One of the thing I get asked a lot is how to get a website higher in the SERPs.
Well, it is going to take a lot of time, effort, and patience.
There are two elements to SEO - what you do on your website and what you do off your website.
Let's talk about things you can do on your website to improve SERP results.
1. Hierarchal Design
The web pages you create should be in a hierarchal design with your home page at the top of the hierarchy. Every page of your website should be reachable by at least one static link.
2. Quality Content
You have to have a lot of quality content on your websites about your particular niche. For real estate websites, this can be achieved by news articles, blog threads, events calendar, and thousands of property detail pages.
3. Keywords
You have to use keywords in your content that related to your particular niche. If you just use the keyword "real estate" you probably are not going to rank very high in the SERPs. However, if you use "Holland Michigan Real Estate" for your key phrase, that gives a specific location. Chances are if you have a great website about Holland Michigan Real Estate, then you are going to rank high in the SERPs. By the way, you should make sure you have your keywords in a the keyword meta tag. Try to limit yourself to 10 keyword phrases.
4. Sitemap
You should have a sitemap on your website. This helps crawlers learn about the structure of your site and makes every section of your website reachable. I would make one sitemap for your users and another XML sitemap for the crawlers. Make sure you submit the XML sitemap to google and yahoo using the webmaster tools.
5. Avoid Black Hat Techniques
There are several black hat techniques such as keyword stuffing and hidden text that can temporarily give you a boost in the SERPs. However, in the long run, your website will be penalized and be even lower in the SERPs than you started out with. Stay away from these techniques.
6. Include a ROBOTS.TXT file on your site.
This tells the crawlers what parts of your site can be crawled. You should avoid making your member and admin sections crawlable.
7. Dynamic Content
Most real estate website use dynamic content. If you use dynamic content, keep your URL strings short and do not use session IDs in your URL strings.
8. Linking to other sites
Make sure you only link to sites you trust. Do not link to link farms or websites that have poor quality. Do not create a link farm yourself either. Linking to sites related to yours is good, but watch out for sites that are not directly related. A couple of these links will not hurt you, but if you get carried away it might.
9. Relevant Title Tags / Description Tag
Make sure your keywords appear in your title tag and description meta tag.
Check out this home page to see how it is done:
Now, let's talk about what you can do outside of your website to improve SERP rankings.
1. Backlinks
You need to get as many backlinks as possible. However, you should pace yourself. Google knows the rate to which you get backlinks. If you increase this rate to fast, alarms go off and your website may get penalized. Plan on doing about 1 hour a day getting backlinks. Do not spend all day doing this.
2. Directories
Submit your website to directories and lots of them including dmoz and yahoo directory.
3. RSS feeds
There are a lot of RSS feed directories out there. If you got a RSS feed, submit it to these directories. This will increase traffic to your website.
4. Social Bookmarking
Submit articles to websites such as digg.com and propeller. Submit videos to websites such as youtube and google. People will bookmark your articles and videos. This will drive traffic to your site.
5. News Releases
Submit a news release about your website.
I hope you enjoyed this article. I may write another SEO article in the future with more advanced techniques.
Good luck on all of your websites.
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