Improving the SEO on the Current Pages on Your Website

This article is about how Australian Real Estate Agents can apply basic SEO principals to the existing pages on their website by changing body text, page title, page description and alt text.

There are so many different Content Management Systems used by agents to manage their websites so its impossible for me to give you specific instructions on how to implement every thing in this article but with some commonsense, logic and a sprinkling of using the help files and program support you should be able to figure everything out fairly easily.

This article is the fourth in a 6 part series to assist agents in improving the SEO of their own websites.

The first article covered getting ready to apply changes to your website.  The second article covered link and referrer building, The third article covered keyword research.

I suggest that if you have not read the first three articles that you do that first. This article will cover optimising the current pages on your website to keywords you identified in article three.

With real estate agent websites there are two different types of pages, the  property pages which are generated automatically by the system to show off your your property listings and then there is the content pages. Most systems will allow you to edit and create new content pages yourself and this article is about you editing  your current pages to inject a bit more search engine friendliness into them.  In the next article we will discuss new pages or sections you can add to your site.

The content pages are the most likely to appear in the search engine and to generate you traffic. The property pages are generally filled automatically into a template and you will probably have very little control over them and they change regularly.

Improving your property pages is certainly an option but you will normally need to update  the template and that will generally be above the skill level of most agents and their staff. If you identify that your property pages could be improved as well you should speak with your website provider to update your templates.  Any changes to the template would automatically roll out to all property pages in one hit.

You should work through each of the existing pages on your website and refresh and  improve them one by one.

First Things First!

The first step you need to do is identify the keywords for each page.  From the keywords you identified in Article 3 select between 1 and 3 keywords that each of your existing content pages are about. On a very large site you might have individual pages targeting just one keyword but for now applying 2 or sometimes three related keywords on one page should give you the widest coverage with what you have as most agents have very few content pages on their website.

Make sure the keywords are related and best explain what the page is about. Don’t worry if you don’t have enough content pages to match up with all your keywords as in Article 4 we will discuss creating new pages for your website.

For a suburb profile  on the suburb of Nerang I might select the keywords “Nerang Real Estate” and “Nerang Property”.

Key Areas to Improve on Each Page

To improve the SEO on a particular page there are a few key areas we need to look at:-

• Page Title
• Meta Description
• Meta Keywords
• Body Content
• Images

Page Title

The single most important factor that will influence your SEO is the page title. By default some CMS systems that agents use will apply the same page title for every page.  This is a huge problem and something you need to sort out asap. The quickest way to check out all of your page titles at the moment is to use Google Search.

If you search using the site: operator you will see all the pages in Google’s index for that domain. So searching site:rwm.com.au shows us that every page is unique for the Richardson and Wrench Mosman site. As a side note if anybody had any doubts that Robert had 2000 pages on his site this search confirms that Google has a touch under 1900 of those pages indexed.

If all yours page titles are the same and if you find that you cannot change the page title you really need to consider moving or upgrading your web provider.

The page title is so powerful that no matter what you search, chances are that the majority of the pages returned on the first page will have the term you searched for in the page title. Your page title should then naturally feature the keyword or keywords you are targeting for that specific page.

The other things page title’s do is attract the persons attention on the search results page. A good page title will help get you higher on the page but a great page title will  better convey that you have what the searcher is looking for and provide a call to action and get them to click on your page over the others.

The biggest problem most people make is trying to target too many subjects on one page. This just saturates the page as far as the search engines are concerned and your theme on the page does not stand out amongst all the clutter. Keep each page focussed on just one subject. Obviously on the home page you should be targeting the name of your agency above all else with references to each suburb in your primary trade.

Using the same Nerang Suburb Profile example from above I would suggest something like :

Nerang Real Estate -  View Information on all Nerang Property

Notice how I did not use the name of the agency on that page title. That is optional and in most cases I would suggest you don’t do that on the majority of your pages. Even though the search engines will look at longer titles they will only show the first 70 characters on the search engines results page. Google also seem to only include the first 12 words of the title in the intitle: site operator. This means that you should use these two figures as your limit when crafting your page titles and if you want to put your company/agency name in the title then put it at the end.’

Nerang Real Estate -  View Information on all Nerang Property – First National Real Estate Nerang

Meta Description

The meta description is also very important but not as much as it use to be. Search engines use to rely very heavily on the meta description to work out what the page was about but webmasters worked out how to abuse this so its importance has been reduced in recent years. But one thing has remained unchanged and that is the meta description is generally, but not always, selected by search engines to display on the search engine results page as a snapshot of the content on the site.

This means that on top of having SEO value crafting a good meta description is important to entice visitors to click on your website.

Different search engines will display different number of characters but since Google is the smallest and is the major player then you should be guided by their 160 character limit.

The meta description should follow these rules

• Contain your keywords
• Inform the user what they will find on the page
• Be unique

For our example a good description depending upon what you actually have on your suburb profile might be :

The Nerang suburb profile includes info on Nerang real estate including suburb details, demographics, property types and recent Nerang property prices achieved

Meta Keywords

Meta keywords use to be very important but they have lost most of their power.  Google in fact have openly declared they do not use them at any stage anymore but  since other search engines still potentially use them and it is very easy and quick to do with no downside at all it’s important to add them to each page.

This is really a simple matter of adding the keywords you have identified for that page plus I would also add in the reverse if they are valid so for our example this would be”

nerang real estate, nerang property, real estate nerang, property nerang

Body Content

The body content is just the content on what is on the page and that is really up to you but there should be a few rules you should follow.

