It probably took quite some time for you to build your business to the size that it is today. You started with obtaining your own real estate license, learned the ropes and became a successful agent.

You then took the next logical step and studied for your broker’s license. Once you passed the test, you looked for your own office space, bid your old broker a fond farewell and set out to make your own mark in the world of real estate brokers.

Now you’ve got a thriving practice with agents that work under your supervision, an IT department and an advertising team. You’ve shown what you can do on land and now you want to venture forth into the Internet world of real estate marketing.

You have the advantages of a large staff and a sizeable budget, so getting your name well known to Internet users should be a piece of cake, right? Guess again. There is a lot of work that needs to be done and because of the size of your agency; it may not be as simple as you think.

The larger your company is the more work you will need to put into it because you probably have a much more complex website. This could include pages for specific departments, and individual pages for multiple sales agents. It may also include general property searches, property searches by listing agents, property searches by price, etc.

The good news is, because of your substantial size, you probably have a lot of people working for you that can implement what’s needed for your Search Engine Optimization.

The bad news is you have a lot of people working for you that can implement what’s needed for your Search Engine Optimization. Confused? Let me explain.

If you own a large real estate brokerage, you probably have multiple sales agents that work for you. You may also have an IT team that is well versed in today’s technology and can easily implement what’s needed to bring your web site to the attention of those who are in need of your services.

However, the old adage that too many cooks spoil the broth is also in play here. Between your advertising team, IT team, and sales associates, each with their own ideas on how things should be done, the results can end up in a cluster of confusion and power struggles on everyone’s part.

Not to worry though. By employing steps to get everyone on the same page, and working as a collective unit, you will be able to use SEO to the fullest and reap the rewards for both you and your agents.

1) Be Prepared for a Long Road

Don’t expect to implement these changes over night. Depending on how complex your web site is and how many agents you have working with you will depend on the amount of effort needed on everyone’s part.

Even if you do manage to corral all of your employees, come up with a plan and implement it is timely manner, the wheels of the search engine turn slowly, so it could take up to three months for the spiders to take note of all of your changes and rank your page more highly.

Patience and perseverance are going to be key factors in the effective utilization of SEO. They are just as important as understanding the SEO concepts and employing them, maybe even more so. It’s time to roll up your sleeves and get to work.

2) Get Organized

The first step is to get things organized in all of the company’s departments. If you do not require regular reports on what each division is doing, now is the time to start.

Review each of the reports from the various departments and consider ways that each unit can do things to support the others. For example, your advertising team should come up with graphics that are minimal in size but are visually captivating and can easily be placed on your web page by your IT team.

Don’t forget to add HTML coding to your graphics so that they are seen by the search engine spiders. You want your web page to contain a lot of information without being confusing and here these two divisions can work together.

The same applies to your sales staff. Have your advertising team work with each person to come up with the best photos to place on the ad. Full length photos can take up a lot of space and few people who visit the web page will have an interest in what the salesperson is wearing.

They may, however, make judgments based on the sales person’s facial expression, so a simple head shot will allow your agents to be easily identified and also free up space to put more compelling information about that agent such as their individual areas of expertise.

3) Setting Up an Optimization Team

One of the bonuses of having a large company is that you are not alone in your efforts to become the number one real estate brokerage in your area. One of the biggest problems with some business owners is the need to do everything themselves.

This can end up costing the company a valuable resource: you. In order to be even more successful, you need to be able to confidently delegate work to individuals you know you can trust to get the job done. This will free up your time to come up with more ways to utilize SEO and further the success of your company.

Set up an optimization team by calling together all of the department heads and going over your companies goals. Have each manager assume the duties of coming up with ways for their individual departments to meet those goals and then have regular meetings to make sure that their ideas are workable and will complement what the other departments are doing.

Call for regular brainstorming meetings. Offer your staff incentives like bonuses for the best idea of the month or other ways that will further optimize your website.

Listen carefully to them because they are the ones that are on the front lines everyday, battling it out in the trenches with the competition that wants to lure your business away.

Because of that they may have ideas that you may not have ever thought of and you can use them to boost your ranking and conversions.

