Real Estate Internet Marketing - 5 Steps to Search Engine Success
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by Brandon Cornett
Spend some time in a real estate Internet marketing forum, and you'll quickly realize what a hot topic search engines have become.
Every agent wants his or her real estate website to rank well in the search engines.
But with so much information out there (and worse, misinformation), the road to success can be hard to follow. The following tips will help you navigate.
Real Estate Internet Marketing — Five Steps to Search Engine Success:
Step 1 - Research and Choose Your Key Phrases
The first (and most important) step to search engine optimization is to determine your key phrases. By key phrases, I mean those words and phrases your prospects would use to find the services you provide. For example, if you're a real estate agent in Austin, Texas, one of your key phrases might be "Austin, Texas real estate."
Don't guess at your key phrases. Research them. Use the tools available to find out how many people are searching which phrases. Overture (a Yahoo company) has a key-phrase research tool you can use for free. It's located at http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/.
To learn about key phrases in even more detail, you can sign up with WordTracker.com. It's not free like the Overture tool, but it's more thorough. WordTracker will give you information from all of the major search engines.
Step 2 - Evaluate Your Website
Now we will step ever-so-briefly into the technical weeds of website development. Even if you don't fully understand the following information, you'll benefit from it. If you hire a web developer, for example, you'll be able to speak intelligently about your search engine aspirations.
A real estate website with clean, well-structured HTML (web code) will have greater search engine visibility than a site with complex, poorly structured HTML code.
Search engines like Google will rank your website on its content (among other factors). The more complicated your website's HTML code, the harder it will be for search engines to find what they want ... your content.
If you bury your website's content under mounds of Javascript, table tags and graphics — or if you hide it behind dynamically generated URLs — you'll greatly reduce your SEO success. And in so doing, you'll reduce your Internet marketing success in general.
You can avoid these things by hiring a professional designer, and telling him or her you want a properly built website that's primed for SEO.
Step 3 - Create Quality Content (And Plenty of It)
Search engines love content. Content helps the search engines figure out what your website is all about. And they have to know what your website is about in order to list it under relevant searches.
Revisit your list of key phrases from Step 1. Find ways to interweave those phrases -- in a natural way -- throughout your content.
One way to achieve this is to add article pages to your website. An article of 300 500 words will allow you to integrate your key phrases in a natural way. Good for search engines, and good for your readers!
Step 4 - Obtain Inbound Links from Quality Websites
Search engines also evaluate your website based on the number (and quality) of inbound links. Inbound links are hyperlinks on other websites that link to yours.
When it comes to inbound links, quality matters more than quantity. In other words, it's better to have a handful of inbound links from quality, well-ranked sites than 100 "starter" sites with low ranking. Relevance plays a big part as well. Inbound links from relevant websites (similar in theme and content to your own) will help you more than links from irrelevant websites.
You can gain inbound links in several ways. In my opinion, publishing articles online is the best way to go about it. "Article marketing," as it's known, deserves a discussion all to itself. Just know it can help you increase the number of quality sites that link to yours.
Write Your Way to Search Engine Success
Want to learn more about article marketing? Want to publish your way to higher search engine ranking? Check out The Agent's Guide to Article Marketing.
Step 5 - Be Patient and Persistent
Search engine optimization takes time. People who say they can get your website on page one of Google overnight are either (A) lying to you, or (B) trying to sell you something that will do you more harm than good.
A solid SEO program takes time, patience and persistence. But you can take heart in the fact that once you achieve good search engine ranking, you'll be able to maintain it for quite some time. Of course, it helps to make SEO a permanent part of your overall marketing efforts.
Conclusion
A real estate Internet marketing program is only complete when it brings search engine optimization into the fold. The five steps above will help you improve your search engine ranking, and thus improve your Internet marketing program as a whole.
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