• Use your keywords naturally in the content. The days of stuffing keywords throughout the page is really gone. It may still effect some of the smaller search engines but the ones you want to target are not fooled by this anymore and if they consider you are spamming the page with your keywords you will probably get penalised for it.
• Your page sections should be marked with Headings or a H tags.   Header tags come in different levels. If you look at this article the page title is a H1 heading tag, the section headings are H2 tags and the sub section headings are h3 tags.  Include your keywords as much as possible in the headings tags
• Many search engines are believed to look at the readability of the content. I think it is more about the maths involved than if the actual words make sense.  Good easy to read content seems to follow a similar formula.  There are a few ways they do including looking at the number of paragraphs, the number of sentences per paragraph, the number of words per sentence. They also look at the complexity of the words you use.  When the search engines do this paragraphs containing masses of keywords are quickly identified as spam.  This means its important to  use good grammar and structure to your content and refrain from using complex words. Don’t make sentences or paragraphs too big or even too small. Make it easier to read for a visitor and that will make it easier to read for a search engine. You should really be able to tell just by looking at it but to test the readability of your pages you can use one of the many online tools like http://www.read-able.com/
• You should bold keywords and other import information on the page at least once or twice when they appear in your page’s body content.  Bold works with the search engines just like it does to a reader and highlights important words as being particularly relevant. Don’t bold every instance you use your keywords or go overboard in anyway. It needs to look natural

Images

Images are something often overlooked by real estate agents. In general each page should contain at least one image. Pages with longer content should include even more.  Pages with images generally make it much easier for a visitor to read by breaking up all that text but additionally for a search engine they also add further context to the page’s content.

Rename the photos to the keywords for that page and upload them to the website and insert them on the page. You then need to set the alt text for each image on the page. The alt text describes the image and again you insert your keywords. Search engines use the name of the image files and the alt text when analysing just what your page content is about.

Other Factors You Need to Consider.

There are a range of other factors you need to consider when looking to optimise your pages. These include :

• Bounce  and Satisfaction Rates
• Page Load Time
• Internal and External Links

Bounce and Satisfaction Rates

Google has recently advised that in order to gain more relevance on their results it will be placing more emphasis on bounce and/or satisfaction rates for each page.

A bounce rate is the percentage of all users who view only that page and then leave without viewing anything else on your site. The satisfaction rate approaches the issue from the opposite end of the spectrum but in a slightly different way. The satisfaction rate is the percentage of people who find the information they were actually searching for on the page they visited.  This means that satisfaction rate will indicate how many people clicked on your link and were satisfied with the results without having to return to return to Google and perform any further searches.

In essence what Google is saying is that the higher the bounce rate for a page, the less important it must be for that term and the higher the satisfaction rate the more relevant it is for that particular keyword.

This places a high importance on making sure your visitors arriving from search engines, or at least Google, do not return to the search engine and instead they look further into your site. Increasing your site’s “stickyness” in keeping visitors on the site longer and looking at more pages will be more important than ever. Make sure in the first paragraph of your text is inviting and explains exactly what the page is about. With Google at least everyone that leaves your site unsatisfied is a potential black mark and those that continue to browse and read through your site is a tick.

Page Load Time

Google has indicated recently that page load times will play a role in determining your ranking. Selecting a high quality web host and minimising your page load time will soon play a role in just where you rank in the search engine.  In re-designing the pages the biggest way you can minimise page load times is to make sure the images you use on each page are small and optimised for the web.

There are a lot of tools out there that can check your page load time but here is one http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Internal and External Links

You need to include links into your page body content that link to other pages on your site and to other external sites. Google uses these in there ranking plus they will make visitors burrow further increasing your satisfaction rates.  External links can be made to open in a new browser window meaning the visitor will not actually browse away from your site should they click on an external link. Using our example of  the Nerang suburb profile you might include a paragraph like this:

Nerang is very centrally located on the Gold Coast and is a popular choice for working couples and young families. Nerang real estate prices start from $220,000 for a 2 bedroom unit and $350,000 for a 3 bedroom house but quickly rise to well over $1 million for prestige executive residences and acreage properties outside of the residential area. Recognised as one of the most affordable suburbs on the Gold Coast but still within 15 minutes drive to the beaches, Nerang property is also very popular with First Home Buyers and local and out of town investors.

This content uses our keywords in the context of the page but we can also provide a range of internal and external links to the reader throughout the content such as

Nerang is very centrally located on the Gold Coast and is a popular choice for working couples and young families. Nerang real estate prices start from $220,000 for a 2 bedroom unit and $350,000 for a 3 bedroom house but quickly rise to well over $1 million for prestige executive residences and acreage properties outside of the residential area. Recognised as one of the most affordable suburbs on the Gold Coast but still within 15 minutes drive to the beaches, Nerang property is also very popular with First Home Buyers and local and out of town investors.

Peppering links to other pages on your own site and occasionally other external sites will improve your seo and will keep visitors on your site longer and enable them to engage better with your site. If you are worried about external links allowing visitors to leave your site then you easily have them open a new browser window so they dont actually navigate away from your site.

Overview

So as you work through updating your current content pages create yourself a checklist to make sure you look at every one of these factors

• Page Title
• Meta Description
• Meta Keywords
• Body Content
  • Keywords in Content
  • Header Tags
  • Readability
  • Bolding Keywords
• Images
• Bounce  and Satisfaction Rates
• Page Load Time
• Internal and External Links

If you ensure you look at and improve each of these factors on all your content pages then you are well on your way to improve your seo and getting more traffic.  If you have a quite a few pages to get through spread them out and dont try and do them all at once. Remember you only have to do that once and the benefit lasts for a very long time. Thats why SEO is one of the best investments you can do for your website.