Including all of the divisions of your agency has another bonus attached to it. It makes them all feel that they are apart of a team. This will help them to work even harder for and with each other since the success of one department will mean the success of them all.

Each time you successfully achieve a new goal, let your team know that they are a fundamental part of that success. That their involvement is what helped the company to reach that goal.

Have a party or take everyone out to dinner. Showing appreciation will do even more to keep them working that much harder for their own as well as the company’s overall success.

4) Educate Yourself and Your Team

As a Real Estate Broker you probably know just about all there is to know about real estate in your area, and now that you’ve learned about meta tags, links, spiders and robots, its time to make sure that your employees understand these terms as well.

By understanding them, they will better be able to come up with ideas that coincide with these terms and further your company’s SEO goals.

When it comes to the mundane details of running a real estate practice, you are no doubt already well versed in how each department runs.

You keep up do date on all the new laws and make sure that your agents are also so informed. The same applied to your advertising and PR divisions. Each knew what it was that you wanted to accomplish and would work to make sure that that goal was achieved.

Prior to your decision to employ SEO to get your website noticed, each department would work independently to carry out their specific duties.

Now that you’ve decided to use SEO techniques, it’s time to call all of your departments together and do some cross training. Everyone has to be on the same page and by understanding the fundamental duties of each division, it will be easier to for everyone to come together and present ideas that are harmonious to each other.

A good example of this would be your IT department’s probable lack of knowledge about what it is your advertising department does and how it relates to them on an SEO level.

Typically the tech personnel are responsible to keep the server’s running and making sure that everyone’s computer remains operable.

They may also be responsible for updating your website, removing agents who have left your employ and adding the new additions. This would include bios, pictures and other information that is pertinent to that agent. They would also remove old listings and replace them with the new ones that your agents bring in.

What they might not be aware of is the importance of HTML coding and metatag descriptions. They may not understand how important having keywords embedded in invisible text is.

Why? Because before they had no need to know about it. You gave them the information you wanted inputted and they followed your instructions, unaware of the importance of how that information was inputted.

Make sure that your IT staff understands the basics of text, links and content. Make sure that they are aware of the importance of using HTML coding to convert graphics.

They probably already understand what HTML coding is but make sure that they understand how important it is to place this coding on each and every page that your site contains.

They may be quite proud of the flash animated graphic displays on your site that make it visually stunning and attractive but they may not realize that the search engine spiders are unable to see it.

If the spiders don’t see it then neither will those people who are searching under the keywords on your page. It’s better to have more text and less animation, so that the spiders will be better able to catalog and index your pages and increase the pages search engine rankings.

Your copywriters and advertising staff also need to understand the effective use of keywords and how they need to be distributed throughout the content on your sites pages. They need to understand the need for articles, blogs and newsletters and how to effectively get viewer’s to your site to leave their email addresses for follow-up.

Your agents also need to know about and understand these types of content. If they have individual pages on your site, they can use them to start their own blogs, articles and newsletters.

More sales for them means more money for your company and since each of their pages contributes to your site, those pages need to be written in such a way that the search engine spiders will recognize them.

This is why its important to bring your sales staff and your IT team together and make sure that each department understands not only why things are being done in a certain way but how to combine those things to make your SEO more effective.

5) Set SEO Goals for Short and Long Term

Earlier we discussed setting up goals you hope to achieve with your SEO plans. Now its time to break them down a bit further into two categories, long term goals and short term goals.

When implementing search engine optimization, while you might feel pressured to get all of the balls rolling at once that could end up in a recipe for disaster.

In order to effectively use SEO, you have to do so in a step by step manner. This way everything will get done in an effective way. Trying to rush could cause you to skip important steps or to take shortcuts in an attempt to realize your goals faster.

