Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the active practice of increasing visitor traffic to your website by optimizing both on and off page factors to get your site ranking high in the search engine result pages (or SERPs) for certain search phrases – or “keywords”. Keep in mind that each search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc) has its own rules and guidelines for ranking websites, so optimization tactics work differently on different search engines. SEO is an ongoing process – if you want to stick to the top of the SERPs, you can never stop practicing SEO. The most traffic comes from ranking in the top 3 results in a given search engine for various keywords.

Keywords are basically the search phrases people use to find what they’re looking for on the web. If I was looking for a real estate agent in Lancaster PA or wanted to find listings to look at, I would try these different keyword phrases: “Realtor in Lancaster, PA,” “Real estate agent in Lancaster, PA,” “homes for sale in Lancaster PA,” and “real estate listings in Lancaster PA.” That’s just a few combinations of search terms people may use when looking for that topic. You can use this keyword selector tool to type in a search phrase, find out how many people search for it each month and also find related search phrases and how many times THOSE keywords are searched for each month.

Obviously, you want to target keywords that get a lot of traffic. If you use this keyword selector tool, and multiply the number of searches they give for a given keyword by about 4, that’s closer to the number of times someone has gone to Google.com and searched for that keyword. As of now, Google.com is the most used search engine in the U.S. with Yahoo at a close second. You want to target these search engines mostly, but don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Getting your site ranked in the top 10 in multiple search engines will give you an UNBELIEVABLE amount of traffic.

Now that you have an idea of what keywords are and their importance (it’s how people search for you!) you need to know that SEO is usually broken down into two types of optimization: on page and off. On page optimization basically means making sure your website has the proper title and meta tags, with keywords included; creating unique or interesting content for your site; making sure to pepper your keywords throughout the site; and making sure that your site is accessible to search engine crawls (which is how the search engines learn about your site to rank it). Your best bet to get an in-depth look into on-page optimization and SEO in general is to check out a GREAT resource for those of you new to SEO: SEOmoz’s Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization.

Those are just a few of the factors that go into on-page optimization of your site, but the most important thing to remember is that CONTENT IS KING. You can do all the SEO you want, but if you don’t have good content on your site, it won’t be worth jack to visitors or search engines. If you have really interesting, creative or unique content for your site, people will notice and your rankings will come almost naturally, but very slowly. That’s why SEO is so important and useful – there are things you can do to get your website noticed and ranking higher, faster.

But again, it all comes down to GREAT CONTENT for your readers. Make your real estate website a wealth of information on real estate and your community. Create content for your users FIRST and then go back and optimize it for your website. There are literally MILLIONS of sites and blogs with SEO information out there, just go do a search on Google. We’ve been through many and have compiled a list of the ones we found the most useful:

• SEOMoz.org
• SEOBook.com (Check out their SEO glossary)
• Search Engine Watch
• SearchEngineLand.com
  
• Search Engine Roundtable
• Online Marketing Blog

Now, we haven’t forgotten about the off-page optimization aspect of SEO. To keep things a bit shorter and sweeter, we’ve given off-page optimization its own article, which you can read here.

One last note about SEO: there are perhaps 3 schools of SEO (or 2, depending on your opinion): black hat, white hat and gray hat. Black hat SEOs are basically spammers – they’re willing to undertake unethical practices to get rankings, including: hiding links and text on their website to stuff it with keywords, spamming forums and blogs with links to their website without contributing any other useful information, high-jacking people’s sites to stuff it with their own links and other underhanded methods.

White hat SEOs tend to stick by the Google Webmaster guidelines (or as close to as possible) to practice ethical SEO. Basically, they adhere to the concept that content is king and only request or buy links or participate on blogs and forums when they have useful information to share. They are as much marketers as SEOs. Gray hat SEOs are somewhere in between walking that fine line, and they also tend to practice the “content is king” concept and provide their visitors with useful content, but they’re not shy about advertising that fact. They write articles for articles directories, linking to their sites. They make it a point to be active in forums and blogs to drop their link along with information and they may or may not engage in linking practices that Google’s guidelines may frown upon (but to be blunt, Google’s guidelines are VERY strict).

If you’re caught “gaming” or taking advantage of the search engines, it can cause a huge drop in your ranking. But if you practice fairly ethical SEO and make sure you’re always providing useful information for people, you’ll be fine and your site will continue to move up in ranking.