Rather than write yet another article preaching about how to do well at search engine optimization (you are probably all sick of these because you see them all over the internet!), I thought  it might be more interesting for you to  read a post about how to FAIL at SEO.

Too many real estate agents think they are doing well at search engine optimization, but chances are they are failing, or at least not fixing mistakes they are making.

Ready to see if you are failing miserably at SEO too? Here’s the list…

1. You have a bad URL. A URL is one of the first things you buy, and it’s often where people make an immediate SEO mistake. If your URL doesn’t have your target selling areas in it, or to a lesser extent, your own name, then you already have started off poorly in terms of SEO. This is because search engines give high priority to websites with good relevant URLs. So check yours - if it’s irrelevant, consider buying a more relevant domain name!

2. Make poor use or choice of target market keywords. So, let’s say you target West Palm Beach. Are those keywords used pretty often on your homepage and interior pages? One of the simplest ways to fail at SEO is failing to integrate these into your content as much as possible (you don’t want to make it look like spam though). And think niche for keywords too. Obviously if you are trying to get good search engine results you are going to have a harder time with ‘homes for sale’ than ‘West Palm Beach Condo Listings’. Search engines have always used this concept to rank pages in search engine results.

3: Have a bad title for your website. This is similar to the URL - if you don’t have relevant keywords in your website title, then you are failing at SEO. And this is a pretty simple fix - surprisingly many people still fail at this. Go ahead, check your website title right now.

4: You don’t understand the importance of link popularity and page rank. And no I don’t mean link exchange here. If you don’t have high page rank and great link popularity (Google’s major method of ranking websites), or don’t even understand this concept, then you are failing in the biggest way. Google puts a VERY HIGH emphasis on this. For an example, type in ‘click here’ in Google. What’s the first result you see? Adobe Reader. Not one mention of ‘click here’ on the page, or on the source code. Why? It’s purely because there are literally tens of thousands of websites linking to that page by using the term ‘click here to get adobe reader’. Hopefully that should help you really understand how important offsite linking  and link popularity is.  Bottom line - if you don’t have quality, relevant websites linking to you, then you are going to pretty much fail at SEO.

5: You think you can do SEO well by yourself. SEO is confusing, and it changes a lot, so it’s hard to understand and keep up with. Yes, you can probably fix the basic, less important SEO problems by yourself. But unless you use an SEO company who are experts (we offer these SEO services), especially to build your link popularity and page rank, then you are likely to fail at excelling in search engine optimization.  And we all know how important great search engine results are when it comes to getting good quality traffic!

And one last bonus way to fail. By choosing an SEO firm that offers a guarantee! Why is that a mistake? Because there really is no guarantee when it comes to where your website will list in search engines, and for how long. In particular, Google changes their search algorithm all the time, so you may not keep your good position for long.   Any company that guarantees placement is probably using blackhat techniques that might get you a good ranking for the short-term, but once the search engines catch you, you run the risk of being banned completely!

As per usual, feel free to comment on this article below!

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