Additional Reading

SEO Explained For Small Business Owners

SEO at Wikipedia

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

And lastly something that I have only just found myself and if you are just learning about SEO is the most important thing you will read on the subject because it is written by Google themselves

Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

Duplicate content is often legitimate and Google understands this. Take property listings for example. Jane Smith is a real estate agent. She uses MyDesktop to upload a new listing to her site. As part of the MyDesktop service her listing is uploaded to reiwa.com, domain.com.au and realestate.com.au, all via an XML feed.

It makes sense for Jane to pay for this service. She enters her listing details once but gets exposure on a number of sites. But that’s not the end of the story.

Jane is interested in more than selling her listing. She also wants to attract new listings. To do so she wants to be found in a Google search and this is where duplicate content becomes an issue.

When Google finds duplicate content they look for instructions from the webmaster about how they want a page indexed. These instructions are found within the page meta tags and help the search engine deliver the most relevant results to the end-user.

However, when Google finds legitimate duplicate content – a property listing on multiple sites for example – without these instructions they are faced with a choice: Which page of content do they deliver in the search results? Their response is to “… always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer.” What that means to Jane is the original content, the page she created when posting the listing on her website, may well not be what a web searcher finds. And she’s trying to build a database of subscribers to her e-newsletter that’s bad news.

Let’s look at a real-life example. I conducted a Google search using the phrase “2brm unit for sale Victoria Park”. It’s a search term that might be conducted by either a buyer or seller. The first page of the search results contained no results from real estate agents. All were from listing portals or site scrapers. Starting to see my point?

The one that caught my eye, though, was from realestate.com.au (REA), the first entry in the search results. It included a link to a listing profile page, which contained the very same information as the original listing page on the agent’s site (when these properties are marked by the agent as sold these links may stop working). In this instance Google has determined that, of the two pages of identical property description, the one from REA was the most relevant. The agent has missed out on a visitor to their website and a chance to add to their email database.

Google’s recommendation about syndicated content, and that’s what agents are doing with their listing data, is this:

Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites…it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to use the noindex meta tag to prevent search engines from indexing their version of the content.

In other words Google wants to index the original content, but they need help.

Let’s look at Google’s suggestion in two parts as it pertains to the above example.

First, REA does provide a link to the agent’s website, just not from the listing page and not to the original listing page (article) as recommended by Google. There’s no way for Google to know which piece of content was the duplicate. Furthermore, when they do provide a link to the agent’s site (from within the agent’s profile page) it’s hidden by a rel=”nofollow” tag. What this means is that the link is ignored by the search engines. The agent gets no Google love from the REA link and no boost in the performance of their site in a Google search. It’s all one way traffic in favour of the portal.

Second, REA don’t add the noindex meta tag to the duplicate page. If they did the page wouldn’t be indexed and therefore wouldn’t display in the search results.

Agents who think that the reason for a web presence is just to advertise property will have no problem with the portal’s behaviour. Buyers are finding their properties and that’s all that matters. But agents who want to build a brand using the Internet will have a different viewpoint. These agents provide content to REA to advertise their listings not so the portal can dominate search results.

I concede there’s more to SEO than just dealing with duplicate content. Even if it wasn’t an issue some agents manage their websites so badly they will never be found in the first page of a search. But agents who take pride in their website and their brand are right to be peeved at REA’s ethics. And they’re also right to look to the membership organisations to which they belong to step up and help them compete.
It’s high time for agents to demand  a fair go.

SEO Series

This article is the third in the series. The first article introduced the concept of SEO and focussed on the initial tasks and housekeeping to prepare your website to improve its SEO and monitoring that improvement. The second article concentrated on Referral Building and how to increase the authoritative value of your website. This article will concentrate on the very important task of keyword research.

Keyword Research

A keyword is a word or phrase used to search on and extract information out of an index. In the context of these articles keywords will be search engine keywords. These are the word or terms that a web user will use to search for property related websites.

The whole context of Search Engine Optimisation hinges on your website appearing as high as possible for related search engine keywords on the many search engines. The more keywords your site returns for the more targetted traffic you will generate.

This article focuses on identifying potential keywords to implement into your SEO structure. We will leave the implementation of these keywords to the next two articles but identifying the right keywords is really half the battle.

Not enough people treat the keyword research phase with enough importance. It really is the foundation of your whole SEO work and is why I will be concentrating a whole article in the series to this.

In the next article in the series we will look at using some of these keywords to improve your existing pages of your website and then in the following article we will look at creating new pages to add to your website.

Primary Geographic Keywords

These are the keywords that will probably bring you the most traffic and should be setup for each of the suburbs in your primary trade area.

Using our agency as an example we operate in 4 key residential suburbs, Nerang, Highland Park, Carrara and Worongary but I will use Nerang as my example. Other than the agency name itself the primary keywords for a real estate agency primarily fall into two camps. “Real Estate” and “Property”.

So our primary keywords would first start with the suburb and then add that suburb to each combination so for Nerang we would have.

• Nerang
• Nerang Real Estate
• Nerang Property

Repeat for every primary suburb of course and lets not forget to reverse your keywords

Many of these keywords can also be used in reverse, so “Real Estate Nerang” would also be valid. This does not work all the time but each of these below would be natural search terms.

• Real Estate Nerang
• Property Nerang

This gives us 5 primary keywords per suburb. Assuming  you focus on the top 4 suburbs that form part of your primary trade area  and you have first 20 keywords but lets not stop there.

Other Geographic Keywords

The exact secondary keywords you need to identify will vary for each agency depending upon the property types you sell and the services you offer.

I am going to give you a few examples broken down into sections which should highlight the need to think about the different “layers” of keywords that you can target.

At the bottom of this article I will show how you conduct some research to find the keywords for your particular requirements.

