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SEO Mastery (on-site)

By Roger V

Services for Real Estate Pros with Swift Marketing 09454451

August 15, 2008 05:03 PM

I'm not practicing real estate (just doing marketing) so this is no-holds barred.

There are a ton of people who like to try and sell search engine optimization as "magic dust they sprinkle on your website". This is my exact on-site SEO list of steps, which, when combined with off-site SEO (e.g. things like "article marketing" to get you backlinks, i.e. the art of optimizing your site OFF your own site) will deliver a knockout punch.

With this list, I out SEO'd even Yahoo Real Estate and Zillow, which led to complaints from other agents who couldn't understand how I ranked ahead of them for even their own listings. It works..the tactics change all the time but this is still pretty fresh. The only thing different with "today's recipe" is title plays a big part, off-site-SEO is bigger than ever, and alt tags are watched a bit (were totally ignored before).

I don't have time to explain anything..so if you don't understand it, sorry, just google it and you'll figure it out quickly. Also, this is pasted verbatim from a portion of our success guide we give to www.Movoxo.com subscribers (See www.FSBOSupplies.com and www.SecretsKit.com for recent products too; up next is www.iSignature.com ) - so forgive any product references.

Hope it helps! It really is this simple.

=========================================================================

Search Engine Optimization:

People like to represent this as magic dust they sprinkle on your website, or try to be secretive about what they do. Never do business with these people. Below is my unedited (other than adding some description for you) personal list of search engine optimization secrets. Note it'll take 3 weeks to 3 months for the results to show up. You can use Google webmaster services (free) if you're serious about SEO.

All Movoxo.com websites are already search engine optimized, and due to volume, we have some advanced tricks that would be very tough to pull off on your own. Didn't know we have websites? We do - two levels - a great basic free site, and if you like that, you'll love the premium paid version with more features. Contact us to get your site setup.

Top Specific Steps you can do to SEO your site.

Keywords in the title tag. Specific is good, and use duplicates phrased differently i.e. "Chicago Real estate listings homes relocation". The more keywords you have, the less "weight" given to them, sort of, so choose carefully.

Targeted keywords in the body tag ideally, a few keywords at about 5% density.

Keywords in H2-H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on the rankings while keywords in H1 headline tags don't seem to have an effect. (H2 = smaller Header tag)

Using keywords in bold or strong tags - slight effect i.e. the actual word that is bolded is thought to be slightly more important.

Keywords in image file names i.e. mortgage-rates.jpg as the actual file name. Tip: don't just put all your graphics in /images - rename that folder to niceville-real-estate - follow?

Keywords in image alt attributes are an absolute must.

Keyword in the domain name doesn't help verbatim - although, using domain names as link text may explain this i.e. what people say you are in the link to you is far more important than what you say you are. For example, if SallyRealtor.com has a link to you like "Click here for lowest insurance rates" that's not nearly as good as "Click here for lowest insurance rates" - follow? It's the part that linked that matters. This is very important - get people to link back to you but you have to define what keywords are actually linked.

Web pages that use very few parameters in the URL (?id=123, etc.). Google mostly here on this, google likes pages that look written by a human.

Inbound links - The top result on Google has usually about four times as many links as result number 11. See G above.

Keywords in the file name don't seem to have a positive effect [Roger's tests disagree with this. Note use - as a space, not _ underscore, i.e. Chicago-Illinois shows as Chicago Illinois, but Chicago_Illinois = Chicago_Illinois) though this is almost certainly because of item G above.

The file size doesn't seem to influence the ranking of a web page on Google although smaller sites tend to have slightly higher rankings - again, more likely to be written by a human instead of a database.

1. Chëck Search Engine Crawl Error Pages

It's important to monitor search engine crawl error reports to keep on top of how your site and its pages are performing. Monitoring error reports can help you determine when and where Googlebot or another crawler is having trouble indexing your content - which can help you find a solution to the problem. Go to www.w3c.org for a full test.

2. Create/update robots.txt and sitemap files

These files are supported by major search engines and are incredibly useful tools for ensuring that crawlers index your important site content while avoiding those sections/files that you deem to be either unimportant or cause problems in the crawl process. In many cases we've seen the proper use of these files make all the difference between a total crawl failure for a site and a full index of content pages which makes them crucial from an SEO standpoint.

