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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