for people to make a special trip just to purchase a greeting card.

You can do the same thing to your website if you don’t choose the right keyword phrases.  As was discussed in the series on Content Mistakes, the biggest mistake you can make when selecting keywords is to use common sense.

You can’t use keyword phrases that you would use to find homes in your area.  You must use phrases that the majority of other people use to find homes in your area.

How to Research Keywords

How can you figure out which keyword phrases other people use to find homes in your area?  The most effective way to do that is to use one of the online tools that gather information from a variety of search engines.  There are two popular paid research tools.

• WordTracker.com – Lowest cost subscription $30 for one week
• KeywordDiscovery.com – Lowest cost subscription $70 for one month

These tools will help you identify the number of searches done on a particular term, the competition for that term (the number of other websites that optimize for the term), and suggestions for related keywords.

There are also some free online tools that provide varying degrees of accuracy.  Here are just a few:

• Digital Point
• Yahoo
• Google

How to Select Keywords

The most commonly used search terms for real estate are typically CITY Real Estate and CITY Homes for Sale.  I’ve found that people typically search by the name of the city they want to live in.  They’re less likely to search by County or State.  And, that makes sense to me.   Counties are usually fairly large places and people typically don’t want to live anywhere in a county.

So, you might think that the best keyword would be City Real Estate.  But, it depends on what you mean by best.  My definition of best goes something like this:

The keyword phrase that 1) attracts the most targeted traffic, and 2) has the best balance between the amount of usage and the amount of competition.

Let’s take Atlanta as an example.  The search term Atlanta Real Estate is probably the most used search term in my area, but it also has the highest level of competition.  In addition, metro Atlanta covers a lot of territory.  Ranking for Atlanta Real Estate would take time, effort and expense.  It would be a great SEO accomplishment.  However, it wouldn’t attract very targeted traffic.

So, really think about what you want to accomplish with your website.  If your website and domain name are new, you already know that it will take longer to rank in the search engines.  If you want to generate traffic as quickly as possible, it might make more sense to optimize for a term that is very targeted and has a good balance between usage and competition.

If ranking for the highest usage term in your area is a good business decision, you can include that term in your list of keyword phrases, but even then you may want to optimize your home page for a less competitive term to get the quickest results, then work on the most competitive keyword over time.

Look for Keyword Gems

Researching related keywords can sometimes identify what I call Keyword Gems.  To me, a Keyword Gem is a term that has almost as much usage as the main keyword in your area, but much less competition.  For example, sometimes just putting the two-letter state designation in the phrase will make a big difference.

When you find a keyword like CITY ST Real Estate where the usage is 90% of the main keyword, but the competition is 50% of the main keyword, you know you’ve got a real gem!

Use this link to see all the posts in this series: Do-It-Yourself SEO. 

Think Like a Search Engine

The place to begin learning SEO is to start thinking like a search engine.  Well, search engines don’t really think, and we don’t know how they’re programmed down to the last detail.  If the search engines published their complete algorithm for ranking sites, the Black Hat folks would go even crazier finding ways to trick the system.

But, all that aside, here’s a very high level overview of how search engines work.  And, keep in mind that the assumption for the rest of this series is that your website meets the minimum requirements for being search engine friendly.

If you’re not sure what those are, check out the series on Real Estate Website Content Mistakes.

A Search Engine’s Goal:  Satisfying Their Customers

Everyone has customers - even search engines.  For a search engine, their customer is the person who types a search phrase into their search field.  The search engine wants to provide the best list of web pages that offer the most in-depth and accurate information on the keyword phrase that has been entered.

And, that is a pretty aggressive goal.  You know from using search engines yourself that there can be anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of web pages that are listed for a particular search term.  So, how does a search engine possibly figure out which pages to include in a list, and what order to put them in?
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Use this link to see all the posts in this series: Do-It-Yourself SEO. 

SEO:  Do-It-Yourself or Hire an Expert?

Doing your own SEO is certainly possible if you have the time and inclination.  Here are the challenges:

• Learning what needs to be done
• Devoting time to do SEO
• Continuing SEO activities on an on-going basis

Learning What Needs to be Done

When you’re learning about SEO, make sure you’re learning “White Hat” SEO, as opposed to “Black Hat” SEO.  White Hat SEO refers to using techniques that don’t try to trick the search engines into ranking your site.  These techniques follow the webmaster guidelines published by the search engines.