Property Types

• Nerang Houses
• Nerang Homes
• Nerang Units
• Nerang Land

Buyers

• Nerang Property For Sale
• Nerang Homes For Sale
• Nerang Units For Sale
• Nerang Land For Sale

Investors

• Nerang Investment Property
• Nerang Investment
• Nerang Property Investment

Sellers

• Nerang Property Values
• Nerang Property Sales
• Nerang Agents
• Nerang Real Estate Agent
• Nerang Real Estate Agents

Tenants

• Nerang Homes to Rent
• Nerang Property to Rent
• Nerang Rentals

Landlords

• Nerang Property Management
• Nerang Property Managers

Valuation

• Nerang valuers
• Nerang valuation

Other examples that could be valid for some agencies but not others could focus around  keywords like “studio” or “studio apartment”, “waterfront”, “prestige”, “acreage”, “hobby farm” and many others.

Offices operating in smaller country towns will find it worthwhile targeting keywords based on the name of the town but those in the urban sprawl of the cities will find the competition for city based keywords like Sydney Real Estate or Melbourne Property is just too high.

The same things goes for keywords based on district and regions and I would recommend that you initially concentrate on suburb based keywords. Crawl before you walk.. and walk before you run.

Secondary General Keywords

Another good thing to target is more general keywords. Although these sort of keywords can bring significant traffic it is not targeted for your specific agency or location. The traffic is still useful though as it improves your overall ratings and authoritative value on the internet which in turns pushes your results for other keywords higher and higher. Use this list as a guide only and create a list that suits your particular office.

Buyers

• What happens at settlement
• Settlement day
• Building and pest inspection
• First Home Buyers

Investors

• FIRB
• real estate investing
• Real Estate Investment
• Investment in real estate
• Real Estate Investment Software
• Real Estate Investment incentives
• Real Estate Taxes

Sellers

• Real Estate Commission Queensland
• Agent Commission Queensland
• Real Estate Commission
• Exclusive agency
• Selling By Auction

Tenants

• Renting with Pets
• tenants rights
• tenant responsibility
• properties for rent

Landlords

• real estate investment management
• real estate investment manager
• property management
• property manager
• tenant screening
• evicting tenants
• evict a tenant
• Tenancy Database

Misspellings

Another interesting set of keywords to consider is common misspellings. As an example Real Estate is often typed in as realestate by many searchers and Gold Coast is often combined to Gold Coast. You should consider keywords that people would often type even if they may not be technically correct. If I operated in Port Macquarie I would certainly make sure one of my keywords was “Pt Macquarie”.

An International Flavour

If a large selection of your potential market is to international clients you should also concentrate on words  they would use when searching for properties in your area. Americans would use “realtor”, “condominium” or “condo” whereas visitors from the UK would use words like estate agent, detached and semi-detached.

So Where to Next?

You have to take my examples and suggestions above and create your own keyword lists that is specifically suited for your office and your primary trade area and then you have to prioritise those keywords.

Prioritising for Quality AND Quantity

Thankfully we don’t have to just guess our way through the list as Google provides a fantastic tool that will provide you with enough information to make the job relatively easy.

Google runs a service called Adwords. This is when you advertise on Google with those small “sponsored by” ads on Google’s search engine and other sites. Google provides their advertisers and potential advertisers with a “Keyword Tool”. This tool allows you to enter any search term and it will return the relative traffic generated for that search term plus it will suggest a range of other keywords that you might want to consider and their relative traffic.

But please remember one major point.. Its not just about selecting the keywords with the highest traffic.  Some keywords might only attract a couple of searches a week.. but you want to come up number one every single time.

To put this in perspective lets look at two different examples. The exact keyword “Sydney Real Estate” was searched for 6,600 times for the month of July, 2009. This is certainly significant traffic but it is an ultra competitive keyword and is an unrealistic target for most agents just getting into SEO. Even if you could get a good share of that traffic your particular agency would probably not suit the majority of searchers targeting this fairly generic keyword most often used by buyers.

On the other side of the fence, 58 peoples searched for the exact term “Parramatta real estate agents” and if you were a parramatta real estate agent you would be relevant to all 58 of those searchers who on average would mostly be sellers.

When you create your keyword list I suggest that you rate each keyword you add to the list out of 5. All your primary keywords should be a 4 or a 5, but the secondary keywords will range dramatically. Those with higher priority will be your initial focus and give you a place to start as well as identify targets for the future.

Another Good Place to Identify Keywords

If you have Google Analytics or some other web analytics solution installed you can find out what search terms people are using to find your website now. that can also be a good place to start but don’t limit yourself to what is just working now.

Use your own personal experience. We have all been using search engines for quite a few years now. Chances are what you would search when looking for an agent is just what most other people would. Think how you would search for an agent in your area if you were looking to select a real estate agent to sell your home. What would you search for?

Google Keyword Tool

There are quite a few keyword research tools available but most cost money and are too complicated but because of Google’s dominance in Australia combining your own fundamental market knowledge and Google’s Keyword Tool should be more than enough to get you started.

The Google Keyword Tool is of course free to use and is your best friend when you are trying to create a collection of keywords to target. For every keyword returned the tool provides three sets of data as a default although you can turn on additional columns if you want.

Advertiser Competition is the level of competition that other companies are bidding on that keyword on Google. I will cover this a little in the next article but in simple terms the higher the competition the more it will cost to compete for that keyword. For a keyword targetted to a seller it may be worth it to pay $1.00 per click but you may not want to consider that rate to attract potential buyers.

Local Search Volume. This provides the Australian based searches for that specific keyword. For the most part this is the column with the most relevant data we are looking for.