Instead, take your time and do it right the first time so you will avoid having to lose time valuable time correcting your mistakes and walking the same path over and over again. There’s an old adage that tailors use; measure twice, cut once. The same principle holds true for SEO.

a) Short Term Goals

Your short term goals should include:

• A careful analysis of your existing website.
• Determining what content doesn’t have HTML coding so it can be added.
• Removing old links that are no longer active or conducive to realizing your goals.
• Removing “fluff” content and adding informative ones.
• Making sure that you have auto responders for your opt-in content.
• A way to track conversions of your viewers into actual clients.
• A way to separately track your online conversions from your offline ones.
• Adding or updating navigation tools to make it easy for your viewers to find their way around your website.
• Determining the best time to schedule regular meetings so that they will be convenient for everyone.
• Appointing a person from each department that will be in charge of that particular division’s SEO.
• Deciding on an incentive plan that will motivate your staff to concentrate on their SEO’s efforts.
• Making sure your IT department has a full understanding of what their responsibilities are so that the content added will be not only user focused but spider friendly.
• Topics that can be used for articles, blogs and newsletters.
• Keywords that will be used in the above content to add relevance to your site.
• Appointing a specific person to be in charge of tracking what the competition is doing, (there’s enough competition out there that this may become a full time job).
• Scheduling a regularly appointed time for yourself to review all of the reports and make notes about how you feel each division can be improved the next month.
• Scheduling a time to meet with the individual department heads including the regular manager and the person in charge of that department’s SEO if different, to go over the reports and any notes that you have made.
• Establishing a data base of email addresses to market to, including all of the ones that your individual agents obtain from their pages.
• Establishing how you plan to divide the leads evenly among your agents.
• Determining how much of your agencies business you want to come from online conversions.

b) Long Term Goals

Now that you’ve written out the short term goals that you want to implement, its time to diagram your long term ones.

Your long term goals should include:

• A steady increase in the percentage of your online conversions.
• Increasing techniques to further target both your local and out of state audiences.
• Finding new ways to continue to effectively handle the steady increase of clientele that your website brings.
• Making sure that acquiring online conversions does not interfere with acquiring your offline ones.

6) Map Out Your Progress

Mapping out your progress is going to be essential to keeping your SEO campaign running smoothly. It’s the best way to be able to analyze what is working for you and what isn’t. The way to do this is by tracking the success of your various SEO techniques

If you haven’t added a hit counter to your website, make sure you do so posthaste so that you will be able to correctly record your percentage of online conversion.

Pay close attention to your opt-in content to see which ones garner the most email addresses. This will help you to determine what should be kept and what should be removed.

You should also pay attention to what’s happening with the individual pages of your agents. See which agents are the most successful in acquiring email address and conversions. This way you can share their techniques with the agents who have not had the same success.

There’s a lot of competition between agents and they might not be that willing to share their precious techniques, but it’s your agency and since this is a team effort, everyone needs to be required to make positive contributions.

There’s plenty of real estate business to go around and since your SEO techniques is bringing in so much of it, then no one should have qualms about sharing the wealth.

I know I’ve said it before but I will say it again now and probably again later on in this book. Search engine optimization is a continuous process. You will constantly have to track what’s on your existing site and update, remove and make changes to the content that it contains.

You will have to continuously change your keywords and phrases and make sure that they are relevant to the content. Tracking the progress of your SEO techniques will make it easier for you to know what to add, remove and change on your site to make sure that it stays effective on a permanent basis.

If you are a small business owner and just read all of the things that will be required of big businesses, you might be breathing a sigh of relief because since your business isn’t that big, you won’t have to worry taking all those complicated steps.

Guess again my friend. You need to take the same steps to achieve your goals and you will have to work even harder because you don’t have the same staff or generous budget that your big business competitors have. Of course everything that has disadvantages has advantages as well.

For one thing, you don’t have a large staff which means that there’s less egos that you will have to deal with when trying to get your SEO show on the road.

Because your staff is smaller, it will be easier to schedule meeting times with them since there are fewer personal schedules that will need to be juggled. One of the reasons that people go into real estate in the first place is because of the flexibility of hours.

This allows both men and women to take care of their home responsibilities and conduct business based on their own personal schedules.

You will also probably have an outside IT consultant who takes care of your site’s maintenance. This can be a very good thing because since they have their own business, they are probably on top of all of the latest method of coding and the other technical knowledge that enables to garner and keep business. That means there’s less to explain.

If you are a single person business, than all the better because you can use your off time to dedicate to enhancing your knowledge and if you need more ideas, no problem. You can use your competition to get them. In one sense this is even better because by studying the sites of your highly ranked competitors you will already know what methods work because they’ve already been tried and proven to be true.