3. Chëck Googlebot activity reports

These reports allow you to monitor how long it's taking Googlebot to access your pages. This information can be very important if you are worried that you may be on a slow network or experiencing web server problems. If it is taking search engine crawlers a long time to index your pages it may be the case that there are times when they "time out" and stop trying. Additionally, if the crawlers are unable to call your pages up quickly there is a good chance users are experiencing the same lag in load times, and we all know how impatient internet users can be.

4. Chëck how your site looks to browsers without image and JavaScrípt support

One of the best ways to determine just what your site looks like to a search engine crawler is to view your pages in a browser with image and JavaScrípt support disabled. Mozilla's Firefox browser has a plug-in available called the "Web Developer Toolbar" that adds this functionality and a lot more to the popular standards-compliant browser. If after turning off image and JavaScrípt support you aren't able to make sense of your pages at all, it is a good sign that your site is not well-optimized for search. While images and JavaScrípt can add a lot to the user experience they should always be viewed as a "luxury" - or simply an improvement upon an already-solid textual content base.

5. Ensure that all navigation is in HTML, not images [update: this isn't important as long as google can smoothly crawl the site AND the image alt tags are present]

One of the most common mistakes in web design is to use images for site navigation. While for some companies and webmasters SEO is not a concern and therefore they can get away with this, for anyone worried about having well-optimized pages this should be the first thing to go. Not only will it render your site navigation basically valueless for search engine crawlers, but within reason very similar effects can usually be achieved with CSS roll-overs that maintain the aesthetic impact while still providing valuable and relevant link text to search engines.

6. Chëck that all images include ALT text

Failing to include descriptive ALT text with images is to miss out on another place to optimize your pages. Not only is this important for accessibility for vision-impaired users, but search engines simply can't "take a look" at your images and decipher the content there. They can only see your ALT text, if you've provided it, and the association they'll make with the image and your relevant content will be based exclusively on this attribute.

7. Use Flash content sparingly - NOTE THIS IS INCORRECT ON GOOGLE. Google is capable of splitting open a swf to read it's text. Also, the image-alt tags are paid attention to in SEO results, I've studied this i.e. the "text in movie". [UPDATE JUL 2008: Google now spiders and crawls within flash]

Several years ago Flash hit the scene and spread like wild fire. It was neat looking, quick to download and brought interactivity and animation on the web to a new height. However, from an SEO standpoint, Flash files might as well be spacer GIFs - they're empty. Search engines are not able to index text/content within a Flash file. For this reason, while Flash can do a lot for presentation, from an accessibility and SEO standpoint it should be used very sparingly and only on non-crucial content.