Global Monthly Search Volume is the amount traffic that is generated in the rest of the world for that particular keyword.

Changing the Match type will provide more detailed results. Dont forget low search numbers may produce “Not Enough Data” but they may be still a very valid keywords to use. The Keyword Tool seems to be great for popular keywords but for less searched terms it is not quite sensitive as we would like.

The tool allows you to save keyword lists as well and is best shown in a short video which hopefully will show you how easy it is. The video is in two parts. The first I have concentrated on keywords specifically targeted to buyers  and then for general property management search terms using the Gold Coast suburb of Robina.

We are now half way through the series with the next article concentrating on improving the pages you already have on your website.

Since the agents are paying franchise fees, should the traffic generated by an agent that subsequently clicks open the franchises corporate site be Free traffic to the franchise? Or should the franchise reward the agent for generating traffic to their site?

Free Traffic Means Franchises Receive Free Home Loan Leads

Most franchises now have their own home loan department & potentially the franchise can generate more revenue from their home loans than they do from franchise fees paid by their agents.

If a real estate franchise wants to increase its profile on the web they could provide a reduction in franchise fees for agents who include links to their corporate website or they could build in a monthly pay-per-click incentive for the agencies who send lots of visitors across to their corporate website.

Just think, if a franchise is prepared to use pay-per-click advertising on Google to generate traffic, then wouldn’t a click from one of their agents’ websites, blogs, twitter/facebook accounts have a similar value?

If the Real Estate Franchises adopted this concept they could reward their own agents instead of paying Google for leads.

I’m sure some franchises will frown upon this idea, but the forward thinking real estate franchises should see that this provides a real incentive for their agents to build a larger web presence, send more traffic to the franchises corporate website & build a bigger corporate brand which could help to generate more real estate offices & increase the franchises home loan revenue.

I feel that anything which reduces the running costs of an agency & helps to encourage agents to increase their web presence at the same time is a good thing. What do you think?

This article is the second in the series to help Australian Real Estate Agents improve their traffic from optimizing their website. If you have not read the first article in the SEO series I strongly suggest you start there instead and return to reading this article after that.

Referral Building

One of the recognized methods that Search Engines use to rank websites is by placing preference on what they consider authoritative websites. One of the key methods to assess your authoritative value is by analysing your website content, but we will discuss that in a future article.

The other way they calculate a websites authoritative value is by checking what websites link to you and to a lesser extent what websites you link to. The search engines understand that if popular well visited and quality websites who cover your website’s topic link to your website then there is a very high chance that you are also a quality website on that same topic. It conversely stands to reason that links from low quality off topic websites will provide no authoritative value at all, and in fact can impact negatively on your ranking. A link from a highly ranked website is like a “vote” and the more votes you get the better. The seo value or “vote” a website passes to another with a referral link is often coined “link juice”.

PageRank

Google uses a page quality ranking system called PageRank which covers the popularity of a page or website. PageRank is only part of the whole equation but it is a useful way to determine how popular a website is with incoming weblinks. Just remember as far as google is concerned PageRank is only one of the ranking factors of why your website is top of the list. A good PageRank (abbrieviated to PR) for an agency is 3 or 4.  Anything higher is probably an unrealistic goal given the traffic and exposure an indivudal agency can generate… but there is no harm in trying.

So one of the most important parts of improving your SEO strategy is to build quality referral links back to your website. These links back to your website will create a level of traffic in their own right but their real value from an SEO perspective is the “link juice” they pass to you allowing you to rank higher and get more traffic from the search engines.

There are several ways to build referral links to your website but the easiest quickest place to get your site listed on Interent website directories. That’s what we are going to concentrate on first but I will discuss other strategies of building website links later in the article.

Website Directories – Paid or Free?

In the early days of the web very few web directories charged as they all tried to build up their website’s content. Over recent years things have changed and now a few web directories have started to charge to list your site. They built up high PageRank rankings for their websites when free and  then changed a “fee” to websites to get themselves listed on a high PR site. Google recently applied a manual override to many directories “selling” links from their websites for what they considered as an excessive charge.

Even though paying a reasonable amount to get your listed is probably not out of the question, for my mind there are very few websites that are worthwhile paying for at the end of the day.  There is one major exception for that rule though and that’s Yahoo.

Get Ready

Before you start submitting your website some thought has to be put into exactly what information you submit. Other than your website address and email you are going to require two other pieces of information for just about all directories you submit to. You should prepare these for two reasons. Firstly its very important that you use the right keywords as it will help your SEO and secondly it will speed up your submission process when you can cut and paste the information every time.

Website Title

It is important to include your primary keywords in the website title but ensure you don’t include promotion terms.

“Nerang First National Real Estate – Gold Coast Real Estate Agent” might be acceptable but

“Nerang First National, the Gold Coasts Best Real Estate Agent” would not be.

Description

It is important to cover the range of services on your website. Different sites will allow different length descriptions of your website so create one default description and change it if you have it or you can create a small and a large version.

“Specialising in residential real estate services for the suburbs of Nerang, Carrara, Highland Park, Worongary and the surrounding hinterland of the Gold Coast, Queensland Australia. Website features include property for sale, property for rent, real estate guide, free advisory guides to download, local community and business directory, email newsletters, blog and more”

might be ok for a directory submission but something like

”Nerang property for sale and rent” would be very poor utilization.

Selecting the Right Category

When you submit to a business directory it is vitally important that you submit to the right category. Submitting to the wrong category will at best slow down your acceptance but at worst will mean that your submission is not even considered at all. Some directories are sorted by suburb or city. Some are just sorted by state.