Hopefully these advantage will make you feel better, but there is still a lot of work to do so let’s get started.

1) Educate Yourself and Others Involved

Just like the big business moguls, you need to educate yourself and those that you work with regarding all of the SEO techniques that you will be using.

If you are using outside staff for IT and advertising, you will still need to schedule meetings with them to explain what it is you want done and, if need be, how you expect them to achieve this. Since you are their client, they should have no problem with meeting with you on a regular basis.

2) Set Your Goals

Website design doesn’t start on the computer; it starts with a pencil and and piece of paper. Start by deciding what your own online goals are. Your goals should mirror the ones that were set for the larger businesses but since you will be doing this without the help of a staff, you need to determine what your primary goals are and how you plan to achieve them.

Separate the short term goals from the long term ones and then map out a plan that will help you achieve each one, one at a time. It might take you a little longer but you know the old saying; the longest journey starts with a single step.

It might seem like trying to achieve all of this is just going to take too much time. To that I say time is going to pass anyway. Six months from now, you can be at a higher spot on the search engine results or you could be wishing you had started your SEO campaign 6 months previously. Go ahead and get started. You have little to lose and tons of profits to gain.

3) Start Small

Just like the big boys, you need to start small and begin at the beginning. If you don’t already have a website in place, you now have the knowledge required to design one or have it designed effectively.

If you do have a site in place, time to sit down with your pad and pen and start analyzing each section. Use what you’ve learned to dissect it and determine what stays and what goes.

Larger companies will have other staff members to analyze the site and brainstorm on ideas to improve it. If you are a smaller agency or run a one person office, the onus is on you to make sure that you have a user focused site. Look at it the same way you would if you were the one seeking information on real estate in your area.

Because you are a real estate professional, you may not really consider the same things that a layperson would when wanting information about real estate.

To help you with this, feel free to enlist the support of your friends and family members who are not in the business. Ask them to look at your site and give you an objective opinion on its efficiency.

If you already have content that includes articles, blogs and newsletters, ask them to read them and rate how well they answer their questions and hold their interests.

This advice can be better than what you paid for because your friends and family will be give you an honest assessment and since they are not professionals, they have a better idea of what a layperson is looking for in terms of information, so take full advantage of asking them for advice.

a) Budget Accordingly

One of your primary concerns is going to be your budget. While the larger companies may have a huge surplus of funds to use for their optimization efforts, the question is, do you?

You may be fortunate enough to have been careful with your money and have enough overflow to set aside a large amount to be used for SEO purposes.

If this is not the case then you need to pull out your calculator and start analyzing your available funds to determine how much you can afford to spend on the optimization of your website.

You are probably tired of hearing me say this but I have to say it again and it won’t be for the last time. SEO is a continuous process. That means that your budget needs to be a monthly one.

You might have a bit extra in the coffers this month that you can use to optimize your site effectively. Unfortunately, one month is not enough so you need to have a set amount that you can comfortably spend on the ongoing optimization of your site.

You may already have a webmaster that maintains your site and that’s a good thing since you will have already budgeted in his monthly service fee.

If you are going to need him to provide extra services to optimize your site then there may be additional fees involved so you need to set up a meeting to go over his new duties and find out how much more this will cost you.

If you are setting up a website from scratch, then you will need to shop around for a website hosting service. There are many of these companies and all will promise to provide the best service possible but as a sales professional you already know not to base your decision solely on the promise of another.

Now your on the other side of the fence, so shop around and make sure that the company you choose is reputable and is able to provide good customer service support.

Look for a host that provides 24 hour live service. Many sites will promise 24 hour support but that support might be in the form of annoying and usually unhelpful computerized advice.

You type in your question and the computer will return with a list of answers they think may help you. These companies have their own search engines and the spiders that seek out the answers may return with the wrong ones.

This costs you valuable time, especially if there is a problem with your website and you need it addressed ASAP. Having a live person listen to your questions and take steps to help you will be worth the few extra dollars a month that they may charge to host your site.

