Its SEO week here at RSS Pieces, every article this week will have to do with an aspect of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  Today, were going to talk about the most basic measure of SEO, SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) and how your real estate blog or website can climb it.  According to Wikipedia, A search engine results page, or SERP, is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page. SERPs may also contain advertisements, a way for search engines to earn income.

Read also: What you need to know about SEO

Where does your real estate blog or website fall in the SERPs?

Want to see where your real estate blog or website falls in the SERPs for your primary keyword? Try this super cool SERP tool from RelAdvance. Please note that according to Google your PageRank and backlinks are not updated, so if they look low, dont worry, Ill show you how to check your actual backlinks later in the article.

Three primary components of good SEO 

Where you fall in the SERPs is a function of your real estate blog or websites overall SEO. The primary components of good SEO are:

When you write the content on your real estate blog or website, make sure it is laser focused. Come up with three to five keywords or phrases you want that page to be searchable by and repeat those words or phrases throughout the article. Dont keyword spam, but rather use the terms naturally throughout the article. For example, notice how I repeat the term ˜real estate blog throughout this article. I use it naturally, when it makes sense, because I want to be searchable by that term. So, writing SEOed content is that simple. Chose a word or phrase your want to be found by and use it repeatedly.

Meta tag keywords, descriptions and titles that are highly relevant to the content on the specific page help to increase your value to search engines and assist in boosting your real estate blog or website in the SERP. The basic premise is: you cant write an article about all the golf courses in your county and use ˜real estate as a keyword unless you specifically mention ˜real estate in the post. 

Tool: To see how relevant your meta data is to you content use Widexls meta data analyzer.

Backlinks are still the backbone of SEO, so acquiring them is essential. I wrote my compendium on backlinks a while back and feel that it is still pretty current, the link is below. 

Read also: Ultimate guide to building backlinks

Tool: Use iwebtool to figure out your actual backlink numbers. 

IMPORTANT: the next Google PageRank and backlink update is thought to be scheduled for January 28, 2006, so build those backlinks fast so you can boost your PageRank.

One of my personal pet peeves is invalidated code. HTML/XHTML code that does not validate means your web designer is a hack. You need a valid website because valid code is displayed properly and uniformly across popular browsers. Valid code is what search engines understand and will assist with SEO. Since search engines cant read invalidated code, they skip over the text inside the invalid tags- meaning you lose precious content that can be used to boost your keyword density and SERP positioning. Never ever hire a developer or web company that writes invalid code: always check your developers site with the tool below before hiring them. The W3C standards have been around for years and all good developers follow them.

Read also: Validating your real estate blog or website

Tool: check to see if your site is valid at W3C

NOTE: RSS Pieces proudly displays all three W3C validation certificates for our feeds and website. 

Your website is an online storefront that needs traffic to drive sales. Websites are marketing tools. You can have the best looking website on the Internet, but if your site isnt searchable by Google, Yahoo!, MSN¦ youre site isnt working as a marketing tool for you.
A properly developed website should drive traffic through organic searches on popular search engines like Google. Not sure if yours is? Try this. When you search for your website on Google with the keywords or phrases you would expect your customers to enter, does your site show up on the first page towards the top of the list?
No? Wondering why? Its simple, your website isnt optimized for search engines. The bad news is: you are essentially invisible on the web. The good news is: you can fix that.
If SEO sounds like technical mumbo jumbo to you. Ask yourself these two questions:

1. When you search for your website on Google based on the key words and phrases you would expect your customers to use, does your website show up number one, two or three in the search engine results?
2. Does your daily website traffic exceed 1,000 unique visitors (browser, XML, bots, etc) per day?

If you answered ˜no to either or both of these questions, your website isnt working for you. The fact is: most web designers do not employ standard white hat Search Engine Optimization (SEO) methods. Without SEO, your website will not drive volume traffic. SEO is a standardized means of optimizing Web pages or whole sites in order to make them more search engine-friendly, thus achieving higher positions in search results.
With the rules to Internet visibility constantly changing as search engines like Google and Yahoo adjust their filters and algorithms to sort out would-be spammers and illicit content sites from search results, it is important to hire experts that stay on the cutting edge of SEO. For a list of quality SEO companies, visit SEOList. On the other hand, you could just buy an RSS Pieces real estate blog which automates many of the components of SEO and provides backlink services.

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