By Glenn Houck
RISMEDIA, April 16, 2008-The equivalent to a homerun on the Internet for a broker is to dominate their market in the natural (free) search results. I talk to many market- leading brokers, who can’t understand how non-brokers are beating them in the free Google results, and capturing profitable clients without paying for Pay Per Click traffic.
To succeed at SEO, you need to cover the 4 Bases of SEO.
First Base: Target the right keywords. Real estate SEO is very competitive, so you must target a set of keywords where you have a chance or ranking in the top 20 positions. Focus on search terms that are specific to your business, such as city/neighborhood names in your service area, and your specialties such as “luxury homes” or “golf homes.”
Second Base: Unique, relevant content. Your website must have good content that is unique (not copied from other sites) and relevant to your business. At a minimum, you should have 20-30 pages on your website that give information on real estate, your service area and your business. Be sure these Web pages contain your target keywords in the body text, and also put the most important keywords in the HTML tag.
Third Base: Good website structure. This is one area that many neglect and then wonder why their Web pages are never found in search engines. Each page on your website must contain text in HTML, and be reached by following HTML links (usually those blue underlined text links). If your website uses technologies such as Flash, JavaScript or redirects for navigation or content, the search engines may not be able to find your pages or read your content.
Home Plate: Link popularity. Search engines count each link to your website as a vote of popularity. The more “inbound” links you have, the higher your site will rank. Good content and services will attract inbound links, so focus first on building a good website. Other things you can do are to ask your business partners and associates to link to your site, submit your site to Web directories and include a link to your site in online press releases and blog posts.
By covering the four SEO bases, you can compete in SEO-and a great SEO consulting company can pay for themselves several times over-especially for larger brokers.
Glenn Houck is co-founder of LeadQual, LLC, a leading provider of Lead Qualification and Live Transfer Leads. LeadQual also provides Paid Search (CPC) Management and SEO Consulting for large brokers.
For more information, visit www.LeadQual.com/RealEstate.