You will also need to budget for your email marketing campaign which will be discussed further in the next section.

b) Beef Up Your Email Marketing Campaign

Your long and short term goals are going to be the same as those of the larger businesses with a few additions. Because of your lack of staff, focusing on an email campaign is something that you should give strong attention to. Larger agencies have lots of agents, and with these agents come enough personal referrals that will keep the business afloat.

While instituting an email campaign is certainly advantageous for them, they have other irons in the fire and might not be able to direct a large portion of their attention to it. They may feel they have so many other clients that they look at an email marketing campaign as gravy. You, on the other hand may have much more time to focus on a campaign that can be extremely lucrative for you.

One of your first priorities is to make sure that you site has a way to capture email addresses and automatically respond to opt-in requests.
If your site lacks opt-in requests then make a note to have them added.

Another way that email marketing campaigns benefit small agencies is that since you have less agents to bring the business to you, this type of strategy lets the business come to you on its own.

Having people leave you with their email address gives you a potential goldmine of potential clients. It’s a lot easier to communicate with 50 people online through emails and newsletters than it is to physically seek them out using offline strategies.

c) Doing Things the “Write” Way

Now that you recognize how much an email marketing campaign can benefit you, your next consideration is the actual written opt-in content such as articles, blogs and newsletters. Larger businesses may have an advertising department to handle the writing but you may have to depend on yourself to get them done.

Make an honest assessment of your writing abilities. If you are not the type that is able to communicate effectively with the written word then you will need to go to outside sources to get the job done.

Luckily, there are many Internet ghost writing agencies that can handle this for you and the cost may be lower than you might expect.

There are plenty of starving writers out there that will bid on the job of writing your articles, newsletters and blogs. You just have to find them.

It’s easy to post an ad in one of the many freelance online writing sites. These sites post your advertisement and it’s seen by writers that are looking for work. Once such site is, http://www.elance.com.

Another is http://www.freelancewriting.com/ifreelance.php

These sites are viewed everyday. What you will need to do is set a budget for your monthly or weekly or daily requirements, post your ad and let the writers bid on you job.

Naturally you will post the content on your site as though it was written by you and no one will be the wiser. This way you can keep fresh content on your site and not have to worry about handling all of the writing yourself, which will be considerable. This will allow you the time to focus on responding to the emails that are left on your site thanks to your opt-in content.

d) Long Term Goal – Expansion

Keeping your expanding list of potential clients in mind, its time to consider how you will handle the sudden rise in inquiries and your ability to convert them into actual clientele.

The last thing you want to do is to have to answer 50 inquiries into real estate in your area and be so busy trying to turn them into clients that some of them end up sitting on the back burner or worse, go completely ignored.

It does not help you to have a dynamic site that reels them in and you are unable to handle them all. This will not only cause you lose viable leads, but can also hurt your reputation.

As you know referrals are all important in this business and you don’t want people to say, “Great website but he never got back to me.”

It’s human nature for a client to be quicker to talk about your negative aspects then your positive ones. You can do a great job for someone and while they may say thank you, it was their expectation that you would do such a bang-up job for them in the first place. This means that in their minds, you didn’t do anything extraordinary, you were just doing your job.

It doesn’t matter that you wrangled with the seller’s or buyer’s agent over carpet allowance or repair credits, stayed on top of the appraiser to submit his paperwork despite how busy he is and harassed the lender to make sure that the loan closed within the required deadline.

They don’t see you do all of that and even if they did, in their mind this is what they are paying you for and they are right. So while you might have sweated it out and burned the midnight oil, you were doing what you were supposed to do so what’s the big deal?

On the other hand, let’s say that despite your best efforts, the appraiser dropped the ball and took too long to submit the appraisal report, or the lender just couldn’t fit you into closing schedule on the day that you needed to.

Your clients, who are nervous enough may have taken the day off from work thinking that they were going to close that day, just to find out that they will have to come back tomorrow or the next day.

Who do you think is going to bear the brunt of their annoyance? The lender? The appraiser? Nope, the person whose phone is going to angrily ringing is yours.

Even worse, your ears will probably be ringing as well since these same clients that you slaved over will be venting to their friends and family and guess whose name will be at the forefront of their raving?

