Everything that you do with your website, whether it be adding a piece of content or adding a new page, the first thing you need to do is focus on "how do I provide value to the person I'm intending to read this."
SEO
Ever find yourself wondering how to properly format a post or page, or worse, trying to figure out why it’s not ranking or why there doesn’t seem to be any retention? In this video, we’ll review some of the key strategies involved in optimizing real estate content on your WordPress website (although these concepts in most cases could apply to any real estate page). We’ll start with general concepts and dive into the particulars to make sure that from here on out, you’ll know exactly what you should be doing!
Here’s a screenshot of today’s board
Audio Transcription
Please note that ‘Orlando Real Estate’ has been substituted for ‘WordPress Real Estate’ in the below content.
Hey guys, Nelson Quest here with Agentfire.com and today we’re going to be talking about, Creating a Perfectly Optimized Real Estate Page. So, let’s just get right into it, let’s go over some fundamentals first.
Fundamentals
1) Provide Value
I say this in just about every post I wrote or video I make. Everything that you do with your website, whether it be adding a piece of content or adding a new page, the first thing you need to do is focus on “how do I provide value to the person I’m intending to read this.” The keywords, everything else will flow from there, but it starts with how do I provide value.
2) Easy to Navigate
This is pretty straightforward if we’re talking about the website you want to make sure that you have a clean menu, lots of whitespace, very specific calls to action. If we’re talking about the page or post, you want to make sure that everything is neatly organized. Make sure that you’re using subheadings to break the content up. If you’ve got images in there, make sure they’re aligned left or right and that they’re not just thrown in there.
3) Responsive
I don’t think I need to tell you how many people are going to be viewing your site from a non-desktop, so that’s an iPad, smartphone, tablet, etc. It’s 2014, you need to make sure that your site is responsive, that the content on your site is well served to any device.
4) Keyword Targeting
Even if you don’t know what specific keywords you want to target on a page or post, you should have some sort of keyword focus. Yes- you want to provide value, and yes, you want to make sure that your content sounds organic (genuine), but at the same time, you should have some sort of understanding of the sort of keywords you need to get into this content for it to rank well.
On-Page Elements
Let’s get into the on-page elements. So for today’s’ video, this is the sample page that I’ve created. You’ll notice that the title is WordPress Real Estate. WordPress Real Estate is the primary long tail keyword that we’re going to be targeting for this piece of content. So we’ve got the title here, a paragraph, a subheading here, a second paragraph, a hyperlink, a picture with a caption, and these are social share icons. Again I’ll go through each one of these individually. And this is the page URL.
1) Header Tags
When it comes to WordPress, if you’re adding a post or page, your title is automatically going to be in an H1 tag or ‘Heading 1’ Tag. For the actual content that’s going to be written in your visual editor, it’s up to you to add subheading tags too, so H2 or H3. I personally don’t recommend using H1 tags in the actual main content unless you have a page that really has a bunch of different focuses. For the most part, if you’re creating a page, it’s got a singular focus, and that should be summarized within the title, and that should consist of your keywords. So you want to make sure that your keywords are in your title, and in all of your heading tags. ‘
In this example you’ll see that the title is WordPress Real Estate, again that’s the summary of the entire page, H1 tag. This is an H2 tag, we have Overview of the WordPress Real Estate Market, so you’ll see we’ve got the keywords in there. In an ideal piece of content, we have additional heading tags and additional sections. We may have ‘School Information for the WordPress Real Estate Market’ or something else. If the paragraph that’s going to be following that subheading is not described by the subheading, that’s not good. You want to make sure that you have a consistent flow throughout your entire post or page. So in this example, ‘Overview of the WordPress Real Estate Market’, I want to make sure that the following paragraph is talking about an overview of the WordPress Real Estate Market, so don’t just throw keywords into a subheading if there’s no context within the actual paragraph of content on the page. We want to make sure that everything is nice and organic- we’ll talk more about that in a second.
2) Page URL
Generally speaking, your page URL, so if I create this post, it’s going to be ‘yourdomain.com/WordPress-real-estate/’. with WordPress, it will normally just take your title and use that as the page URL. The part we want to focus on here is not the ‘yourdomain.com’ part but the part that comes after that. The only thing to note over here, again you want to make sure that you have your keywords in the Page URL, which is pretty much going to happen automatically if it’s in the title. The only thing I want to note here is that if you’ve got a really long title, you may want to consider shortening the URL a little bit, so if our page title was ‘Overview of the WordPress Real Estate Market’, we may want to shorten the URL to ‘/wordpress-real-estate/’ or /wordpress-real-estate-market/. You don’t want to have a page URL that’s too long.
3) Organic Copy
What we’re talking about when I say organic copy, again this comes back to the whole ‘providing value’ concept. It’s amazing how many agents that I speak with where I’ll go to their site and look at some of the content that they’ve written, and it’s very clear that they’re just stuffing as many keywords as they can into the said paragraph. You want to make sure that your content is readable, and it sounds organic. There’s a way to use keywords and there’s a way to not use keywords. This is how you use keywords: so in this first paragraph, we’ve got “WordPress is a city in south Florida, generally speaking, WordPress Real Estate is some of the hottest in the United States.” Now, what we did there is we used it organically. Now if we took this paragraph and we wrote “WordPress Real Estate is a city in South Florida. WordPress Real Estate is the hottest in the US primarily because of WordPress Real Estate…” That’s not something you want to do. For starters, that just doesn’t work. It’s called called keyword stuffing and it’s going to get your site completely kicked off of Google. Number 2, if I’m someone that comes to your site, even if it did work, and I’m reading that paragraph, I’m going to be out of there in a few seconds. So you want to make sure that there’s an Organic, sporadic use of keywords throughout the content. You don’t want to have the same keyword in paragraph 4 or 5 times. Again that’s going to set off flags and nobody is going to read it.
