Seriously, this is the CSI episode for SEO. When it comes time to SEO your real estate blog or website, you need to stop looking at your site with human eyes and start looking at it with search engines eyes. Because, while your page might look great to you- all those pretty pictures and Flash animations stimulating your cerebral cortex, a search engine only sees the text. That’s right, search engines are text driven, all that fluff your designer spent hours toiling away at on her Mac is completely invisible to your favorite search engine.

As rapidly as technology advances, search engines are far from an intelligent technology capable of appreciating the beauty of a cool design or hearing the sounds and recognizing movement in movies. Instead, search engines crawl the Web, looking at particular site items, predominately text, to get an idea of what a site is about.

Tool: iwebtool’s spider view shows you your real estate blog or website how a search engine sees it.

Forensic accounting: 7 items a search engine can’t see

1. Images (always provide “alt” tags for images, they get rid of validation errors and provide search engines with searchable text)
2. Flash movies
3. JavaScript
4. Frames
5. Password-protected pages
6. Directories
7. Audio/Video files (A notable exception to this rule are podcasts and vodcasts which carry searchable text making them search engine friendly media types)

Read also: Optimizing your Flash site

How do search engines work?

Step 1: Search Engine Crawls Your Site

First, search engines crawl the Web to see what is out there. This task is performed by a piece of software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google and Slurp for Yahoo!). Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Since there are more than over 20 billion web pages on the web, it is impossible for a spider to visit each site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified. Sometimes crawlers will not visit your site for a month or two, so during this time your SEO efforts will not be rewarded. But there is nothing you can do about it, it’s just the way it works. One way to incite crawls is to use ping services like Pingoat or Pingomatic.

Read also: The differences between search engines

Step 2: Search Engine Indexes Your Site

After a page is crawled, engines index the page’s content and store it in a giant database, from which it can later be retrieved. Essentially, indexing is when a search engine identifies the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigns the page to particular keywords. Sometimes search engines do not get the meaning of a page right but if you help them by optimizing your pages with content relevant keywords and descriptions, it will be easier for them to classify your pages correctly and for your site – to get higher rankings.

Read also: Meta tagging the right way

Read also: Myth: PIP determines real estate blog or website success

Tool: Search Engine Saturation How many pages do you have indexed?

Step 3: How a search engine performs a search

When a search request comes in, the search engine processes it by comparing the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Since it is likely that more than one page contains the same search string, the search engine refers to the calculated relevancy of each of the pages in its index to the search string.

There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links, or metatags. That is why different search engines give different search results pages for the same search string.

Read also: Getting the most out of your meta tags

Tool: Zippy: let’s you get just about any site metric or information you can think of and allows you to compare multiple sites in terms of SEO. 

Step 4: How a search engine retrieves results to display SERP

The last step in search engines' activity is retrieving the results. This step involves nothing more than the engine displaying the results in the browser – i.e. the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant sites. Good SEO should increase the relevancy of your pages based on the content and selected keywords and therefore result in higher search engine results placing.

Read also: Where does your site rank in the SERPs?

Tool: We Build Web Pages: allows you to analyze and compare your site against the top 10 sites that rank for your keywords in the SERPs.

Related Posts

Does your blogroll suck?
Long tail, short tail and coat tail searches
Learn How To SEO Your Blog
Get the most out of your meta tags
Canonicalization: is it killing your website?


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