4 Simple Tips For Great Search Engine Optimization

"Search engine marketing and search engine optimization are critically important to online businesses. You can spend every penny you have on a website, but it will all be for nothing if nobody knows your site is there." - Marc Ostrofsky, Internet Entrepreneur

Good marketing is essential for producing a steady stream of leads. Whether you're a hard money lender or a wholesaler, a website is a great way to have potential clients find, learn about, and hopefully contact you. Like the quote above, if no one knows your site exists, there is no point in continuing to dump time, energy, and money into it. Here are 4 easy-to-implement tips for improving your search engine ranking.

1. Optimize your site for Google's algorithm

In January the research firm StatCounter reported that Google's market share of overall searches performed by consumers reached 74.8%. The other two major search engine companies,  Bing and Yahoo!, came in at 12.4% and 10.9% respectively. If you are successful in optimizing your website and webpages to Google standards, your site will show up in nearly 75% of all searches for that particular subject matter. 

I'll cover the ways you can optimize better for Google in more detail in later posts. Nonetheless, the following 3 points will help as well.

2. Create a site map

A site map is a page that contains links to every page, or at least every subpage, contained on your website. BiggerPockets has so many pages, it would be nearly impossible to make a site map containing all of them. But, smaller sites that have, say, 50 pages, benefit from displaying each page in the site map. Here is a very helpful link to Google's instructions on how to create a sitemap: Google Sitemap Instructions

3. Include different types of content on each page

Google's robots love diversified content. What is diversified content, you might ask? Different file types that accompany your regular written content. So, you might want to include a PDF of your rates if you are a hard money lender, or up to 6 JPEGs of a recent project you completed if you are flipper. You can also imbed Youtube videos into webpages. 

Another thing to consider is the number of written words each page contains. Some Google experts recommend putting as much content on a single page as possible. You might have success doing that, but there is a better way that I'll address in a later post related to building subpages. I have a had great results in boosting search engine result page (SERP) ranking by limiting informational pages to somewhere between 500 and 600 words. To briefly address this, Google's goal in delivering search results is to provide their customer (the person searching for information) with the highest quality content. Google measures this several ways, but two stand out as the most important: bounce rate and duration. Google views high bounce rates (85% and higher) and page visits short in duration (less than 30 seconds) as indicators of poor quality content. Improving these two factors will dramatically increase your SERP ranking. Read more by searching "Google Analytics".

4. Use the most searched keywords in your writing, videos, and subpage URLs

This seems like a no-brainer, but it can easily be done wrong. Most importantly, be sure to write content that is conversational, but not too casual (leave the "dudes" and "gnarlies" for the beach). Trying to glean information from a heavily-keyworded web page is nearly impossible and potential business partners hate it. Make sure your writing comes off as natural. Here's an example of what not to do: "Hard money lenders in California provide hard money loans to people in need of hard money loans." Yes, there are websites out there with that type of content. Can you imagine trying to read through 500 words of that? Recall, your goal is to keep your readers attention by providing them with the information they are searching for. 

The most effective way to find exactly what words are being searched is through Google Adwords keyword research tool. Google will require you to register an account, but the tool can be used absolutely free of charge. There are innumerable article online giving precise instructions on how to use the tool. Essentially, you'll be looking for search terms that are 1, 2, 3, and even up to 5 words in length. You will need to type them into the field manually, or you can access lists of terms that other people have compiled for use with actual pay-per-click ads in Google's search results. Click submit, and Google provides you with a bar chart of search totals per month for the geographic area you selected dating back one year.