SEO and Your Point2 Agent Website I’ve been an employee of Point2 for over 2 years, and one topic that has always been of interest to me is website Search Engine Optimization. Once I became an expert of the Point2 Software, I started researching SEO What I’ve learned over the last 2 years I now teach in one of our Education sessions called ‘Increasing your Online Presence: an Introduction to SEO’. This session is fairly basic, it utilizes the features that are built into your Point2 account specifically for SEO. There are MANY other methods and techniques that can be utilized in addition to the ones that I talk about in the Education Sessions. This series will include what I teach in the Education Sessions, as well as a few additional SEO practices that you can use to further optimize your website. Patience and Understanding... To start, I want to emphasize that patience is a virtue. You will not jump to prime search placement overnight, so don’t get discouraged. It can take a while for your website to be indexed, especially if your website or domain name is brand new. The reason for this is that Search Engines want to display well established sites that have proven to be relevant and stable, they don’t want to show a list of sites that are still in their infancy with a high probability that the site could no longer exist in a short period of time. This would cause a lot of cached sites to appear in search results, and that would be of no benefit to the person searching. Secondly, SEO is at best a topic open to much debate. It’s a mix of speculation theory and trend watching, at the benefit of search engine companies. While this could sound like a negative thing, it really is a protection. If the algorithms that search engines create to decide page rank were made public knowledge, we’d find hundreds of irrelevant websites appearing on page one of searches, in effect making the search engines irrelevant. SEO Basics – Your Domain Name The first step to optimizing your Point2 Agent website is to purchase, point, or transfer a domain name (website address) to it. The third level domain attached to your website (yourname.point2agent.com) is a temporary domain, provided for you to access your website when you first create it. It does not help in any way to optimize your site. It's all about the Content... Secondly, you’ll want to update all of the default content on your website. The content on all of your pages that is provided by Point2 is template content, and it is placed on all new Point2 Agent websites. Search Engines don’t like duplicated content, and because Point2 Agent’s template content is placed on all new websites, it’s duplicated a lot! The sooner you change the default content on your website, the sooner you can stop worrying about duplicated content and how it may impact your SEO. The best way to go about updating all of your websites content is to do it one page at a time. While editing your pages, keep these suggestions in mind:
- People use search engines to find what they’re looking for by using keywords, or search terms. Know your target audience, how they would search, and, what terms they would use to find your website. Write your content to be rich with those keywords. Take a look at our Professional Spotlight websites for inspiration and ideas.
- Links on your website can also positively affect your SEO When an online visitor finds your website via Search Engine, and follows the links on your website, it ultimately tells the Search Engine that the online visitor has found the information they are looking for on your website and is interacting with and navigating through your website. If the online visitor accessed your website from a search engine but didn’t find the information they were looking for, chances are they are not going to interact with or navigate through your website.
There are different types of links, and some are better than others, they are listed below:
- Internal links – Hyperlinks within the content on your website to other pages on your website are referred to as internal links.
- External – Like the name suggests, these are hyperlinks on your website that link to outside websites that are relevant to what your website provides. These websites that you link to should provide valuable information to your online visitors. Your real estate website can link to community information websites, mortgage broker websites, and product and service websites that may benefit a person looking to either sell or buy real estate, just to name a few examples.
- Inbound links – These are websites that link to your website. A high number of inbound links tell the Search Engines that you have valuable information that other websites want their traffic to see. The more online visitors that travel through these links to your website, the more Search Engines will reward you with higher placement.
- The best types of links you can have are reciprocal links. This is where you link to other websites and those websites link back to you. Keep in mind that you should be aware of what websites you are linking to. If the site you are linking to has a bad reputation with search engines, you could risk being penalized if you are linking to it.
- Always update the Meta Description and Meta Keywords for every page, each time you edit that page. The description is what shows up under the link to your website on the Search Engine results page. This should briefly describe what information can be found on that page. The Meta Keywords entered into your website should directly reflect the keywords used on that page within the content. You will get penalized if the Search Engine tries to compare your Meta Keywords to the content and they don’t match up. Every Keyword entered should be found within the content.
As we come to the close of the first installment of the SEO series, I want to leave you with this guideline: Don’t try to fool Search Engines by falsely optimizing your site to generate traffic; they are smarter than one may think. You may find companies out there who provide Website SEO but if their promises seem too good to be true, they probably are. There is a great article on www.searchenginewatch.com about how Search Engines rank web pages, and the general rules they follow. I’ve also found an article that discusses unethical techniques used in order to gain higher Search Engine placement. While these techniques work for a short time, they end up getting the website banned from Search Engines in the long run. ~Riana Back, Point2 Agent Education Specialist |