You got it, yours. Real estate can be a thankless business so you want to do everything you can to keep your reputation in tact and get these same people to refer you to their friends and family members.

That means its time to think about expansion. Now don’t read what I just wrote and start hiring agents in a panic. As previously stated several times throughout this book, SEO takes a bit of time so time is on your side.

However, you will need to have a contingency plan ready for when your business does get to the point of needing people to help you handle your growing list of prospects.

It might seem a bit early to start thinking about this but it is better for you to have your expansion plans in place, so that you won’t have to worry about it when the time to use them arrives.

You might be looking at your budget and start wondering how you will be able to afford a larger workspace or more employees. Not to worry. Initially, you may not have to rent out a larger work space.

Thanks to the Internet, many people now telecommute, working out of their own homes. All you would really need is to be able to provide a conference room or some area in your office where the agent would be able to sit down with their clients and discuss business in a professional environment.

Telecommuting is an especially viable solution as an alternative to losing money by renting extra space. Much of real estate transactions can be done over the phone and most written work can be accomplished on an agent or employees home computer. This way you can expand your business at little to no extra cost.

You might also consider hiring someone who will work on a commission basis determined by how many leads turn into to actual clients. This person would be responsible for answering emails, sending out newsletters and if possible, writing your blogs and articles. Another option would be to pay them a straight salary. It would all depend on the portion of your budget that you allotted for this purpose.

There are other cost cutting ways that will allow you to free up extra money to be used for your SEO purposes. Take the time to sit down and come up with the ones that will work best for you.

e) Keep organized

Hopefully by now your brain is in total SEO mode and the ideas are flowing on a continuous basis. When you embark on a journey into new territory, it’s easy to get so many ideas that by the end of the day you will have so many new ideas about all of the new aspects that you have been considering that your desk becomes a jumble of paperwork. It’s important to remain organized so that all those ideas will be effective.

1) Work On One Thing At A Time

Organize all of your thoughts, turn them into a comprehensive list and work on one at a time. This will help you to focus all of your energy on one concept thus allowing you to develop that idea more fully. This is far better than trying to multitask and end up not doing a complete job on any one item.

Consider the definition of the word, “optimize”. It means to “enhance the effectiveness of”. Your optimization efforts do not begin with your website, but with the ideas that are in your head and your ability to develop each one effectively.

Trying to do too many things at once may seem like a faster way to handle them but may actually not only cost you valuable time, but money as well because you may miss ways to effectively get more leads and as you know leads are the source of your income.

2) Map Out Your Progress

Once you start to put SEO theories into practice it is important to keep track of the progress that you are making. You will need to institute ways to keep track of your online conversions, separately from your offline ones.

Make sure that your site has a hit counter to help you with this purpose. This will help you to more easily determine what that percentage is.

Earlier in the book, I suggested using a telephone number on your site that is dedicated to your online viewers. This is to help you keep track of which of your conversions are coming from your offline sales and which are coming from your online ones.

In order to facilitate the process more successfully, talk to your office providers about instituting a way to capture the incoming online and offline phone numbers and to separate them on your bill. Many phone companies have introduced ways for businesses to save money on their business phone bills.

One such way allows a business to have two separate numbers by having one number forward to the main business line. The negative aspect of such a program is that all calls fall under the main phone number.

You may have to pay more to have a dedicated line that is separate from your regular office number but in the end it will be worth it. This way you will be able to accurately determine the percentage of both forms of conversion.

If you have hired someone to handle your email marketing campaign, whether they are paid on a commission or a straight salary, have them submit regular reports on a weekly or even daily basis.

You don’t want to wait until the end of the month to start sifting through reports. Hopefully your number of email leads have increased considerably but imagine having to review a month’s worth of progress all at once. You will have to dedicate much more time sifting through the paperwork and this could interfere with other things that you need to accomplish that day.

Reviewing this information a bit at a time will help you to give it your full attention and really analyze your progress. Its much better to review this information on a gradual basis, so that you won’t feel as pressured and stressed out.

3) Time Management

Another important part of SEO is your ability to manage time. Considering all you have learned in the proceeding chapters, you now recognize all the work that needs to be done and to truly be effective you will need to manage your time effectively.

