These are basic guidelines to follow and if you have to stray from them a bit to make your site more readable or user-friendly that’s fine. Your site making sense to human visitors comes first.

Title Tags

Title tags are the most important element of on page optimization. Including your keyword phrases in the title will help the search engines determine that your page is relevant to that phrase.

• Your title tag should contain your primary keyword phrase(s) for that page.
• Title tags should be kept to 65 characters or less.
• Think of your title tag like an ad headline.
• Every page on your site should have different Titles.

The image below is a screenshot from a search for Los Angeles real estate. Notice the words that were included in my search term are bold. When your title includes the searched phrase it will appear bold in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page), this is important to draw attention to your listing and improve click through.

Meta Description Tags

Meta description tags are more important for click through than they are for rankings. If you look at the image above the black text displayed is from the meta description tag. If you don’t have a meta description tag on the page the search engines will generally grab a snippet of text from the page.

• Think of your description tag as a selling point to get a searcher to click through to your site.
• Include your target keywords where it makes sense.
• Description tags will only display about the first 150-165 characters in the SERPs.

Heading Tags & Text Styles

The bigger bold words above on this page are using heading tags. The html code for a heading tags are as follows:

Heading 1 - <h1> text of choice </h1>

Heading 2 - <h2> text of choice </h2>

Heading 3 - <h3> text of choice </h3>

Heading tags carry a little weight in the search engines but if this is a little to complicated dont’ worry and just skip it. If your using a visual editor you may not be able to create these tags.  There may be an option to switch to the html editor where you can add html tags or there may be an option in your visual editor.

• You should have only one h1 tag and it should be reserved for your high priority keyword phrase.
• You can have as many h2 and below tags as you want.
• Don’t sacrifice usability to get your h-tags on the page.
• Use h-tags to draw attention to an area on your page.

Text styles such as bold, underline and italic can also give the words you use them on more weight but honestly it’s not going to make that much of a difference. Again your sites usability is much more important than getting an extra keyword on the page.

Page Content – Copy

When writing your page copy you need to be writing for human visitors. Fit keyword phrases in where it makes sense. You should have at least one occurrence of your primary keyword phrase on the page and if possible, in a heading tag. There may be a slight benefit of getting your keyword phrase toward the top of the page but don’t sacrifice readability.

• Fit your keywords in the copy where they make sense.
• Make sure it makes sense to human visitors.

Internal Link Optimization

You can optimize your internal links by using good anchor text. Anchor text or link text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink.

You probably don’t want to link to your competitors website but linking to other websites that can benefit your users should not hurt you. And, you should try to keep these outbound links off your homepage. You don’t want to send people away before they find what they want.

• Use your keyword phrases in your link text.
• Don’t be afraid to link to other websites.

Before you go out and find what keywords potential clients are searching for, you should first write down what pages you already have on your site. There are likely a few pages on your site that you don’t need or want to rank… still I recommend you write them down(maybe something will fit there.

Here are some example pages gathered from other real estate websites.

• Homepage – this is basically a portal to direct traffic to where they want to go on your site.

• Listing Page – if you work in multiple cities you can and should have a listing page for each city.

• Rental Page – if you do rentals you should have a page specifically for that.

• About page – self explanatory.

• Blog – you should have a blog or some sort of page on your site where you can put up articles.

Each of these pages should be targeting different keyword phrases. And each of these pages can target more than one keyword.

Commonly Used Real Estate Keywords

There are some commonly used keywords that are used to find real estate websites. These should be your starting point for finding your keywords and determining which ones should have top priority.

(insert your city name here) real estate, (your city) homes and (your city) homes for sale: will likely be the keywords with the most search volume. But don’t jump in without doing the research first.

Keyword Research Tools

There are plenty of keyword research tools out there that you can use but for our purposes we’re going to use a free tool from Google.

Google Adwords – Keyword Tool – You should create an account or if you already have and account, log in using the link at the top right of the page. By logging in you will get more data then you will logged out.

Now put your commonly used keyword phrases  in the box labeled, Word or phrase. You can check the box labeled “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms”. If you signed in just click search, if you didn’t sign in fill in the captcha field and click search.

After you search and get your keyword results, there will be a new option in the left navigation area called Match Types.

Deselect Broad and check the box next to “Phrase”. Feel free to play around with the match types to get a feel for what people are actually typing in to the search engines.

Now you should have a list with the keyword terms you typed in as well as a list of keyword ideas(example screenshot below) . There will also be search volume data and competition data for each keyword phrase.

The competition data is for Adwords advertisers and for our purposes can be ignored. The global and local monthly search volume is what we’re looking for. In most real estate markets the global volume vs the monthly volume will be the same or very close so focus on the Global Monthly Search volume.

Now make a file in word, notepad, excel or whichever program you feel most comfortable with. Add all the keywords that are relevant to your business to this file with the search volumes next to them.

Example:

• san jacinto real estate –  Broad= 880 , Phrase= 170
• san jacinto homes – Broad= 2400 , Phrase= 170

Save this file somewhere on your computer so you can find it later.

Keyword Grouping

Each page that you want to get rankings for should target 1-3 keywords. There is no rule on how many keywords you can target on one page but it’s best to keep it at a few closely related phrases.

The best way to group keywords is to think of which page they best apply to. And, the easiest page on a website to get ranked is the homepage so lets start there.

For example, I would target the homepage with:” San Jacinto real estate”, “San Jacinto CA real estate” and “real estate San Jacinto”. The top priority keyword in this group would be “San Jacinto real estate” because it has the highest search volume of the 3 phrases.

You may end up with some keyword groups that are larger than a few phrases. In this case you can:
try to split them up,
you can pick the ones with the highest search volume,
or you can pick the ones that make the most sense grammatically (recommended).

If you haven’t already done so, assign each keyword group to the page on your site that’s the most relevant. If you have keyword groups that don’t match a page on your site save them and down the road you may want to make a page or pages for those keyword phrases.

Save all the data you gathered and use it to optimize the pages on your site and to get ideas for new content to create.

I wanted to give a quick introduction to the the site.

REASEO stands for Real Estate Agent Search Engine Optimization(SEO) as you can probably see at the top of the site. On the site you’ll actually be learning a lot more than what most consider SEO.

Navigating the Site

While the content is rolling out the site navigation will be pretty simple but as the site grows so will the complexity of finding your way around. Don’t worry I will try to make it as easy as possible.

First off, everything will be posted into categories. The main categories that I know we will be using are as follows:

• Real Estate SEO (General SEO stuff)
• Link Building (is SEO but deserves it’s own space)
• Web Analytics (Visitor Tracking)
• Lead Generation (self explanatory)
• Website Design (Design tips & Self Hosting your Own Website)

There will be a category menu towards the top of the page with the main categories to make things easier to find. There is also a search function where you can search for specific text at the upper right of the page.

Contact

The Contact page is for you. I encourage you to use it so you can get the most out of this site.

If you have questions, comments, suggestions, etc. please let me know.

Thanks for visiting and come back soon.

Commenting

Blog commenting is one of the biggest forms of spam because it’s one of the easiest and fastest ways to get a link. So unfortunately comments will be moderated.

As a general rule of thumb, if you want your comment to be approved please make it relevant to the post(for example: if you have a question or feedback related to the post… you should leave a comment).

If you have a general question that is not directly related to a post I would suggest the Contact page.