I will try and make some recommendations along the way but do some research and make sure you place your submission in the best category. Some directories will even let you submit to more than one category so when you can maximize your exposure and select as many as you can. On the directory pages look for words similar to “add your site”, “add your url”, “add your business” or something similar

The Top Tips for your submissions

1. No words in CAPITALS
2. No promotional language – ie. Sydney’s Best Real Estate Agent
3. Remember to use keywords that buyers or sellers would use.
4. Read the submission rules and follow them.
5. Submit to the right category

Major Web Directories

There are two web directories that are essential in SEO and are the single most powerful things you will do throughout this whole series.

DMOZ or Open Directory Project

This is one of the most powerful web directory and your listing in the directory will provide you an instant boost to your SEO. Why is it so powerful? “The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.”

This directory is used directly by nearly 150 other sites on the interent as their own directory. In simple terms you list once on DMOZ and if accepted you will automatically get listed on nearly 150 other high quality sites. Even Google itself rebrands the DMOZ directory data as its own Google Directory. Because of this sheer power and the fact that every single submission is checked manually by a real person, the directory is held in very high regard.

You are only allowed up to 30 words as a description so make them count. Browse to your geographic region first. Ideally submit your category into the real estate section of the business section under the locality but if one does not exist yet, just submit to the business section or even the locality category. Do not submit to state or national real estate sections as it will not be allowed unless you deal with the whole state and will just delay your submission.

Yahoo Web Directory

This is the only directory that I would suggest you pay the listing fee without question. Listing in the yahoo directory is very important SEO wise and like DMOZ every submission is manually checked. Unlike DMOZ that is a community maintained, the Yahoo directory is a business which is why there is now a listing charge.

Browse to the category of your local area and then add your listing to the real estate section if it exists or else just add it there

Other Important Directories to Submit To

Google Local Directory

For some search types (and real estate is one of them) Google includes a map section at the top of the page when you use their search engine. This information is populated directly from the Google Local Directory. The default data is now drawn from the Yellow Pages but DO NOT rely up on this. Creating your own listing is easy and will get you on the top of the list on the front page plus it puts more information in the directory listing.

ZoomInfo

This is a well regarded business directory and although US centric, most of the search engines are based in the US as well.

Other Directories to submit to include:

• Hotfrog
• International Real Estate Directory
• Property Listings Australia
• Come on Aussie
• TrueLocal
• Brownbook
• Start Local
• YourEstate.com.au
• HouseHunters
• Real Estate Guide.net
• Just Real Estate

Link Exchanges

There are many websites that will list you in their directory if you link back to them first. If it’s a good quality site and its about real estate then this may be worthwhile. Don’t bother unless it is about real estate. If you decide to exchange or swap link then you will first need to setup a links page on your website. Call this page, Links, Real Estate Links, Real Estate Resources or whatever you want but its purpose is to provide links to other real estate websites. Search “Real Estate Link Exchange” on google and you will find plenty of contenders.

Dont base your whole link building efforts on these exchanges but they are good to bolster your numbers.

Local Directories. Do a search on google to find local business directories to submit to. As an example searching for “Gold Coast Business Directory” and “Gold Coast Website Directory” identifies a number of local web directories that we can submit our agency website to.

Other Link Building Strategies

Here are some ideas for building other links back to your website, all of which will help your SEO.

• Include your link on everything off the net, especially if it is published online as when it is it becomes a link back to you. Things like job ads, print magazines, press releases and many more things end up online.
• Because Government (gov.au) and Educational (edu.au) domains are unavailable to just anybody, getting a link from them is very good for SEO and one of the best ways to get this is to sponsor your local school and get them to link to your website from the schools website.
• Get everyone from the same real estate network and the same area to all link to each other.
• Make sure you comment on blogs and forums and use your web address.
• Create your own blog. Other people will reference your blog posts either in their blog or will book mark it in many of the social bookmarking sites.
• Setup accounts on social bookmarking sites like Delicous and Stumbleupon and bookmark your own websites but don’t just stop there
• Create a Google Profile, Linked In Profile, Twitter Account for you and then a  Twitter Account for your agency, Facebook Account for you and then a Twitter Page for Your agency.  Each of these accounts allows you to link back to your website and to each other.

So Who Should You Link To

Since what sites you link to also improves your own authoritative value why dont you consider creating your own link section by linking to other websites about real estate and about your immediate area. Setting up a local business and community section on your website and a real estate guide will help find a home for these links. Government and education websites also have extra importance here so dont forget to link to those sites. Things like state industry bodies, local schools, universities, local businesses.

Dont go crazy and link to every single website you can find on the topic and dont link to everyone that links to you. Most experts agree that a link from someone that you dont reciprocate to is worth more than a link you do. Some seo experts suggest Site A links to Site B which in turn only links to Site C which links only back to Site A.

When you create your own link exchange pages you will get others contacting you to ask about exchanging links with you. Why not get a little proactive about it and set the rules on your page for how to exchange links. Something like these:-

If you wish to be considered for addition to this links page :

1. All websites are to be for sites on Real Estate, Property, Property Investment, Nerang or the Gold Coast
2. Links are not to include no follow attributes and if you remove your link so will we
3. Please create a link on your website that can be accessed through your homepage (no orphaned pages) with the following link “Nerang First National – Gold Coast Real Estate Agent – specialising in residential real estate services in the suburbs of Nerang, Carrara, Highland Park and the Gold Coast Hinterland including property for sale and property for rent”
4. Please send the location of our link on your website and the link text you require to linkexchange@nfn.com.au

WARNING ! Do not participate in a Link Farms or link building system.. ever..

