Real Estate SEO Training – OnSite SEO

For over a decade Real Estate SEO Pros has been working behind the scenes with Real Estate Agents to teach them SEO. After some debate we decided that it was time to unveil our SEO training for the general public and let all Agents have access to our free video series.

Many modern day Real Estate Agents are realizing that Search Engine Optimization or SEO is vital to their online and off line success. More and more buyers and sellers (80% according to USA Today 2007) are going online to research their market and pricing before they even pick up the phone to call an agent.

You can see SEO as mainly two applications when it comes to working on a web presence. There is onsite and then there is off site 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.. We are offering these free SEO videos to Real Estate Agents so that you can learn both aspects of this critical process. Lets talk about our onsite Optimization video at this point in time.

Our onsite optimization video will be generally concerned with showing you what are the crucial factors to your onsite optimization. Our free videos present anyone with a basic level of website knowledge with a way to manipulate and develop your site so that you can improve your sites standings in the search engines and show that your site is worth visiting.

The initial step to onsite or on page optimization is applied to your sites, page titles. This is an often overlooked but significant onsite factor in search engine algorithms. People regularly have the same titles on each page but page titles are looked upon by search engines as a guide to a pages subject. 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 best for every topic within your website to have its own page.

If you market beach front acreage, have a page for that. If you promote in San Diego have a page for that, if you market Lofts have a page for that. This enables you to optimize a page for a very explicit set of key phrases. The Search engines main 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.

Next comes the main page content and this should also be defined and clarified by the adjoining subject matter. Writing good quality and distinctive content is a skill and as with anything it takes practice to get good at it. You know your region better than most, so you can really communicate your views 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. When the search engines visit your site, they look at the density of your keywords and if it is excessive they consider it keyword stuffing. This approach 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. Poor experiences on your site usually end with your prospects leaving your site quickly, this is called bounce rate..

If you are careful to pick a domain name that is keyword specific to your target keyword or has your target word this will assist you with ranking higher on the page.. But if you have a site name by now don’t worry as your content and page headers can make up for this over time. If you decide to build a number of sites, as many top sellers do then next go round bring in key phrases relating to page content. It is of value if your site names can be both short and memorable. Have your core phrase at the beginning 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. The search engines index your images so using keyword rich names here can be to your advantage. 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 hamper 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 include key phrase variations such as pluralization’s along with a keyword rich narrative of your site that clients will read on the search engine page results. Given that these specify the subject of your page it is seen by search engines as an guide to the key phrases being targeted for that page and that page only.

It is of value to understand that each of these onsite SEO factors are important. So as you construct your page, or have your web master attend to it, or the kid down the block, start 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.