8. Ensure that each page has a unique

and meta description tag Optimization of <title> tags is one of the most important on-page SEO points. Many webmasters are apparently unaware and use either duplicate <title> tags for multiple pages or do not target search traffíc at all within this valuable tag. Run a search on a competitive keyword of your choice on Google - clíck on the first few links that show up and see what text appears in the title bar for the window. You should see right away that this is a key place to include target keywords for your pages. 9. Make sure that important page elements are HTML The simple fact to keep in mind when optimizing a page is that the crawlers are basically only looking at your source code. Anything you've put together in a Flash movie, an image or any other multimedia component is likely to be invisible to search engines. With that in mind it should be clear that the most important elements of your page, where the heart of your content will lie, should be presented in clean, standards-compliant and optimized HTML source code. 10. Be sure to target keywords in your page content Some webmasters publish their pages in hopes that they will rank well for competitive keywords within their topic or niche. However, this will simply nevër happen unless you include your target keywords in the page content. This means creating well-optimized content that mentions these keywords frequently without triggering sp@m filters. Any way you cut it you're going to need to do some writing - if you don't like doing it yourself it's a good idea to hire a professional copy writer. Simply put: without relevant content that mentions your target keywords you will not rank well. 11. Don't use frames There is still some debate as to whether frames are absolutely horrible for SEO or whether they are simply just not the best choice. Is there really a difference? Either way, you probably don't want to use frames. Crawlers can have trouble getting through to your content and effectively indexing individual pages, for one thing. For another, most functionality that the use of frames allows is easily duplicated using proper CSS coding. There is still some use for a frames-based layout, but it is still better to avoid it if at all possible. [update: i use iframes all the time, but I do think i take a hit for it.. adding "nofollow" seems to help and using robots.txt to disallow the iframe, but anyway, use them sparingly if at all] 12. Make sure that your server is returning a 404 error code for unfound pages We've all seen it. We're browsing around at a new or familiar site, clicking links and reading content, when we get the infamous blank screen that reads "404 page not found" error. While broken links that point to these pages should definitely be avoided you also don't want to create a "custom error page" to replace this page. Why? Well, it's simple: if you generate a custom error page, crawlers can spend time following broken links that they won't know are broken. A 404 error page is easily recognizable, and search engine crawlers are programmed to stop following links that generate this page. If crawlers end up in a section of your site that is down through an old link that you missed, they might not spend the time to index the rest of your site. -- Reason for this is some servers will dynamically generate a page based on any URL i.e. the keywords in the URL automatically generate a page; google doesn't like these sites because it knows they're not human produced and probably of lower value to a human searcher, so it penalizes them. 13. Ensure that crawlers will not fall into infinite loops Many webmasters see fit to include scripting languages, such as Perl, Php and Asp to add interactive functionality to their web pages. Whether for a calendar system, a forum, eCommerce functionality for an online store, etc. scripting is used quite frequently on the internet. However, what some webmasters don't realize is that unless they use robots.txt files or take other preventative measures search engine crawlers can fall into what are called "infinite loops" in their pages. Imagine, if you will, a scrípt that allows a webmaster to add a calendar to one of his pages. Now, any programmer worth his salt would base this scrípt on calculations - it would auto-generate each page based on the previous month and a formula to determine how the days and dates would fall. That scrípt, depending on sophistication, could plausibly extend infinitely into the past or future. Now think of the way a crawler works - it follows links, indexes what it finds, and follows more links. What's to stop a crawler from clicking "next month" in a calendar scrípt an infinite number of times? Nothing - well, almost nothing. Crawlers are well-built programs that need to run efficiently. As such they are built to recognize when they've run into an "infinite loop" situation like this, and they will simply stop indexing pages at a site that is flagged for this error.

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Tony Sena

Shelter Realty, Inc - Henderson, NV

Broker/Property Manager

Roger, this is some good stuff!

Aug 15, 2008 05:05 PM

Bob & Carolin Benjamin

Benjamin Realty LLC - Gold Canyon, AZ

East Phoenix Arizona Homes

This is very good .. going to bookmark your post and come back and read later again.

Aug 15, 2008 05:56 PM

Gita Bantwal

RE/MAX Centre Realtors - Warwick, PA

REALTOR,ABR,CRS,SRES,GRI - Bucks County & Philadel

I have bookmarked this so that I can read and learn from it.Thank you.

Aug 15, 2008 11:05 PM

Virginia Hepp - Mesquite NV REALTOR

Desert Gold Realty - Mesquite NV Homes For Sale - Mesquite, NV

Mesquite NV Homes and Neighborhoods - Search MLS

Roger - Excellent article, thank you so much. I am not saying that I understand it yet, I subscribed to learn more from you. My website is not that strong and I need all the help I can get.

Aug 16, 2008 04:22 AM

Roger V

Swift Marketing - Studio City, CA

Thanks Tony!

Good to hear Virginia...it's not enough to be an expert. The world needs to know how your expertise can help them get a better house, sell for more money, etc.

Aug 16, 2008 04:50 AM

Russell Lewis

Realty Austin, Austin Texas Real Estate - Austin, TX

Broker,CLHMS,GRI

"don't have time to explain anything..so if you don't understand it, sorry, just google it and you'll figure it out quickly."

Ok, I am a bit confused but it is intriguing enough that I am going to look into this further.

Aug 16, 2008 04:57 AM

Roger V

Swift Marketing - Studio City, CA

Ok, here's part 2 of this.. honestly, if anyone takes exactly the steps at the top, and then the off-site-SEO i'm posting below, you should have no problem dominating page 1 of google for a medium-range keyword. First, choose your keyword based on number of search results... search google for "mortgage" and you get 72 bazillion (technical term there) results. Seach for "long beach real estate" and you get 725,000 results... that's a fairly competitive keyword, but it's do-able and smaller towns will be even easier.