You’ll see what we did over here also in this paragraph, we’ve got “The Real Estate Market here in WordPress” so you’ll see what we did is we broke up the main keyword into two keywords, so this is somewhat of an organic use of this primary keyword that we’re trying to target.
4) Optimized Photos
With WordPress, this is very easy. When you add a photo you’re able to add the title and alt description; make sure you add something that has your keywords, but again if you’re doing that, make sure that photo pertains to those keywords. So in this example (in case you can’t tell, this is a home, and this is Mickey, and this is Minnie, again we’re doing WordPress Real Estate), the caption we have over here WordPress Real Estate Near Disney is Prime. So if this was just a picture of Mickey, I shouldn’t be putting anything that relates to WordPress Real Estate in the title tag for this image, in the description for this image, or in the caption for this image. You want to make sure that you’re not trying to manipulate. Again: Organic, Value!
Captions are another cool thing with WordPress, they’re another great way for you to get keywords organically into your content. Again as you can see in this example, this is essentially a picture representing WordPress Real Estate so it’s perfectly fine if we create a caption that says ‘WordPress Real Estate near Disneyland is prime.’
5) Social Share
When you have great content, people are going to want to share it, and you’re going to want to make sure that you have your Facebook Like, Twitter Tweet This, Google +1 This. Not only is it important to have that on there from a sharing perspective, but it’s also seen by search engines as a vote of confidence, so if you get a bunch of people liking your site, 10 people like your post or page, that’s 10 votes of confidence. It’s seen as a social indicator and it’s a very good thing to have on all of your content.
6) Inter-linking
Tell me if you’ve seen this before – when you’re reading through a blog post or someone’s page and you notice that a set of words has a hyperlink, and that hyperlink goes to another page on their site with content that is relevant to that hyperlink. What we’ve got here in this example (Reads paragraph)… this is in large part thanks to a recent WordPress School Report, and this is supposed to be a hyperlink. What we’ve done, is this is, hypothetically, a link to a post or page that we’ve created previously that’s pertaining to the WordPress School Report. So again, this is considered inter-linking, it’s viewed as a very healthy signal from a site. You want to make sure that all of your content has links to other content. Not only is it a good signal for search engines, but it’s also good from a usability standpoint. If I’m someone and I’m reading this particular post and I see this link and it goes to another post which is talking about the WordPress School Report, I’m likely to click on it, I’m likely to stay on your site and ascertain some value from this. It’s not a bad idea once you have a bunch of posts or pages on your site, to go back and create some links between all of the content. So if I wrote this WordPress School Report a few months after I wrote this piece on WordPress Real Estate, I may come back to this page and create a link that goes to this school report. Again, inter-linking is not only a great indicator, a healthy indicator for Search Engines, but it’s also from a usability standpoint.
7) Meta Data
Meta Data is essentially the meta title and meta description for your post or page. Here at Agentfire, we use a plugin called WordPress SEO by Yoast. What this allows us to do is from the actual page or post that we’re creating, we can adjust these things. A lot of people seem to be under the misunderstanding that the meta title and meta description have some sort of SEO benefit. In 2005 they did, they definitely do not anymore, however, it is somewhat important from what’s called a SERPS perspective (basically a click-ability perspective). Normally what happens is that if I don’t set a meta title and meta description for this post, Google is automatically going to take this title, and some summary of content from this post, whatever they think best reflects the title. So they may not take the first paragraph, they may take another paragraph if they feel it’s more representative of the post. Now, from a click-ability standpoint, if I’m doing a search for WordPress Real Estate and this happens to come up, it may make sense to optimize the title tag and description for this page. So instead of the title just being ‘WordPress Real Estate’ and the description being ‘WordPress is a city in South Florida,’ you can do something like ‘Comprehensive WordPress Real Estate Information’ as the title, and then the description can also be something catchy. So again, meta title, meta description, tweak them if you want some increased click-ability.
8) Google Authorship
Basically, if you have a G+ Profile – have you ever seen where you do a search for something and you see the persons photo and name underneath the results. Me personally, if you found this post through a search you probably saw me standing in South Africa with a gigantic giraffe behind me – I’m actually not sure what the exact correlation is between that and the number of clicks we’re getting, but we’re getting a lot of clicks so I’m going to assume it works!
Google authorship is great – not only is it considered a social indicator, so it’s another reason for Google to trust your content, but it also improves click-thru rates. so if I see 5 articles in my search results, and I see one of them was written by someone where I see their photo and their name, it’s going to catch my attention and I’m much more likely to click onto that piece of content.
That’s pretty much it for today if you guys have any questions about this feel free to email me directly my email is [email protected]. Make sure to follow us, sign up for our newsletter, and thanks for watching!