Review your to do list and set aside regular time allotments for each task, each week. Yep, I’m saying it again. SEO is a continuous process so you will need to continuously find time to keep up with all of the techniques.

Initially you can start with an hour a day as you slowly increase the optimization of your website. This way you won’t inundate yourself with so much SEO work that the rest of your business suffers.

As your business grows and the leads begin to increase, you can then consider hiring someone to help you with your efforts and adjust your SEO time management system accordingly.

Metadata is a relatively simple term that’s a bit tricky to describe. You already know what data is, meaning information. In the computer world, metadata describes that information. Simply put its information about information.

Using an example from the literary world, let’s take a common word like duck and define it; a bird that is common to water. If this were to translate to metadata, duck would be the data and the definition would be metadata in that it describes the data.

Earlier we talked about the invisible text on your website that is seen by the search engines but now by the viewer. Metadata is what the invisible text consists of.

If you remember, search engine spiders are blind to JavaScript. When many business owners designed their websites, they designed it with the viewer in mind, including documents in the form of PDF files, PowerPoint and Excel.

These were formatted in non-HTML code because while it’s great that they designed a user focuses site, they did not design it for the search engine spiders to find.

Search engine spiders may not be readily able to see non-HTML code but they can read metadata descriptions. So if you include non-HTML coded content on your site then you have to go a step further and include descriptions of it so that the search engine spiders can read it and determine its relevance to the search.

In order to help the spiders, as well as yourself, you need to add what’s known as meta tags to your non-HTML coded content, which will explain to them what that content consists of.

A good example to use would be the keywords contained on your site. Let’s say that your keywords are Houses for Sale, Homes for Sale and Home Sales.

To let the search engines know what your keywords are without putting on your site, “ATTENTION SEARCH ENGINE SPIDERS: MY KEYWORDS ARE HOUSES FOR SALE, HOMES FOR SALE AND HOME SALES”. Instead, embedded in your source code where the human eyes can’t see it but the spiders can, will be written:”

Encoding it this way offers a description for the search engine spiders to read and make a note of the keywords that your page is about. Keep in mind that you still have to use these keywords heavily in your site so that the spiders will make note of their relevance to your site.

It’s important to note here that not all search engines still support metatags, still it can’t hurt to include them to garner the attention of the ones that still do.

Metatags should be used to in several important places. Because it would take another book to explain all of the intricacies of meta tag coding, you should consult with your IT person or website designer and have them code it correctly.

Meta tag descriptions should be used in the title of the page, the file name, large font text and at the very least the first 60 characters of text on any document.

By now you have a better understanding of the importance of keywords and the role that they play in SEO. Below this section are some sample keywords and phrases but as I said before, they are probably just a drop in the bucket once you really start thinking about them and writing them down.

You may end your SEO brainstorming session with so many words that you don’t know which ones to start with. That’s where keyword selector tools come in.

Keyword selector tools work in a number of ways. One way that they assist you is by listing the alternative keywords and ranking them by popularity. There are a number of keyword selector tools that are free for you to use.

• GoogleAdwords Keyword Tool
  This is an excellent SEO tool that costs nothing to use but provides you with valuable information. There are two main sections, Keyword Variations and Site Related Keywords. Under the Keyword Variations section, you can search by keywords only, or keyword popularity. The keyword popularity option will let you know how popular the keywords you chose are. This will give you an excellent basis upon which to select your keywords.The Site Related Keywords section is another valuable tool to use and once again it’s free. You can type in your web site’s URL and it will review your website and return with a suggested list of keywords that you should consider using.
• Yahoo!Search Marketing Keyword selector tool
  * No longer working.
  The Yahoo keyword selector tool is extremely slow to use, when it even works. I typed in Kentucky homes for sale and this was the result:

As you can see on the right hand side, the number of times this key phrase was searched for is indicated for the month of October, along with different variations that the phrase was searched under. It would be wise to check your keywords here on a monthly basis since, as you know, popularity of keywords will constantly fluctuate.

There are paid keyword selector tools such as WordTracker, but try the free ones first and see how they work out for you. You can always opt to use a paid service later.