So once you knock off the top steps for on-site-SEO focused on -1- key phrase (hint: use Google Adwords not just to buy the keyword, but to help determine what keywords to go after, sort by volume of searches), next, write a few articles that about your unique market (whatever content, but make it useful and intensely local so it's of real value i.e. top things to do, top things to see, etc.). Make sure your keyphrase density is at least 2% of the total words (use Word to do a word count, then count your phrases).

Next, get a "content spinner" to computer-rewrite the article slightly. A Content Spinner will replace "house" with "home" and "see the house" with "view the house" to create hundreds of variations - this is needed because Google hates duplicate content. So you reword the articles just a bit, each one, and the spinner can create 100 slight variations of the article.

Next, take the time or hire an assistant to submit articles to these sites. This will get you a one-way-backlink which is better than cross-linking.

Here's a long list... in truth you really only need ezinearticles and a few others -after- you have some presence i.e. to defend your turf, but at first, you need a ton of backlinks to outrank the big sites..so dig the well and it'll produce water for years to come. Here's a good list of article sites.. yes, it's a lot of work, but just knock off 3 a day or spend 1/2 a day doing all at once.
___________________________________________________________________________

www.Articlebiz.com
www.Articlecity.com
www.Articledashboard.com
www.Ezinearticles.com
www.Selfgrowth.com
www.Articlealley.com
www.Articlecube.com
www.Easyarticles.com
www.Ideamarketers.com
www.Articles.webraydian.com
www.Site-reference.com
www.Submitondashboard.com
www.The-article-directory.com/index.php
www.tisoftware.biz/articles/index.php
www.A1-articledirectory.com
www.Afroarticles.com
www.Articlecat.com
www.Articlepros.com
www.Articlerich.com
www.Articlebase.com
www.Articlesbeyondbetter.com
www.Articleleson.com
www.Contentdesk.com
www.Earticleonline.com
www.Top7business.com/submit
www.Webmasterslibrary.com
www.Workoninternet.com
www.Ams-skins.morethanarticles.com
www.Articlecrux.com
www.Articlesyndicator.com
www.Local-list.us
www.Commonconnections.com
www.Article99.com
www.Articlebankonline.com
www.Articlecafe.net
www.Articleclick.com
www.Articlecrash.com
www.Article-directory-central.com
www.Articlegeek.com
www.Article-junction.com
www.Articlenorth.com
www.Articleretreat.com
www.Articlesbin.com
www.Article-submission.us
www.Article-voip.com
www.Articlezap.com
www.Bigarticlepro.com
www.Bigarticlepro.com
www.Christiannotepad.com
www.Crixi.com
www.Electrictext.com
www.Ezine-directory-express.com
www.Freearticlepost.com
www.Gratisartikler.com
www.Impactarticles.com
www.Isysi.com
www.Marketmyarticle.com
www.Media13.com

===== that's it for them. Next, bookmark your own site via these social sites. Set up a free account, bookmark your site, and a few other related local sites so your links are of value. =========

By the way, don't underestimate this. My friend's research showed that appearing on the front page of digg.com delivered more results than being in the New York Times.

www.Propeller.com
www.Slashdot.org
www.Digg.com
www.Technorati.com
www.Del.icio.us
www.Stumbleupon.com
www.Twitter.com
www.Reddit.com
www.Tagza.com
www.Fark.com
www.Newsvine.com
www.Furl.net
www.swik.net
www.Connotea.org
www.Sphinn.com
www.Blinklist.com
www.Faves.com
www.Mister-wong.com
www.Spurl.net
www.Netvouz.com
www.Diigo.com
www.Backflip.com
www.Rawsugar.com
www.Bibsonomy.org
www.Folkd.com
www.Linkagogo.com
www.Indianpad.com
www.Plugim.com
www.Myjeeves.ask.com

Last, create an event, write a properly formatted press release and then submit it. This will need to be real news, not just "buy from me" but like "Jimbob raised $5,000 for charity from local residents" or "jimbob ran in the burning barn and saved the baby animals and is a local hero, and by the way, he's a realtor to help you sell your home"..just make sure it's true. But it will need to be somewhat newsworthy - stats about foreclosures, biggest/smallest/worst/ugliest home ever sold - whatever works for you. It also could be not about homes at all, just local living - i.e. farmers market has moved from 3rd street to the boardwalk.

