Last week I wrote about the importance of internal links and I stand by everything I wrote; many sites neglect their internal structure, get lazy on the anchor texts for navigational links, and in general miss an opportunity to help solidify their site in the rankings. They mean the difference between a site with staying power in the rankings and one that flies up and then falls.

But today, let’s talk about one of the driving forces behind rankings: Incoming links. In a way, incoming links are a very frustrating part of SEO because if they’re high quality, they’re probably also spontaneous. That means the best links are the ones you didn’t ask for; someone read your site and linked to your article. They follow your blog and linked or responded to it in their own. Ideally, they’re using descriptive, keyword-rich anchor text. Some link to your homepage and some to different internal pages in your site. Why is that frustrating? Because you can’t control them. The best links are ones you didn’t ask for, so if they have generic non-descript anchor text, oh well.

Insert your own witty caption about incoming links here…there’s just too many to pick from..

And sometimes, they just don’t happen at all – you can’t force someone to link to you. So what can you do to encourage people to link back to your site? Well, here are a couple suggestions:

1)      Content. Yes, yes – this isn’t the first time I’ve said it, it won’t be the last time, and I’m certainly not the first to say it, but – content is the core of a good SEO strategy. Good content attracts the search engines, gets people reading, and hopefully, gets people linking back, too. If your content is well written and thought provoking, people will pass it on.

2)      Link to them! Link exchanges – especially black-hat SEO practices like link farms – are frowned on, and might even penalize you or get you outright banned from the search engines, but organic, spontaneous link exchanges can be your best friend. If you link to someone, you’ll get their attention – and they might pay it forward, particularly if you’ve done everything you can to make your site attractive and useful.

3)      Tweet your own horn…on Twitter and Facebook, that is. Social networking sites can easily be leveraged to get your site out there – and with re-tweeting and sharing, respectively, it’s easy to get your content flung quickly from person to person. Google indexes Twitter too, so links there count!

4)      Use your blog for more than just content; they’re social media tools too. With your blog linked in your profile/signature, read other blogs that your target audience is reading. And comment. Discuss. Agree, disagree – but make a valid point and support it. Even if they don’t link back too, creating a presence in the blogosphere gets traffic back to you – which means more exposure, and chances for linkbacks. Do the same thing on your blog; if you get a comment, respond to it. Get a dialogue going.

We’ll talk more about solicited links at a later date, but when it comes to unsolicited incoming links, it pretty much comes down to exposure. Get your name out there – and if you’ve done a good job with your content, links will come.

All right, so we all know the power and importance of backlinks in SEO. They boost your rank when they’re high quality and have a good volume, and because of this have spawned a number of practices in SEO – both good and bad, from the cheap black-hat SEO tricks we talked about last week like link farms, link exchanges, and link spam, to the good white-hat SEO practice of link-baiting, particularly in blogs, to encourage others to link back to your pages.

But it isn’t just backlinks that are important; internal links are a force you should be leveraging too. Internal links – properly structured with appropriate, keyword-rich anchor text – should be a critical part of your SEO strategy, too. A high internal link percentage helps determine your page’s search engine rank, and it’s just that simple – the more you use high quality links inside your site, the better you rank. It’s just that simple.

Your pages should be connected in the circle, the circle of internal links…what? That’s how the song goes, isn’t it?

So where should you be using internal links?  Obviously, you want links in your site map, and if appropriate, your footer that appears on every page. You should still use your targeted keywords in your anchor text; this is an easy way to boost your page in the search engine rankings, using extra keywords, without keyword spamming or annoying your human viewers. This is win/win because it boosts both your keyword density and your internal link percentage.

But don’t neglect your content. You know how important content is; you’ve gone to the trouble to generate lots of quality, well written, keyword-dense content that wows both the search engines and your target audience. Chances are some of it’s self-referential, right? So use it, and add links into your content. Choose anchor text that’s pertinent to both the page you’re linking to and the article or post you’re writing, and add that link in. In addition to increasing your internal link percentage, it also helps improve your credibility when you can link to other supporting work that you’ve written on the subject. It might feel odd to reference yourself, but when it comes to SEO it’s okay to pat yourself on the back and give yourself a link – so go ahead and toot your own horn here. Just don’t let it go to your head!

