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"7 Days, 7 Secrets, Search Engine Placement Made Simple"
The Only 7 Things You Need to KNOW About SEO
To Get First Page Results At Google and Yahoo"
By Lonn Dugan, Realtor, Head Coach, www.MyRealCoach.com
DAY 1: Terms And Concepts, What Others Have Done Before You
The Only Terms You Need To Know
Domain Names and URL's
"Domain" is a word in common usage that refers to a territory. On the Internet, your domain name is part of your web address. This is the territory you claim and control in the online world. It is a sort of virtual territory. The beauty of the Internet is that any domain name can be at the proverbial BEST LOCATION, as long as it is memorable and not too hard to type. In the real world, only one building can be on any corner at the intersection of First St. and Main St. But online, any domain name can be there, in the mind of a web browser, by being the one they think of or see the most often.
A typical web address has three parts. See below.
When you register a domain, you choose the domain name, as well as the top level domain (.com or .net for instance). These are registered on a first come first serve basis. The www in the example above is the THIRD LEVEL domain name. Once you register YOURDOMAIN.com your hosting provider will determine if you must type the www or if you can get to the site without it. Other third level domains are possible, including city.domain.com or ftp.domain.com (FTP stands for file transfer protocol as in for a document server) or StreetName.domain.com (for navigating directly to individual listing pages).
Domains are registered, or rented, from "Registrars", instead of purchased. I recommend http://www.godaddy.com/
Domains can be registered for up to 10 years, or can be renewed annually. If you fail to renew your domain, it becomes suspended, and after a time, it may go back into the pool of available names for somebody else to register. This can happen even if your hosting bill is paid up. Registation and hosting are two different things, even if provided by the same company. So always mind your registration renewal date or make sure the Registrar has a valid email address to use to contact you.
Registrars follow the rules of ICANN or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. This is a governing body that oversees procedures for the registration of domain names. Popular Registrars include NetworkSolutions.com, and http://www.godaddy.com/
The Best domain names are memorable, and contain natural search terms. For Example, For Real Estate, the best domain names contain words like RealCityName CityNameHome, CityNameHomes, CityHouse, CityHouses, CityHomeFinder, etc. More on this later.
Search Engines vs Directories: Yahoo, Google, Dmoz
Some search engines are completely automatic "engines" that search the entire known World Wide Web, and rank sites according to page content and usefulness as measured by the number of people who use it. Other so called search engines are really Directories, where a human has attempted to organize and catalog the World Wide Web and intentionally promote web sites according to usefulness in it's category or topic. Google is more of a Search Engine. Yahoo is more of a directory. Dmoz.org is a directory. Never heard of Dmoz? It sits in the background and informs a lot of other search sites.
SEO, and close cousin, SERP, (Not PPC)
SEO or Search Engine Optimization refers to work that is done to a web site to make it easy for a search engine to understand what the page is about. A more highly optimized page will get more "points" from the search engine owner and thus will rank higher.
Each search engine has its own formula or set of metrics for awarding points. Google gives extra points for domains that have been registered for a long time. Yahoo tends not to do this in the same way at the present time.
Formulas can change suddenly and sites can move up or down in the ranks quite suddenly, even overnight with grave or fantastic consequences. For this reason, it is best to have many means of getting good search engine rank, and not just one. By this I mean that you want to use Page Title, Description, Keywords, as well as Content and Alt Text Tags, Inbound and outbound and internal Links, and as many other strategies as you can. If you get lucky, for a phrase that does not have a lot of competition, you might do well at first but later fall out of the ranking if the search engine changes the metrics by which the score the pages.
SERP means NATURAL Search Engine Results Placement, and refers to the outcome of the SEO Work. Your rank is measurable. You can start at 150 and end up at #1, or #8 or #24. Most experts agree that ranking below the first page, or higher than #10 is almost meaningless. You have to be in the top ten to get traffic to your site. The closer to the coveted #1 spot you get, the more traffic your work will drive to your web site. Natural results are clicked FAR MORE OFTEN than Paid Results.
PPC means Pay Per Click or Sponsored Results. At most search engines these programs require bidding on the term you want and the highest bidder comes up first. You might pay $.15 per click or $3.00 or $20.00, depending on how competitive your chosen term is. This can be useful while you are waiting for your site to get ranked. However, it can be VERY EXPENSIVE. I have heard of realtors spending $2000 to $5000 a month on PPC. If you stop paying, it all ends. That's why you want to get natural placement. Because the natural placement will never stop producing and won't cost you a lot once you have it.
Meta Tags (and Title Tags):
"Meta" means "about". Tags refer to the HTML programming language or code that ‘tags' an instruction with a description. Font tags tell the web browser what to do with the font, such as which font to use, and whether or not to BOLD the word.
The Meta Tags on your web page tell the search engines (or anybody who views the source code) what the page is about. At least that was the original intent. Some search engines no longer rely on these tags alone, and many so called EXPERTS will say they don't matter, but I believe they ‘contribute' to SERP along with page content, especially when the congruency factor is there. More on this later.
Other Tags describe parts of the web page, including the Header (parts not seen) and the Body (the parts to display in the browser).
