SEO FOR YOUR WEBSITE

If you want your website to rank on Google and other search engines, you need to do off-page and on-page SEO. In this article, we will describe “On-page SEO”, which an Estate Agent with the basic technical knowledge can do On-Page SEO of pages and blog posts by using the free SEOPress add-on tool. If you are a Real Estate Agent and don’t know much about SEO, it is advised to hire an SEO Professional.

SEOPress Add-On Starter Guide (Adobe pdf)
Introduction-Video to SEOPress Free version

Tips on how to work on your SEO titles and meta descriptions

Your SEO title and meta description control how your site appears in Google search results, as well as a few other spots. Let me show you an example. Here’s one of our posts and its listing in Google:

Those texts are your SEO title and meta description. In order to control SEO titles and meta descriptions in WordPress, you need our SEO tool, which has been already installed and configured. When you add pages, blog posts or property listings, you just have to add the titles and the meta descriptions.

Your title tag is the most important on-page SEO factor. In general, the closer the keyword is to the beginning of the title tag, the more weight it has with search engines. You don’t always need to start your title tag with your target keyword. But if there’s an important keyword, try to put it towards the beginning of your title. Wrap your title in an H1 Tag. It is worth checking out your site’s code to make sure you only have one H1 tag per page, and that H1 tag should contain your target keyword. Wrap Subheadings in H2 tags and include your target keyword in at least once.

Here’s what it looks like to set your titles and meta descriptions:

This screenshot is showing you how good or bad your description page or blog post has been optimized for SEO.

Below are some do’s and don’ts for optimizing the SEO title and meta description of your website:

Do … try to naturally include your target keyword

Whenever possible, you want to include your target keyword one time in your SEO title and one time in your meta description.  But a lot of people start their descriptions off with a long intro and use their keyword for the first time much later. Instead, drop your keyword somewhere in the first 100 words or so. This helps Google understand what your page is all about.

Not only does this signal to Google what your page is about, but it also helps human visitors assess whether your content matches what they’re looking for in Google’s search results.

Don’t … make them too long

Google typically displays around ~50-60 characters from your SEO title and ~160 characters from your meta description in its search results. But when it comes to your SEO title, you might be better off keeping things well under Google’s limits.

Do … include your keyword near the beginning

Website visitors typically see about the first two words in list items. In order to communicate to your visitors that your website matches their search intent, you want to try and get your keywords as close to those first two words as possible so that searchers see relevant keywords when they are browsing.

Don’t … forget your meta description

A lot of these tips have focused on your SEO title, but it’s important to write a unique meta description, too.

Page, Blog Or Property Description Content 

Once you optimize your SEO title and meta description, it’s time to move to page SEO techniques – your content (descriptions). Here are the do’s and don’ts to optimize your content itself…

Do … include your target keyword multiple times

The days of stuffing your content with keywords are long gone, but it’s still important to include your target keyword multiple times in your content.

So what’s the perfect keyword density for your content? In general, for your average piece of ~1,000-1,500 content, you probably want to include your keyword somewhere around ~5-7 times.

In addition to including those keywords in the body of your content, you should also try to add your keyword to one of your <h2> headings.

Finally, don’t go overboard and stuff your keyword in as many times as possible. After a certain point, adding more exact match keywords isn’t going to help you, and it might even hurt your SEO.

Do … include your keyword in the first 100 words

While you want to sprinkle your keyword throughout your content, it’s especially important to include your keyword at least once near the beginning. Specifically, within the first ~100 words.

Beyond helping with search engines, doing this also helps human visitors understand that your content is going to deliver on what you promised in your SEO title.

This early mention of your target keyword should come fairly naturally. After all, if your content really is about what you’re promising in the headline then mentioning the keyword shouldn’t be a challenge.

Do … include related keywords

Over the years, Google has gotten a lot smarter about understanding the topic of a piece of content. Now, in addition to including your target keyword, Google also wants to see keywords related to your main topic/keyword.

Do … include relevant internal links

Building backlinks to your site from other websites is one of the most important off-page SEO factors. But other websites are not the only source of contextual links – you can also build links from your own site.

Including internal links in your content accomplishes two things:

• It gives Google context about the content of the destination page, even if Google doesn’t apply as much weight as it would to a link from a high-authority external site.
• It keeps visitors on your website and reduces your bounce rate, which provides additional signals to Google about the quality of your content.

Don’t … forget about images

With all this focus on text content and keywords, it’s easy to forget about other types of content -IMAGES. When you add an image, make sure to add the alt text as well – this can help your images rank in Google Images.

Include Your Keyword in Your Websites URL & Page, Post URLs

Include Your Keyword in Your websites URL

If you can find a domain name for your website with a keyword related to properties, homes, real estate it is recommended to use such domain name for your website because keyword-rich website URLs get 45% more clicks vs. website URLs that don’t contain a keyword that matches the person’s search.

Include Your Keyword in Your pages, posts & property description URLs

You can edit the URL slug of any piece of content on your site. Do that from the Permalink section in the Document sidebar in the WordPress editor. You can also control the overall structure of your WordPress site’s URLs from your permalink settings.

Here’s how to take advantage of those settings and optimize your URLs:

Do … include your keyword in your URL slug

Including your target keyword in your content’s URL is important for two reasons:

1. Google uses the words in your URL as a ranking factor, so using your keyword helps Google understand that it should rank your content for that keyword.
2. URLs that include a keyword in them have a 45% higher organic CTR than those without, perhaps because it signals to humans that the content matches what they’re looking for.

Do … keep your URLs short and sweet

Keep your URLs short and to the point – about 3-5 words if possible. Why? Because there’s a clear correlation between shorter URLs and higher rankings. On average, the URL from a site in the first position was 50 characters total, while the average for sites in the tenth position was over 62 characters, with a clear trend in between:

Don’t … change your URL slugs over time

Once you choose your URL slug, it’s important not to change it carelessly in the future. If you change a URL without taking proper precautions, you’ll lose all your rankings for that page as well as the internal and external links that you’ve built to that page.

If you absolutely must change a URL, make sure to set up a 301 redirect to tell Google and visitors’ browsers that you’ve moved the page.

Finally, “On-page SEO” is not enough to rank your site by itself. But if you implement these handfuls of on-page SEO techniques we talked about above, you’ll set your content up with a strong foundation to rank in Google.

Additional Helpful SEO Sources 
Video Tutorial on how to use the SEO Add-On Pro Version (YouTube Video)
Create Good Titles and Snippets (Google Doc)
SEJ-On-Page-SEO (Adobe pdf)

IMPORTANT NOTE
Please note that SEOPress is installed on your website free of charge. If you need support for this 3rd party add-on, you have to buy SEOPress Pro version, included in an annual subscription service.