One final word on internal links – they’re an important part of getting your website to rank, but you aren’t getting the most out of them that you should if you’re only using them on one page. That page might rank, but the true value of internal links is what they can do for your whole site when you leverage them throughout your website. If the spiders – and hence, your target audience – can loop through your site from page to page, your internal link network adds authority and power to your rankings. If the spiders get stuck on a page with no way out, the best case scenario is you’re not getting as high a rank as you should be. A highly developed internal link structure gets your website humming at peak capacity – and makes any offsite backlinks you gain that much more powerful. Period.

We’ve touched about this briefly in past posts, but today I want to explore the importance of images in SEO in more depth. We all know the importance of keywords in your content and how the search engines pick those up – but did you know the spiders aren’t just crawling your text and your urls and your anchor text & links? They’re spidering your images and graphics, too.

Confused about how to optimize your images for SEO use? Don’t be!

Don’t panic just yet – your images aren’t hurting you, but they’re not helping you, either. They’re an unexplored avenue for boosting your rankings in the search engines – so how do you put them to work for you as more than just a way to improve the look of your website?

Be aware that search engines that search images – such as Google – do it in a variety of ways. They aren’t human, so they’re not looking at what the image looks like – so what are they doing? One important way is by the text around the image. Hopefully, you’re doing this already; your spiffy images should be surrounded by fresh, vibrant, relevant content to your site that makes good use of keywords for the search engines to pick up.

But a major way that search engines will take note of your image is the name of the image, and this is one that most website owners and designers ignore. If you’re leaving default digital camera names on your pictures – so for example, D17473.jpg – you’re not giving the search engine any information and it’s passing your pictures right on by. Give your pictures descriptive names and keep your keywords in mind. A useful image name, in contrast, would be seo_imageconfusion.jpg. The search engines will pick up the keywords in your image’s name, and help your images rank in the search engines  – but more importantly, help boost your site in the overall rankings

One final way to use your images to help boost your site’s rankings is with the little used alt tag. We’ve talked about how the alt tag relates to SEO in the past, but it’s one of the most under-used tags in websites. The alt tag is what causes text to appear for your readers when they hover their mouse over your image;   most of the time, if there is any alt tag usage at all, the image says something both simple and unhelpful – “home” or “image” or “D17473.jpg”. This is unfortunate for two reasons. First, did you know that computers for the visually impaired read images by their alt tags? That means if someone visually impaired is surfing your site and you have an amazing picture up, but have no alt tag or have it tagged as a generic file name, that’s all they hear. That’s really unfortunate! And second, the search engines read those alt tags too. That means if you’re not using them to put an image description – you’re missing an opportunity to push yourself up in the rankings. What a shame! Fortunately, adding an alt tag to your images is easy:

<img src=”www.exampleurl.com/image.jpg” alt=”7 easy tips for SEO”>

There you have it, folks. Go put your images to work for you!

If you want traffic, SEO is your website’s best friend. But it can get a bad rap sometimes; for those who don’t know the difference between good SEO and bad SEO, it’s usually keyword spammers who spring to mind. We’ve all seen it; it might be less common in realty, but if you’ve ever searched for a product you’ve wanted to buy online, chances are you’ve come across it. “Buy WONDEROUS APPLIANCE because buying a WONDEROUS APPLIANCE will help you out in your daily life. If you don’t buy WONDEROUS APPLIANCE you’ll never know how different your life was before WONDEROUS APPLIANCE because WONDEROUS APPLIANCE will change your life!” It’s copy that makes your brain hurt to read – it’s clearly written for the search engines, not the customers. It’s grating and it’s jarring – and unfortunately, it’s what a lot of people think of when they think of SEO.

How does it go? One hat, two hat, white hat SEO, black hat SEO? No? Well, nevermind!

