Basics on Google Search and SEO

Posted by Amy Chorew on Aug 8, 2008 in Amy's Blog Posts | 1 comment

More and more of my students have been asking me to explain search engine optimization in a “REALTOR” friendly language, so here it is, courtesy of my webmaster at WhiteWhaleDesigns.

Google is responsible for over %70 of all search engine traffic to web sites.Google uses automated software to read, analyze, compare and rank you web pages. That automated software looks at code and text, not the same as a human. Graphics and design do not matter.

NOTE: Don’t forget about text! don’t only use Flash.

The most relevant and most important web pages are listed in descending order.

Relevant = how well a web page matches a specific word search
Important = quality and quantity of links that point to your page from other web sites

To be listed on Google at all you will have to be linked to by another website that Google has gone to. Google’s automated software (Googlebot) crawls through your site. The more popular your site the more crawling that happens. Google visits more of fast movin and changing sites such as blogs and news sites.

Top things Google looks for for page ranking.

Keywords in links, both from your page and especially pages pointing to you. The more on other sites that point to you the better.
Keywords used in the Title (<TITLE>) of your web page
keywords used in the headings (<H1>, <H2>) of your page.
The PageRank of your pages which is in turn dependent on the number of links to your site.
Web pages that contain at least 200 words of relevant content. The more the better.
How often the content on your site is updated. You should update your site once a month if possible.
How fast you are obtaining new links (links to you from other sites)
How old the site is and the links going to it. Google likes old sites.

To make it simple get as many keywords on your pages, get as many links to your site that contain the keywords you wish to utilize and don’t do anything that looks “excessive”, “spammy” or “unnatural” to Google to get all these things.

Start with keywords you want to use.

Some sites to use: http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/ http://www.wordtracker.com/

Also analyze your website traffic. Your web host may have an analyzer already for you. If not you should be able to get the raw traffic logs and use software to analyze it.

Next post – Google Adwords