Training for Real Estate Agents On OnSite SEO
November 15, 2009 by Aaron Evans
Filed under SEO
Real Estate SEO Pros have assisted Real Estate Agents with their SEO needs behind the scenes for over a decade. After some deliberation we decided that it was time to unveil our SEO training for the general public and allow all Agents access to our free video series.
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short is part of any modern day Real Estate Agents marketing toolkit and is important for success on the Internet. Over 80% of buyers and sellers (USA Today 2007) make inquiries their market prior to approaching a Real Estate Agent, and so the lucky Agent that captures these hungry prospects is a top seller indeed.
There are two types of SEO to think about when you are looking at starting an on line campaign. There is onsite and then there is offsite optimization. The search engines look at your site from a number of angels so in order to achieve good placement on their pages you must learn to master both sides of the SEO equation.
To have long term success on the Internet you need to use these concepts in concert with each other.. While it is not difficult we felt by offering these videos that Real Estate Agents could benefit by learning about these parts of SEO. Lets talk about our onsite Optimization video at this moment.
Our onsite optimization video will be mostly primarily concerned with showing you what are the vital factors to your onsite optimization. Our free videos present anyone with a basic level of website knowledge with a way to manipulate and improve your site so that you can improve your sites standings in the search engines and show that your site is worth visiting.
The primary step to onsite or On page optimization is applied to your sites, page titles. This is an often overlooked but important onsite factor in search engine algorithms. Folks often have the same titles on each page but page titles are viewed by search engines as a guide to a pages topic. A good quality 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 perfect for every topic within your website to have its own page.
If you market beach front acreage, have a page for that. If you sell in San Diego have a page for that, if you market Lofts have a page for that. This allows you to optimize a page for a very focused set of key phrases. The Search engines prime job is to deliver web pages to users that are directly related to the terms that they are typing in to search 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.
Then comes the central page content and this should also be defined and clarified by the nearby subject matter. Writing good quality and unique content is a ability and as with anything it takes practice to get good at it. You know your subject better than most, so you can really communicate your viewpoint in a unique way that can draw clients to you. It is essential that you remain professional and be sure that your subject matter reads well. Just be natural in the use of your keywords and phrases, and as you are writing just sprinkle them in the beginning and end of your articles.If 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 ploy will only lead to dropping the quality of your website visitors experience and therefore the search engines will likely punish your website with a lower quality score. It will also most likely lead to a high bounce rate.
Picking your sites name by buying a keyword specific Uniform Resource Locater (URL) is a good way to rank highly for your term. But if you have a site name by now don’t be bothered as your content and page headers will make up for this over time. If you decide to develop a number of sites, as many top sellers do then next go round include key phrases relating to page content. It is of value if your site names can be both short and memorable. Have your key phrase at the beginning of your site URL, MiamiBeachFrontRealty.com means you will show up for prospects 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 hinder usability for the visually impaired but would hurt your rank in the search engines as much as keyword stuffing does.
As the spiders come along from the search engines they come by and look at your header tags, that are behind the scenes on your page. These are called Meta Tags and should incorporate key phrase variations such as pluralizations along with a keyword rich explanation of your site that clients will read on the search engine page results. In view of the fact that these denote the subject of your page it is seen by search engines as an over view to the key phrases being targeted for that page and that page only.
It is valuable to be aware of that each of these onsite SEO factors are of value. So as you create 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 hear more about SEO? Stop by our free training at Real Estate SEO Training blog.