It’s called black-hat SEO, and sure, it’ll boost you in the rankings – it might even get you some cursory traffic. But it’s a short-sighted strategy that will ultimately alienate your customers and depress your website’s rankings. Google knows what spamming is, and they will catch up to it. It’s the difference between a well-thought out and planned marathon and a cheap shove for the lead in the first 10 meters; good SEO, or white-hat SEO, will slowly boost your website’s rankings – and keep it there. If you’re new to search-engine optimization, here’s a quick list of ways to differentiate white-hat SEO from black-hat SEO:

1)      Quality content versus poorly-written spam copy.

We have talked about how important content is several times recently. Quality content is education, it appeals to the reader, and it appeals to the search engine. It makes good use of keywords without shoving them in the reader’s face and it’s written in a legible way to get readers coming back for more. It’s one of the core principles of SEO. Quality content delivered consistently will slowly push your site up the rankings – but putting an article up today won’t put you at number one tomorrow.

In contrast, black-hat SEO content is filled to the gills with its targeted keyword, often several times in a sentence to the point where a human reader goes numb trying to make their way through the block of text. It tends to be uninteresting and repetitive at best, and unreadable at worst. It’s targeted strictly at the search engines so they pick up the keywords. Alternatively, it might be hidden entirely from human readers – black text on a black background, or font too small for the human eye to pick up. The search engines will though – and in the short term, it will boost your rankings…until Google and the other search catch on to the spam.

2)      Stolen “scraped” content versus original content.

Fresh, original content helps your site earn higher rankings – but in black-hat SEO, content is simply scraped off another website and plopped in to the site being “optimized”. If this sounds eerily familiar to something you learned about in high school English class, it is – because it’s plagiarism, plain and simple. It might temporarily boost your site up, but unlike real SEO, it’s a short term benefit for a long-term fall.  Plagiarism is illegal, and it will earn a penalty in the rankings – if you continue to rank at all once caught.

3)      Link baiting and quality links versus link farms.

Link baiting is enticing other legitimate, relevant sites and blogs to link to you. The bait might simply be an amazing, high quality article – or it might be a controversial one. It might be one designed simply to draw a lot of attention to you. But these kind of link backs are good quality ones that will boost you up in the rankings – particularly when they’re linking to internal pages rather than to your homepage. Google and the search engines love these kinds of links; they make your site look popular and useful.

Link farms, on the other hand, or link exchanges, are basic links on non-relevant sites – sometimes the page of links sole function is just to link. There’s no high quality content around it and it’s literally just spamming. These might temporarily boost you, but these spam links aren’t ones Google is going to reward you for having.

Of course, there are shades of grey and black hat techniques that are even worse – but these are the most likely to be confused for “normal” SEO by beginners. In the end, it’s easy to tell the two apart.

Everyone talks about what you –should– do for SEO and optimizing your website. Add content, use keywords, and quality links. Without a doubt, these are core SEO principles and they’re things you need to learn how to do right to market your online realty website. They’re the basics because without them it’s difficult to impossible to optimize your website successfully. But once you’ve got the idea of the basics, it’s still entirely possible to sabotage your efforts without meaning to – and a lot of people do it without even realizing they’re hurting their rankings. So to help, I’ve compiled a quick list of SEO mistakes people make all the time – without even realizing it. These errors are costing you rankings – fortunately, they’re generally easy to avoid.

Caution – are there SEO mistakes on YOUR website?

1)      Empty home page

Entry pages might be stylish or en vogue among website designers, but if your homepage is empty except for an entrance banner, you are losing steam in the rankings. Homepages are weighted more heavily in search – having content on your home page and appropriate keyword use is more important than on any other page. Ditch the flashy “click here to enter our site” – it might be pretty, but it’s costing you.

2)      Frames

Frames might sound like a good idea, but they’re really just a good way to hide your content from search engines. Search engine spiders can’t crawl through frames; most of the time if a page does manage to get listed in the rankings, anyone who clicks it ends up in an empty frame – not the page you, or they, wanted to be in. But most of the time, these pages don’t get indexed at all – the search engines see them as empty and pass them right on by.