Here are the guidelines for three of the search engines, and there are other helpful links on the pages, too:

• Google Webmaster Guidelines
  • Matt Cutts Blog - Matt Cutts works for Google and often blogs about SEO issues
• Yahoo
  MSN

Black Hat SEO refers to using techniques that may well cause your site to catapult to the top of search engine rankings for a brief time, but over the long haul, will cause your site to be penalized or even banished from the search engines altogether.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the search engines don’t publish their ranking algorithms.  They provide guidelines and some assistance like Matt Cutts’ blog.  As a result, webmasters and SEO experts must interpret the guidelines and draw conclusions based on their experience.

As you can imagine, information on what works and what doesn’t sometimes starts sounding like the 10 blind men trying to describe an elephant.  I think the best advice for someone starting out learning SEO is to read everything you can, and look for trends.  There are some things almost everyone agrees on, and those are the things I’d recommend you pay most attention to.

Doing SEO on a Regular Basis

This really speaks for itself.  Once you know what you need to do, you can’t do it all at once.  By definition, SEO needs to take place consistently over a period of time.  So, plan on setting aside time each week, even after your site’s ranking starts to improve.

Hiring an Expert

Naturally, I am biased because the services we provide are extremely effective and reasonably priced.  Our clients work with us because they don’t have time to do SEO on a regular basis and/or the inclination to learn all there is to learn.

But since SEO is such a critical issue for most webmasters, there are all kinds of firms out there – some are very good at what they do and some are real charlatans out for a quick buck.  So, there are some things to be aware of no matter who you want to hire:

• In my experience, SEO firms who place cold calls or send e-mails to webmasters aren’t the best ones to deal with. 
• If an SEO firm cannot describe how they plan to improve your search engine ranking, they’re probably using Black Hat techniques.
• If an SEO firm tells you that they must have FTP access to your website to upload some new pages, be wary.  Typically, the pages they want to add to your site aren’t seen by your visitors.  If that is the case, they’re usually some type of “doorway” pages, or other types of pages that don’t fit into webmaster guidelines.
• If you are told that your site will appear at the top of Google within 48 hours, they aren’t an SEO firm.  They’re probably doing a flat fee Pay-Per-Click service.  While you may choose to do Pay-Per-Click to get some immediate traffic, keep in mind that you won’t be making a dent in your site’s long-term ranking capability.
• Make sure that the keyword phrases an SEO firm wants to use to optimize your site are valid.  By valid, I mean that the terms have decent usage and not overwhelming competition.  You don’t have to go after a term like Atlanta Real Estate, but you don’t want to be stuck with a phrase like New Homes for Sale in Atlanta Suburbs.  It might be easy to rank for a phrase like that, but only because no one actually ever uses that term.
• Any SEO firm should be involved in obtaining incoming links for your site.   Make sure those links will be from quality sites and not link farms.

Assuming that you are going to do your own SEO, the balance of this series will address the basics you need to know.

Getting your real estate website found in the search engines – it’s the goal of most real estate professionals.  The days when a real estate website is used as just an online brochure are virtually over.  Ever since it became obvious that websites are a cost-effective way to generate leads, more and more agents and brokers are working on creating lead-generating websites.

By the way, don’t forget to answer the poll in the left column of this page about leads coming from your website!  Based on the responses so far, I’m thinking a series about Do-It-Yourself-SEO might just be useful!

Use this link to see all the posts in this series: Do-It-Yourself SEO.

Getting Started with SEO

We provide SEO services to many of our clients, but some prefer to do their own.  For those clients, and anyone else who is interested, this post is the introduction to an eight-part series on Do-It-Yourself-SEO.  My goal for this series is not to cover every nuance in the world of SEO.  There are lots of books written on the subject if you want that level of detail. 

My goal for this series is to provide enough information about the basics to get you started.  I know that you can make progress with a subset of SEO information, because I’ve worked with clients who have done it.

Here’s What This Series Will Cover

1. Do-It-Yourself or Hire an Expert - We’ll discuss the issues that you should consider when you make a choice between doing your own SEO and hiring a professional.  We’ll also provide some guidelines for choosing an outside firm.
2. Thinking Like a Search Engine - If you understand how search engines think, it will be easier to understand the process for getting your site ranked in the search engines.  It’s true that search engines don’t provide a lot of detail about their ranking algorithms, and different engines use different approaches.  But, it is possible to describe the process at a very high level.
3. Selecting Keywords - The important first step is selecting the keyword phrases you want to be found for.
4. Creating a Site Map - Based on your keyword strategy, you need to identify the specific pages that you’ll create for your site.
5. On-Page Optimization – The things you need to do on your site to make it attractive to search engines.
6. Off-Page Optimization – The things you need to do away from your site to get the search engines to rank your site.
7. Blogging – How to use your blog to improve search engine ranking.

A Glossary of Selected SEO Terms

This list may be expanded, but these are definitions of some of the more commonly-used SEO terms:

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