Getting ranked on google

[Kessie]

I help run a small real estate site in ireland www.aplacetorent.ie and Im in charge of seo. I have read lots of books over the last year or so and while they offer lots of advice some of them dont actually show you what to do. I have joined distilled and I think its the best thing i have done  in the last few weeks and am learning a lot but if anyone has any advice i would be very grateful. Thank you

[skehoe]

When you have competitiors that are a more well known and have a bigger budget than you..... you just need to come up with alternative keywords that are less competitive.

Think synonyms.  By targeting a small niche you will get a better result than trying to compete for more competitive terms that your competitors already dominate.

Would also suggest releasing some positive PR.  A newsworthy press release, eg. about a specific area/suburb that you have listings in will get you a good ranking in Google and link people back to your site.

There are a lot of newswires out there but I find Ireland to be a tough market in general so rather than starting with the 'big/expensive' newswires I would test how much coverage you get with these....

Free Distribution   http://www.irishpressreleases.ie

Paid Distribution   http://www.24-7pressrelease.com

[Debdulal]

i must say sorry if my comment hurts you anyway . you are doing great .. just follow the tips and you will be Okay

[Kessie]

Will try the keywords and sitemap thank you but Idont  think I have much of a chance with those other companies as they are owned by the bigest real estate site in ireland. Thank again

[Kessie]

I have no experience in seo so its hit and miss sorry but i value your comments and am going to carry them out. I have to do everything as there is nobody else to do it at the moment as the site does not make any money.

[JHSpecialty]

1. Be sure your Meta titles and descriptions are unique, add value to the user and the grammar & spelling are correct.

2. Be sure your content flows and the keyword density is under 3% as a guideline. Use synonyms.

3. Remove keyword Meta tags. The only thing it is good for is letting your competitors know what keywords you are targeting.

4. Set up Google Analytics / Web tools.

5. Use Inner linking throughout your pages.

6. Set-up Sitemap & Robots.txt

7. Videos and Alt tags for images.

Follow these steps and you will climb the ranking in no time.

[Debdulal]

1. Redirect all non www version of the web page to with www versions

http://aplacetorent.ie/ should be redirected to http://www.aplacetorent.ie/

2. Set up canonical
http://www.aplacetorent.ie/index.asp
http://www.aplacetorent.ie/

Both pages bear the same content. Set this URL as canonical - http://www.aplacetorent.ie/ to fix internal duplicate.

3. Remove meta keywords

This tag does not make any sense. Remove them from the website.

4. Writer proper meta description

This is what the home page of the website has got. Make it description. This is what Google shows in the SERP.

5. Logo and website URLs are  different

6. Robots.txt file is missing

7. Custom 404 Error page is missing

8. Duplicate content in property listing pages

9. Most pages do not have any title

Last thing – are you serious that you are optimizing this website?

[skehoe]

SEO 101

The first thing to do once you have built the website is submit a sitemap to Google.

If you are using Wordpress or similar there are a lot of free plugin's you could use to do this automatically for you. It important to have a sitemap so that search engines can navigate your website effectively and index each page.

Or the old fashioned way is to google 'submitting URL to google' and copy and pasting each URL.  (not the best way but still can work).

To check which pages are indexed try site:http://www.aplacetorent.ie

Once google knows you exist you need to ensure you are targeting the right keywords for your market.

You can use http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/keyword-density-tool.html to check the keyword density for your on-page SEO. And then ensure your are using the same or similar keywords as the anchor text for inbound links to the site.

Next, ensure all of your social media sites are integrated into the website.  Search engines are placing more and more importance on social presence so definitely get on top of that.

I work with a few clients in Ireland and find Google loves adverts.ie and boards.ie so see if you can use their services in anyway to assist with your link building efforts.

Hope this gives you something to start with