3)      Bland anchor text

Yes, I know – we just talked about the importance of descriptive link text last week, but it’s important enough to bear repeating! Using generic anchor text like “click here” waters down any benefit you get from your links. Your link text is a big part of search engine rankings; making it pertinent and keyword-rich is a large factor in success.

4)      Identical page titles

Page titles are another opportunity to insert relevant, targeted keywords – but more sites than I can count will have the same page title on each page, which the search engines just see as duplication. This can actually push you down in the rankings! Instead, differentiate your page titles with the keywords you’re targeting on that page.

5)      Bland page titles

For every site that uses the same title on every page, there’s another that uses generic titles – “Contact Us” “About Us” etc. These are marginally better than duplicate titles, but you’re still missing a major opportunity to insert relevant keywords and help your pages rank higher in the search engines.

6)      Keyword spamming

Keyword focus is so drilled into our heads in the SEO industry that sometimes people take this principle and run with it – but if they’re not careful, they’ll run themselves into the ground. If the audience you’re targeting is turned off by your copy because every other word is your chosen keyword – chances are, the search engines will be too.

While these are all detrimental to helping your site rank high in the search engines, they’re easy mistakes to avoid. Don’t forget to check back tomorrow; we’ll be talking about real estate marketing ideas.

For most websites, the .com TLD extension is the default one. The majority* of websites that surfers are familiar with are .com extensions, so it’s what their fingers are used to typing, and conversely, it tends to be the top choice for new websites for exactly that reason. Domains with a .net extension are cheaper thank .com, though, and .info extensions are even cheaper still, but savvy folk tend to advise against utilizing anything but a .com extension. But from an SEO perspective, is that necessary tool of the trade, or is that an SEO myth?

The dot-com dilemma: SEO fact or fiction?

For a long time, it’s been said that .com extensions rank higher and are easier to rank in general. But while there are good reasons to choose a .com, which we’ll discuss in later in this post, we’re going to call myth on this. Search engines don’t care if your website has a .com or .net extension; they care about core SEO principles – content, fresh content, relevant content, and quality links. And none of these change at all if your site is using the .net extension over the more expensive .com extension – as far as the search engine is concerned, they’re totally interchangeable. From an SEO perspective, this is a spot you’re free to cut corners on to save a few bucks. When it comes to choosing between .com and .net in terms of rankings, if your SEO strategy is solid you won’t notice any difference.

With that being said, there has been some evidence that .info sites are penalized in the rankings – or if not penalized, more thoroughly scrutinized. From the search engine’s perspective this makes sense; .info extensions are cheap and plentiful, and did we mention how cheap they are? They’re cheap enough that they have earned a well-deserved reputation for being associated with spammers, because they were cheap enough to be worth the risk of getting banned. As such .info earned an informal reputation as spam sites. This does not mean that you can’t rank a .info site and it doesn’t mean you can’t rank a .info site well – with solid SEO components in place, your site will rank. What it does mean is that the search engines might scrutinize it more thoroughly – and sometimes, .info sites will be penalized in the rankings against a similar .com or .net site. If you absolutely need to save money or want a test project, a .info extension will do the job for a fraction of the cost – but it will be, at least slightly, an uphill battle.

So if we’ve established that for SEO purposes it really doesn’t matter which extension you choose, why do people choose the more expensive .com? Well, we’ll still go on record as recommending at least the .com extension. SEO doesn’t exist in a vacuum and while you can rank a .net site just as highly as a .com site, the fact still remains that most people who go to type in a url will default to a .com extension when typing an address in. The repercussions of this are two-fold. First, and most obviously, if your customers attempt to go to your site but type in .com and get a different site, you’re confusing your customers. If you’re confusing your customers, you’re losing your customers. Plain and simple – if they try to get to you once and fail, how likely are they to try again? But second of all, and more subversively, if you go the cost-cutting route and only register the .net, what happens when someone registers the .com version? If your customers try to go to *your* site but type .com, who is gaining the fruits of your labor? It isn’t you.

*with the exception of .edu and .gov extensions, which are for educational and governmental institutions, respectively – we’re assuming that generally, realty websites are not going to be using either of those extensions, so are not discussing them here.