Again, this will get you those magic one-way backlinks, and some human readers. Remember to include your chosen keyphrase!

www.i-newswire.com
www.clickpress.com
www.free-press-release.com
www.express-press-release.com
www.1888pressrelease.com
www.pr9.net
www.pressbox.co.uk
www.pressmethod.com
www.pressreleasespider.com
www.malebits.com
www.prnuke.com
www.prlog.org
www.afly.com
www.press-base.com
www.pressexposure.com
www.sanepr.com
www.prurgent.com
www.prbuzz.com
www.prfree.com
www.freepressindex.com
www.transworldnews.com

also worth a mention: see www.TubeMogul.com - free video syndication. Great site.

========= last, while I'm thinking of it... start with easy keywords and work your way up. I.e. start with "mysmallneighborhood relocation" then mysmallneighborhood real estate" then "bigger area real estate" and then finally, after you know you can get it, "manhattan real estate" i.e. a fiercely competitive space.

This is some work - but it's worth the payoff. The tougher it is to rank for positions 1 - 3, the more valuable it is to be there. There's a huge difference in traffic between positions #1 and #5, and even bigger between #10 and #11 (next page of google).

By the way, if you did this for your keyword, you should be able to completely dominate a keyword, pushing your competitors off the page. For example, this is a nich-y keyword, but google "movoxo" and you'll see the first 10 links are ALL me. Sure, that's a nichey keyword nobody else would compete for..but you see the point. Were someone else to want to rank for that word, it would be tough to tip me off.

Have fun! This is everything you need to know to be a Search Engine Optimization expert. With this, you can hire an assistant to do some of this for you!

hope it helps :)

RogerV CEO of www.iSignature.com instant contract signature and www.Movoxo.com - the Get More Clients company.

Aug 16, 2008 05:44 AM

Dominic Maricic

Home Inspector Pro - Rancho Cucamonga, CA

I have to disagree with you on #7. I've been doing website design for 14 years, and teaching it for 10, performing SEO for the last 6 or 7. Google ATTEMPTS at looking at flash files but does a very very poor job. At best it thinks your site has only one page. Usually it will read the file names within the flash file and index those (like if you link to a pdf within the flash file). I've created many pure flash sites over the years and their SEO is nothing compared to sites that are pure text. Adding some flash to a standard site is fine, but pure flash sites are still a very bad idea.

Dominic Maricic
Home Inspector Pro
http://www.HomeInspectorPro.com

Aug 16, 2008 09:17 AM

Roger V

Swift Marketing - Studio City, CA

hmm.. i can't find it now, but it was on Google's official blog just about 2-3 weeks ago.

However, I could be wrong; I read it quickly, and it could have been a rehash of this, which is that google does read flash, just not very well:
http://www.insideria.com/2008/01/googles-probably-indexing-flas.html

also, for the record, we use flash extensively for videos / movies / interactive apps (such as maps), but NEVER for really anything else. I 100% agree with you that a whole website built in flash is probably not a good idea, and 99.9% of the time sites built in flash should not have been i.e. they payoff isn't worth the cost, especially in these days of ajax.

Aug 16, 2008 09:28 AM

Team Honeycutt

Allen Tate - Concord, NC

i wish I was smarter about all of this and had the patience to sit and read over and over...I am going to pass this on to someone smarter than me. Thanks

Aug 16, 2008 01:37 PM

Vicente A. Martinez

Prudential Douglas Elliman Licensed Real Estate Salesperson - Woodhaven, NY

Realtor, Brooklyn - Long Island - Queens Homes

Hi Roger. Thanks for sharing the wealth of information! Keep it coming.

Aug 16, 2008 07:58 PM

Gita Bantwal

RE/MAX Centre Realtors - Warwick, PA

REALTOR,ABR,CRS,SRES,GRI - Bucks County & Philadel

I am glad I came back to this post. I will check out the links.

Aug 16, 2008 11:03 PM

Kaleb Kunz

Logan, UT

Awesome info!!!

Logan Utah Real Estate

Aug 21, 2008 04:31 PM

Anonymous

Tanv

I am extremly glad that i could reach to you. Your informations are really helpfull to me. Thank you for sharing.

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Dec 06, 2011 01:59 AM

#14

Anonymous

Jess

Have fun! This is everything you need to know to be a Search Engine Optimization expert. With this, you can hire an assistant to do some of this for you!

http://www.enseoarticle.com

Dec 06, 2011 02:02 AM

#15

Anonymous

Melica