Improve Your Real Estate Website Rankings

6 SEO Essentials that Google & Bing Look For 
Courtesy of Social Media Today: http://ow.ly/hoWVS


There’s one dangerous misconception that’s tied to search engine optimization (SEO): Many believe they need to be an IT or coding master to achieve any meaningful improvement in their blog or website’s ranking on search engine results pages.

The truth is, the best things you can do to improve your search rankings organically have nothing to do with your site’s coding.

Here’s a checklist some of the best SEO practices you can start doing today to boost your blog/site’s rankings:

1. Focus on content quality
Search engines have gotten a lot smarter the past few years. You can no longer fool them into giving your site a good ranking simply by stuffing a bunch of keywords onto them.

For pages to rank well, they now have to be readable, generate backlinks and have a very low bounce rate. All of those things come from creating quality content.

For search engines like Google and Bing to label your blog/site as “high-quality” it must also:

• Produce articles that are 300 words or longer the majority of the time. An abundance of short posts carries little weight with search engines.
• Use proper grammar and spelling. Sites with lots of misspellings are highly penalized.
• Generate links from – and links to – authoritative sites.

2. Use keywords properly
When it comes to keywords, there are a few places Google and Bing want to see them used:

• Page titles. How else would a search engine – or a reader – know what your page is about?
• URLs. This, too, tells search engines what topic the page covers.
• Anchor text. When linking to other sites that cover the same keywords, use the keyword(s) themselves as the anchor for those links.
• Image titles. Rather than having an image title like “image 1,” rename the file the keyword(s) you’re using on the page.

Another common misconception is that pages need to have an ideal keyword density to rank well. This is no longer the case. However, the keyword(s) should at least be mentioned two to three times for every 300 words written. It’s also a good idea to use synonyms and variations of the keyword(s) as often as possible.

Whatever you do, don’t sacrifice readability for the sake of keyword cramming. It’ll hurt more than it helps.

3. Cross-link your posts
If you’ve created multiple pages of content focusing on the same keyword(s), link them together.

If your bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who enter your site and leave before viewing other pages) is high, your search engine rank will be low.

One way to reduce your bounce rate is to link visitors to other pages of your site. In other words, point them to other relevant content you’ve posted (again, using keywords as anchor text).

4. Generate links
A major indicator that your site is an authority on a subject is to have lots of other sites/individuals linking to your content.

Of course, the best way to generate links is to provide high-quality content that educates or entertains, and that others will want to share.

Some ways to speed up the link-building process:

• Ask a well-respected company in your industry to endorse your content on its site by creating a link to your material. As an enticement, you can offer to return the favor.
• Find a company sending an e-newsletter and suggest it link to your content as a value-added supplement for its customers.

5. Make sure it loads quickly
Search engines love sites that load quickly – preferably in less than three seconds.

To speed up your site’s load time:

• Reduce/compress the size of your images.
• Reduce the number of images you use.
• Remove plugins.
• Eliminate Flash animations.
• Make sure it’s stable (crashes lead to big SEO penalties).

6. Be social media friendly
The world is going social – and so are search engines.

The more your content is “liked” and “shared” on social media sites, the more weight it’ll be given in search engine results pages.

So it’s time to add Facebook’s “Like” button, Twitter’s “Tweet” button, Google+’s “+1” button and LinkedIn’s “Share” button.

After that, you’ll want to make a list of the keywords you want to rank highly for and make sure you’re including those keywords in the content you post on social media sites.