The more you research SEO, the more you’ll hear it: The most important part of your SEO strategy is your content. Content is critical. Content is the core of any good SEO strategy. And so on and so forth; I could go on, but you get the gist. It might sound cliché, but there’s truth in every cliché and this one is no exception. If you want your website to rank well, you need good content. You need fresh content. And it needs to be relevant. In short? Content is…well, content is king.

It’s good to be King!

So why is content so important? To you, your website’s primary function is to generate income, either by ads traffic, or by getting leads on potential sales & customers. Well – content is how you do that. High quality content gets your site indexed by the search engines and pushes you up in the rankings – and keeps web surfers on your site once they’ve made that all-important first click. And it won’t just attract customers – high quality content increases the chances of someone linking to your site or article, which in turn helps push your site further up the rankings. Quite simply, good content is win/win/win and needs to be a major focus for any SEO strategy.

With this basic tenet in mind, take a good, critical look at your site, and ask yourself three questions: Do you have enough content, and do you have enough relevant, quality content? And finally – do you have regular content additions?

If your site is bare, the addition of articles or even a blog can go a long way towards boosting your site in the rankings. Keep your content on topic though; if you have a fabulous article about pen and ink drawings but the rest of your site is about realty, the search engines are smart enough to catch on. Superfluous irrelevant content won’t help you – it might even hurt you in the rankings. Instead, you want copy writing that is pertinent to your site and makes careful use of the keywords you want to target. Your articles can also contain links to other appropriate relevant articles and pages; not only does this make your copy more enticing for readers, but link karma can pay off with future link backs, too. Don’t forget to proof-read, too. Good copy will help draw in and retain readers too – remember, the entire purpose of content on a site is so that people will read it. If you do a good job – they will!

But simply having quality content isn’t enough; you can’t simply slap articles on your site and never do it again. While that will initially boost your site in the rankings, eventually the search engines will start categorizing your site as stale or possibly even abandoned and you’ll slip down the charts. The solution is regular infusions of quality content to give the search engines new content to index frequently. And not only will the search engines be happy – your readers will, too.

SEO is a long game; in general, it’s not something you can do to simply touch up your website and expect instant results. SEO is described as a marathon rather than a sprint for good reason; if you do too much too fast, you risk a penalty from the search engines because it can make you look like a spammer. If you set yourself up for the long haul, success comes slower but has more staying power. In general, it’s something you want to take the time to do right, which is what the pros do – a long term consistent campaign rather than instant links with no backup later.

SEO cheetahs never prosper – think marathon, not 100m dash!

With that being said, there are some easy fixes you can use right now to better optimize your website:

1. Add a straightforward title

A straight-forward pertinent title gives search engines something else to take note of, bringing traffic to your site, and makes your content more attractive to readers, which helps keep them there.

There are a few places you want your title to be; first, make sure it’s in your header. The title tag is very important for ranking your page appropriately – for example,7 easy SEO tips. This will cause your title to display at the top of the browser, and more importantly, make your title searchable for search engines.

Second, you want your title in your page or post, preferably in a header tag such as <h1>. This puts pertinent text on your page, and makes it more attractive for your readers.

2. Covert to a textual url instead numerical url

As when we discussed proper url structure for your real estate website a few weeks ago, converting your urls from a numerical url such as /page1.phtml to a textual dedicated url such /7-easy-tips-for-seo/ has two primary benefits. First, it creates an extra path for search engines to crawl and index when you use your keywords in your url. And second, it’s going to be much easier for your readers to remember you – and find you again.

3. Make your links specific – don’t use “click here” or “click”

Specific link text – using a description instead of merely “click here” – is another easy fix to help optimize your website. Using keywords to describe the content of the link gains points with the search engines while being more customer friendly, too.

4. Add fresh relevant content

It’s an SEO cliché, but content is one of the strongest ways to optimize your website. Putting up a new article will boost your rating in the search engines, particularly with careful keyword use. Plus, dynamic websites keep traffic coming back, too.