A link farm is a collection of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of links to other websites through an organised link swapping. The links are not natural and each particpant has the same links page on their website with virtually the same links. This practice is frowned upon and you will probably get a negative impact on your SEO. Link farms certainly use to work when authoritative value was first introduced but now they do not.

At least one self styled Real Estate SEO expert is still pushing his link farm matrix as some magical form of SEO even though it has realy helped nobody else and all major search engines strongly warn in writing against participating or running a link farm. It is believed that a possible link farm trigger will be raised with search engines if you have any more than 100 links on page. If any page is even approaching this limit split it into multiple pages. If someone promises to give you hundreds or thousands of links for a price remember, if it sounds too good to be true… IT IS.

Link building should be done manually which is time and effort.. but you only have to do it once for the link work for you for years and even decades.

Next Article

The next article in the series will cover Keyword Research and working out exactly what sort of keywords outside of the “<<Suburb>> Real Estate” and “<<Suburb>> Property” normal ones you should be targeting.

Further Reading

The SEOmoz article Search Engine Ranking Factors is the results of a survey covering this very topic with 37 SEO Experts. It ranks common SEO strategies, how the experts rank each strategy and rates the agreement between them all.  SEOmoz also produce a fantastic “Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization” at . You can even download the guide and print it out for later reading.

Search engines are the  key to generating significant traffic on the internet. It can certainly be supplemented and enhanced by social networking like Facebook, Blogs and the Twitter but search engines are King. In other places around the world a number of search engines are very popular but in Australia, there is only one serious contender for the crown and thats Google.

Even well known brands in our industry like realestate.com.au have over 30% of their traffic delivered every single day by Google. Many of the returning vistors would be returning visitors have already arrived from the search engines in the past.

What this Article Series is.. and what it isnt

This article is going to be one in a series covering the topic of Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short as it applies to the Australian Real Estate Industry. Search Engine Optimisation is the process of getting your site ranked higher in the search engines and thus generating more traffic.

This article is going to cover the basics of Search Engine Optimisation and how to get more visitors to your website. We are not going to be covering any advanced topics and everything discussed should be able to be completed by the average Australian Real Estate Agent with minimal technical skill. Each step is fairly easy but if you need help just ask for help in the comments section.

The restrictions of some content management systems will mean a few of you may not be able to do specific things but if thats the case, just skip that section and move on. You will probably have have to pay for some things to be done on your website but it should be very minimal as most things you will be able to do yourself.

Please understand that I am not going to provide a step be step guide of every single mouse click or form you have to fill in.  That would require something about 10 times the size. Each step is very easy to do and millions of people from a range of skill levels have already been there before you. If you dont understand anything or want some help, just ask.

What is Search Engine Optimisation?

Now before we get too heavily into the subject I must point out a few things. SEO is considered a black art because there is no rule book or documented procedures to follow. Search engines use proprietary algorithms to rank all the websites in the world and they don’t share how that algorithm works for obvious reasons. This means that SEO experts around the world analyse in every fine detail the websites that do rank at the top and they attempt to reverse engineer just what makes a site rank well.

The very basics that form the core are universally agreed by most SEO experts but other than those you will always find someone somewhere who will disagree on any specific tactic or point. Also many experts who agree on a specific SEO strategy might still disagree on the importance that specific issue means in the calculating of web ranking. The important thing to remember is that it is the overall effect of everything that will deliver you results.

What Sort of Results Can You Expect?
SEO cannot work miracles! If your agency is in some small little town about 800km west of civilisation then the worlds best SEO is not going to create more people looking to buy real estate in your area. Better SEO than your competitors will get you more share of the existing searches but it cannot create more searches out of thin air.  It also takes time for everything to work, a lot less than it use to, but it does not not happen overnight. You may first notice changes to how you rank in a few weeks after we finish but the full effect of what you do wont be felt for a few months at least.

In each article I am going to try and give you additional resources for further reading and if anybody at all has anything to add or share to the articles feel free to comment away.

I am aiming to have each article in the series require about 2 hours work and the target is for 6 articles. There is a specific logic to the order of these articles because some things either have to be done before others or they take longer to start acting.

Lets Get Started!

To measure the success of what you are going to undertake we need to record exactly where you are now. This will set a baseline that you have to work from. During this article there is going to be things you have to send your web provider. Obviously sending them each item in one email to be all done together will be the cheapest way to get this added to your site.

Website Grader Report

Website Grader produces a report on your website and gives you an overall grade out of 100. This is not perfect by any means but it is the best overall ranking of a website currently available and is perfect to compare how you score today and how you score after a few months. It takes a lot of factors into consideration when ranking a website. Request a report on your website. A good number would be between 80-100.Any score under that and you really need to do some work on your site to start getting results. Read the report it gives you as it will explain what you are doing right, and what still needs work.

Web Analytics

To understand just what is happening on your site including how many visitors you get and what pages they visit you need some sort of web analytics reporting. A visitor count or hit counters just don’t cut it anymore. If you don’t have detailed statistics on your web visitors you need to install one.

I strongly suggest Google Analytics which is totally free although you may be charged by your web provider to install it. Hubonline recently announced a special for June for nearly $600 which also includes short property urls. For my mind this is highway robbery.  In contrast I believe Portplus will install Google Analytics on your website for under $100 and I think they do short urls as standard.

If you have a Google account such as a gmail account you can use it to log into Google Analytics and create a profile for your website otherwise just create an account now. Google Analytics will provide you with some code that you need to send your web provider to get them to inject it into every page on your site. If you don’t want to use Google Analytics then see if your web provider has another detailed statistics package they can offer but dont just rely on property views.

Google Webmaster

Google Webmaster is a suite of tools for managing how your site integrates with Google Search. We will cover some of those tools in future articles but for now just setup the account and get the verification process underway.