Title, Description, Keyword, Tags. The Title Tag is not exactly a meta tag, because it is a Title Tag, but then again it is often what people are referring to when they say meta tag. The title tag tells the browser what to display on the very first line on the sreen. Not on the white part of the page, but way at the very top, usually in a gray or blue bar next to the browser logo, such as the "e" for internet explorer. The most important tags are TITLE and DESCRIPTION. The keywords tag was once one of the most important, but webmasters started loading keywords into a page in a way that seemed like "cheating" so the search engines began disregarding the keyword tag. However, congruency between title, description, and keyword tags, as well as page content goes a long way to help with top placement.
Alt Tags mean ALTERNATE tags: These are tags that are appended to image or linking commands in the HTML language to make the little words that pop up in a web page when your mouse hovers over an image. Most search engines will read these words and count them in scoring your page.
Keyword Density: The more often your desired keywords are used on the page, and the less often unrelated words are used on the page, the better for your "keyword density". Too many unrelated words or concepts on a page will DILUTE the value of the keywords, making them appear less important, much like adding water to lemonade will DILUTE the special lemon flavors in lemonade until the juice is more ordinary like water.
Crawlers, Spiders, Keywords and Content: Once the Internet came to be referred to as a WEB of information, then there came to be robot programs that traveled the web, to see what was there, and report on anything new. These later came to be known Robot CRAWLERS or SPIDERS. These programs acted like robots by reading the keywords, content, and links, cataloging what was new, and following the links to document richness and relevance of connections and new pages.
Links and Pagerank:
Links are very rich sources of information to search engines as well as web visitors. Links can be IN to your site, or OUT to other sites. Sites that link OUT to very heavily used web sites are seen as being very purposeful and helpful, and so this helps the site score of the site that links out to others. When heavily used sites link IN to another web site, this says a lot about the value of what is on the other web site so it helps the score of the site being linked in. The more important the pages that link to you, the more that link will help your score. Importance is calculated in large part based on popularity. Reciprocal linking used to help, but so many automated reciprocal link programs were run by Link farms that this came to be abused, and now some search engines actually penalize sites for reciprocal links, especially to known link farms.
PageRank (From Google.com) relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.
Source Code, or HTML, DHTML, XML, These stand for various types of instruction code for making documents or web pages. HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language, and gives us the ability to make HYPER-LINKS - now called simply, links. DHTML means Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language, XML means eXtended Markup Language, and so it goes, with variations on the theme. These can be thought of in terms of document programming languages, as dialects, much as English is a language, while a South Texas Drawl is a Dialect of the English Language.
Submission To Search Engines: In the "old days" a site owner might actually apply to be listed on a search engine. This was known as SUBMITTING your site for inclusion. Today, the search engines will find you, if any other site they know about links to you, but if you insist, you may still submit to some search engines. See the search engine home page and look for SUBMIT PAGE or SUGGEST SITE link. Some search engines require payment for submission, or for prompt processing. Some submission services exist which promise to submit your site to the major search engines regularly, such as once per month. Frequent submission can actually hurt your score and such services have been made unnecessary or even harmful by the newest search engine metrics.
Keywords: Those words you decide to target, or if left to chance, the words the search engine decides are the key words on your page. Search engines like Google may ignore your keyword tag and decide on their own what your key words are based on density, frequency, and by how early they appear on the page.
BIG HINT: Your top 6 keywords should be the first 6 words on the page.
Day 1 HOMEWORK: Research What Took Place Already....
Use the Web Sites at http://www.google.com/ as well as http://www.yahoo.com/ or even http://www.alexa.com/ And KeyWord Position Search Tools such as at SEOchat.com
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/multiple-datacenter-keyword-position/
to find out where your page is ranked for likely search phrases. You can also research web site traffic rank at http://www.alexa.com/ (Yes, I know there is some controversy about the accuracy of this tool, but it is a useful tool nonetheless to show what is possible).
For now, pick your favorite keyword phrases - choose 6 or 12 from this list, depending on your niche, your specialty, or what you want to do more of.
CityName Real Estate
Real Estate CityName
Buy Real Estate City
Sell Real Estate City
Homes For Sale City
House For Sale City
For Sale By Owner City
Sell House City
Move To City
Buy House City
Sell House City
Buy Land County
Sell Land County
Buying House City
Selling House City
Buying Condominium City
Selling Condominium City
Relocate to City
Corporate Transfer to City
Home Sales City
New Homes City
Builders in City
Realtors in City
SubdivisionNameCityName
CityAreaCityName
CityAreaHousingType eg: Chicago Downtown Condominium
Realtor CityName
Real Estate Agent City Name
Buying Bank Owned Homes CityName
Buying Investment Property CityName
Real Estate Investors Club CityName
Hud Homes CityName
Rental Properties For Sale City
First time home buyers City
Home Loans City
Land Contract City
Retirement Homes City
Retirement Living City
Remember, while trying to find your page, and documenting your starting rank, you need to take a moment to actually read the home page for some of the sites listed as top ranked for the key words that seem to make the most sense to you.
Notice especially the top ranked sites that are web sites for individual realtors rather than corporate sites or lead generation sites (these can ‘cheat' because of their extreme traffic and the large number of inbound links that elevate their rank over and above what their content might seem to warrant).
Notice that there are some similarities between the results at Yahoo and Google, and many differences. Each search engine uses a different scoring system. The exact system is a secret. And it can change. Browse the top ranked pages and make note of the words they use. Also note any words that pop up when your mouse pauses over images or links (before you click). These are the result of ALT TEXT tags.
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