real estate SEO for beginners

The world of real estate is going through dramatic changes and I am not talking about the current market upheavals caused by the shift from a seller’s market to a buyer’s market.

Regardless of the price level, there will always be buying and selling of homes. But the way people search for and find homes is in the midst of a dramatic change. The Internet is the great equalizer but also the great differentiator.

People searching online don’t know about your achievements, they are all the same at first. If your website doesn’t offer the design and services that people appreciate, they won’t stick around long enough to find out. This is where you can differentiate yourself.

But design and functionality are a secondary issue to the problem of how to be found in the first place. Use the analogy of websites being online business cards. New business cards are not deposited at the top of the stack, but at the bottom. Customers are picking business cards from the top of the pile. SEO or search engine optimization deals with efforts to move business cards higher in the stack so that customers can find one’s site through popular search engines.

So you have a new website. So, you basically just printed your business cards, but no one knows how to find them. Or even more dramatic, you don’t even know if someone is collecting your business cards and you still don’t know if your business cards are in the big pile.

I would define SEO as efforts to deliberately move the website so that it ranks higher on the results page in response to a search query on a variety of search engines.

But there are thousands of search engines out there. TRUE. But all but 3 are irrelevant to your optimization efforts. Google, Yahoo, and MSN control about 98% of all Internet searches. Focus on the big three search engines and the rest will take care of itself.

What is there to optimize? The goal is to be found by people searching for things you offer on your website. When people search, they search verbatim by querying a search term or phrase. In order for you to optimize your site, you first need to understand what keywords or key phrases you want to be found for. Since I practice real estate in Aspen, Colorado, the appropriate search term might be “Aspen Real Estate.”

Be sure to repeat your keywords and phrases on your home page. Turn the most important key phrase into a headline and write it in bold.

It is important to understand that search engines are automated computer systems programmed by humans to evaluate web content without human interference. This means that the search results are based on what is called a computer algorithm. This is basically a set of instructions for the computer on how to evaluate certain criteria and translate the results into a sequence of importance. The most important website first, the least important website last.

The art and science of search engine optimization is trying to understand what the search engines are looking for in a good site and then giving the search engine exactly that. Google’s search engine algorithm probably looks at hundreds of different criteria. It’s so complex that even Google engineers don’t know the whole picture. Well, you might say, how come none of the Google employees know what to do?

Basically you know the most important fundamentals of what makes a good website. Google, for example, uses a proprietary mathematical concept they call “Page Rank” at the root of their systems. Links look like votes. The more links point to a website, the more important that website should be. The more important the website that votes for another website, the more weight that vote carries.

So try to get people to link to your website. It’s important to know that links from websites that have the same theme as your website seem to be more important than links from websites that don’t fit the theme. Links from other real estate related websites are more important to my website than links from websites promoting toys.

Search engines like content-rich websites. The more pages with useful content, the better. Blogs are a great way to accumulate great content on a topic over a period of time. This is the most important since search engines like the website have new content regularly.

DMOZ.org is a human-compiled directory of websites. Please read their instructions carefully and submit your website to a relevant category. Yahoo and Google use this directory and it helps to get listed.

Generate a sitemap and place the xml file on your web server. A sitemap is basically a long list containing all your web pages in a format readable by the computer programs used by search engines to navigate the web. These programs are called “bots” or “spiders.” This will help search engines to find all the pages of your website. Remember, the more web pages the search engine knows about, the better for you.

Search engines cannot read certain content. Graphic content is one of those things. If your site consists primarily of images, the search engine will not understand what your site is about and therefore will not offer it as a search result. Make sure your site is text rich.

The Real Estate website may have pages for the different subdivisions in the service area. Write a blog about the property of the week. It includes a “Frequently Asked Questions” section. Write about yourself and give people a biography of you. Explain the buying and selling process. Offer sales statistics. The list goes on.

Get a program like “Advanced Web Ranking” to search search engines for search results that contain your keywords. Optimization is fun when you start to see results. But manually searching for your website in search results takes a lot of work, and it’s a good job for an automated program.

Read web forums and a couple of books on SEO once you’ve gotten over the basics. The field is constantly evolving and there is more to learn.