Create an account at Google Webmaster using your Google Account login details you just used for Google Analytics. Add a profile for your website and it will ask you to verify in one of two different ways. Select the meta tag option and send that to your web provider to add to the code of your homepage.

Microsoft Bing Webmaster and Yahoo Site Explorer

The other major search providers, Microsoft and Yahoo also have their own versions of Google Webmaster. Create accounts with Microsoft Bing Webmasters and Yahoo Site Explorer and you should setup accounts with both of them and add your website profile. Select the meta tag verification option for both and send these meta tags through to your web provider.

Sitemaps

A modern website should have a sitemap which provides instructions to search engines on exactly what pages you have, when they were last updated and how important are they. To find out if you have a sitemap on your site already you need to add the word sitemap.xml to your web address in a web browser. For our agency site the web address is http://www.nfn.com.au so we enter http://www.nfn.com.au/sitemap.xml and we find that we have a sitemap on our website.

If you don’t have a sitemap don’t panic you need to contact your web provider and ask them to create a sitemap for your site and ask them to place a reference to that sitemap in your robots.txt file. Dont worry what all that means just tell them and only get concerned if their techs don’t understand it.

You will not be able to add your website’s sitemap to Google Webmaster, Microsoft Bing Webmaster and Yahoo Sitexplorer until you have verified all of your accounts. I will remind you again in the next article but don’t forget to send your web provider the verification instructions and get them to setup a Sitemap for you if you don’t already have one.

Save Your Searches

Identify the three or four suburbs that make up your core trade area and use them to search google printing out the first two pages of results each time. Add the words “real estate”, “property”, “real estate agent”, “rentals” and “property for sale” and do a search on each.

So just for the suburb of Nerang I would conduct the following searches on Google and print out the first two pages of results for each.

1. Nerang
2. Nerang real estate
3. Nerang Property
4. Nerang real estate agent
5. Nerang rentals
6. Nerang property for sale

Repeat for each of your core suburbs and identify just where your site returns for each of those results. In the future you are going to run the same searches and if everything has worked out well you will be ranking higher. Ideally you want to be coming in the top three for every search on every one of your core suburbs. Ideally you want to be number 1 for each search but top 3 will still be pretty good.

Next Article

We have now set a baseline to work from so you can see just what your work results in and started some prep work we will follow up in in future articles. The next article in the series will cover link building and getting your site listed in a range of online real estate and general business directories.

Further Reading

Read up on the Real Estate SEO Study as it shows you how important your pages look on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP’s)

Other than Devnet, who have only just setup a specialised Real Estate department this is the first time I have come across a dedicated Real Estate SEO specialist.

The study is targeted to the uninitiated or SEO beginner so is perfect for someone trying to understand just what the SEO subject is about. It shows you just how simple changes can effect how your website looks on Google and how to make it stand out on the search engine results pages. Most of the changes she recommends can easily be implemented by any agent using their content management systems.

It is possible for company’ confidential information to become available on Google if that computer is accessible from the Internet.  In fact, it happens all the time. Go and type in “internal memo filetype:doc” into Google and you will see a bunch of things people don’t normally want in the public domain.

I have noticed recently that I have been seeing “Inactive” in Domain.com.au entries when doing searches over the past few months. When you click on a few of them and its clear that this represents a closed account.

Whilst these accounts have no property in the directory anymore, nor are they in the agents directory on the portal the pages are still active and therefore are still indexed by Google and continue to appear in the search engine.

In light of my last article relating to agents dropping subscription portals in the UK at a rate of 1900 in just 8 months for the leading portal rightmove.co.uk I decided to investigate a little further last night.

Using google search I can filter the google results to show only certain pages at the website domain domain.com.au that have the words “inactive” and “domain.com.au” in the title and the word “AgentProfile.aspx in the url which ensures the search only returns the actual agent profile pages.

This should ensure that I only get individual agent profiles for agents that are now marked as inactive on the domain system

This returns 3370 individual agent profiles.

The actual url is quite long so I have used the tinyurl.com service and you can do the search yourself by clicking on here: http://tinyurl.com/domaininactive

I am not suggesting that all of these agents have left domain in the past few months, or even a year. Maybe it is for a few years, or it could even represent how many agents have left them since they first started but no matter the time period, that is a lot of lost customers in anyone’s language.  In these figures will be a certain amount of natural attrition on their client base as offices close down but you have to wonder how many of these left  them because of performance issues.

I cant think of any reason this information should be in the public domain and it is just poor housekeeping by Domain IT staff.  If you were an REA salesperson and a new agent was considering one of the two portals this list would help sway them your way quickly.

There are a number of ways Domain can have these pages moved from the index very quickly but to date nobody seems to have bothered.  I reckon someone might get on the job pretty quickly now.

Domain really frustrate me because it often seems that they are happy to be second best at a time that the industry would love to see them put pressure on right around Australia.

Realestate.com.au attracts over 30% of their visitors from just one search engine… GOOGLE.  If you factor in the other search engines, particularly Yahoo and Live you could probably expect 35 to 45% of their visitors arrive through the search engines.

The vast majority of these visitors would arrive through organic results simply because they appear higher in the rankings. Search any “<<insert suburb>> real estate” combination in Google and REA will nearly always show up higher than domain.  In fact, I don’t think I have ever seen it the other way but I am sure it does somewhere.

Domain’s SEO needs work. Honestly it should not be that hard and they just need to get off their backsides and do something about it if they want to reverse the SERP positions.

Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind and hopefully someone at Domain sees this as a wakeup call and after fixing these inactive entries they start taking their search engine optimisation seriously. With Google on the scene and a better optimised Domain in fight it could get interesting.