5. Start a blog

All right, this is cheating a little bit since this is a lot like #4, but a blog is a super easy way to add content to your website. As long as your blog is integrated into your site it’s searchable too. Follow the same guidelines you would for adding content to your site in general (use appropriate keywords, titles, and urls), and this is an easy, well understood path.

6. Add a text link nav bar at the bottom of your page

There are a lot of gorgeous websites out there with shiny flash-based navigation bars and layouts. They are aesthetically pleasing – but google and other search engines can’t crawl any of it. If you need the flash-based nav, make sure to add a text-based site navigation link list at the bottom to feed the search engines too. They don’t take much work, but they provide a lot of benefit.

7. Don’t forget the power of images – alt tags are a good place to put keywords!

Images are great and often under used. Alt tag keywords are searchable and in image searches, images will rank based on the text they’re around. To use an alt tag, it looks like:

<img src=”www.exampleurl.com/image.jpg” alt=”7 easy tips for SEO”>

The benefits of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, have been pretty clearly established; a website that gets better rankings in the search engine algorithms shows up faster when people search keywords. This means higher ranked websites get more traffic, and in turn, more customers. In the cut-throat world of Realty, more traffic means more sales. If you’re not coming up on top when potential customers search keywords that pertain to your business, you’re not making the sales that you could and should be. It’s a pretty open and shut case.

So today, let’s tackle a more pressing issue. We all know in today’s economy every penny makes a difference, and there are some corners you should cut to pursue cost savings. This means sometimes you want to do something yourself rather than outsource. This might mean answering your phone yourself instead of hiring a receptionist, for example. Other things you need experts for; you don’t really want to take the time to become an electrician so your new light fixtures can be installed, right? In the time it will take you to learn, you can make more money selling properties than you’ll ever save by learning the electrician trades. But which category does SEO fall under? Is it something that hiring a professional for will save you money in the long term, or can a motivated do-it-yourselfer climb this mountain?

If you have the time, mountain climbing can be fun. Really.

SEO done right takes time and expertise. Done correctly, your website will end up ranked higher in the search engines consistently, and stay there. Websites ranked first get far more actual clicks than websites ranked second or third, and websites that don’t rank on the first page will get minimal traffic. Rankings aren’t an instant gratification game; SEO done poorly can result in short term gains but actually lose you traffic over the long term if the search engines rankings penalize your strategy as spamming instead of quality link building. This is time consuming; you can’t simply build links today and forget it tomorrow. You’ll need to continue link-building over a long period of time – is that time you can afford to take away from actually running your business? That doesn’t even factor in a learning curve; if you’re new to SEO, figuring out the ins and outs is also time consuming – do you have time for that too?

If your answer is yes, the next question you’ll want to consider is if you have the knowledge-base to implement an SEO strategy. For the very basics, how good is your knowledge of html, CSS, and other basic coding languages? What about your writing skills? And perhaps most importantly – do you have the background to read and analyze Google Analytics and Google Algorithm changes? Let’s be honest – to many people, reading through the press releases for Google’s algorithm changes looks an awful lot like gibberish. SEO can have a language all its own; is it one you know, and if not, do you have the time to learn?

Let’s talk about one final aspect of the SEO question – the learning curve. If you’re thinking of giving it a go yourself, ask yourself this: Are you willing to be your own guinea pig? Remember, a sound Real Estate SEO strategy will make a huge difference in your website’s traffic; since nearly 9 out of every 10 homebuyers starts their search online, ranking first under relevant keywords can mean the difference between a thriving site – and one that no one knows exists. Poor Real Estate SEO strategies, or ones that aren’t executed well, can actually stop the search engines from indexing your site at all – or penalize it by pushing it further down the rankings if it thinks you’re using spam techniques rather than building quality links. While everyone needs to start somewhere, when it comes to your website, your business, your livelihood – would you rather be the first try, or would you rather have an experienced professional with proven results drive your business to the top of the rankings?

To sum it up – SEO is something people can do for themselves, but it’s a highly technical skill that takes time to do correctly. Professionals are not cheap by any means, but neither is your time. While certain people with specialized backgrounds can successfully implement an SEO strategy, we think for the most part, this is one strategy best left for the professionals.