What is SEO for Non SEO's

by John M. Freelance SEO Specialist

1. What is SEO?

If you have a website, there is a good chance that people will find it through search engines (i.e., Google). SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the process of optimizing your site, or blog posts to help it rank higher in the search engines. The better you can optimize your site, the more likely someone will find it when they are looking for real estate agents in your area.

2. Why SEO?

SEO is a good way to attract more customers because it is free. Many people will search the web before they choose a real estate agent to list their house or sell them a new home, and SEO can help you appear on the first page of Google. As the saying goes, "If I am looking for you, then why would I look any further?"

3. Where Does SEO Fit In?

Search engine optimization fits in at any stage of your business. It can be used as an effective way to get leads or increase your revenue. If you are still building your website traffic, search engine optimization should be one of the first things that you do because it will most likely have an immediately positive return on investment.

4. What You Need To Know About Keywords

Keywords are extremely important when it comes to optimizing your site. They define what you want your website or blog post to be about. For example, if you sell real estate in the city of Oakland, Calif., then one of your keywords could be 'Oakland Real Estate Agent.' That is a keyword that would attract people who are looking for an Oakland real estate agent.

5. Why Keywords Are Important

Keywords are important because they tell Google (or any other search engine) what your content is about. Without good keywords, it will be difficult for someone to find your site when they type something like "Oakland Real Estate Agent" into Google. When people do not have a good experience on your site because there are no keywords, they will not come back to your site.

6. Meta Tags & Title Tags

Meta tags and title tags are the parts of a webpage HTML code that can be changed in order to make your content more easily found by search engines. It is an important part of an On-page SEO service. Every time you add or edit a post on your blog, you should always check to see if the title tag and meta description have been updated automatically by WordPress, or if it will need to be edited manually. This is an easy way to help optimize your posts for better SEO results.

7. Optimizing Individual Posts

Always include keywords in your post titles and try to work them into as many other parts of the text as possible without making it sound awkward or unnatural (this is called 'on-page SEO'). The title tag and meta description should also be optimized as much as possible (think of this as 'off-page SEO').

8. How Can I Get More Visitors?

When you look for a real estate agent, do you type in 'real estate' to Google's search bar or do you begin typing the name of your city? If it is the former, then there are several things that you can optimize on your site to make sure that you appear when someone searches for something like Oakland Real Estate Agent. The first step is to create a landing page specifically optimized to rank high in Google when someone types in those words (more about landing pages below).

9. Landing Pages

Landing pages are single web pages that are specifically optimized to rank well in search engines for one keyword phrase. For example, if you were an Oakland real estate agent, then you could have a landing page with just Oakland home listings on it so when someone typed 'Oakland real estate' into Google, your page would come up first because of the way in which that specific web page was optimized (which is different from how your blog or the regular site was optimized).

8.1 How Do I Create A Landing Page?

Creating a good landing page takes time and effort because it is almost completely unique from any other web page on your site. The easiest way to create a great landing page is to start with something like WordPress's 'real estate' template and then work hard to change it to make it as focused and optimized as possible. You can also copy the HTML of a page that is already ranking well for a particular keyword phrase and then edit the HTML code to optimize it further for the same thing (I've done this before with great success).

10. Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of trying to make sure that your website is as technically optimized as possible for search engines. It includes things like using a sitemap, having a robots.txt file, making sure all content is crawlable by Googlebot (and other bots), and many other technical details.

11. How Do I Get More Links?

In SEO, links to your website are almost as important as the content of your site itself. The more quality inbound links you have, the better chances you have of ranking well in search engines for a particular keyword phrase. However, you want to make sure that links to your site are from other high-quality sites (blogs or websites) and that they do not contain anything like hidden text or excessive anchor text because this can hurt your rankings. The easiest way to get more good links than bad ones is to network with people who are interested in what you have to offer (real estate in our case).

Hence SEO is way more than the above-mentioned pointers, the industry is full of agencies as well as a freelance SEO consultant who provides various kinds of SEO services.