Technology For Agents

As a real estate agent, search engine marketing should be on the forefront of your mind.  With each year that passes, more and more consumers are using the internet to begin their search for a home.   Most of these consumers are well informed buyers; looking to initially begin by viewing homes for sale.

If you’re looking to put yourself in front of these web surfers, you will eventually begin to consider search engine marketing within your lead generation strategy.

In this series of posts, I will share my knowledge of search engine marketing with you over the course of a few weeks; each post will get more and more detailed and precise.
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After doing some research today, it looks like Trulia is on the rise in the search engine rankings in the Houston real estate market. Houston is the 4th largest city in the United States, and the largest in Texas; it’s a gorilla of real estate markets in my opinion.

Trulia ranking well doesn’t surprise me. Their site is well optimized to rank well in search engines, and their site is truly innovative in the tools it provides to real estate consumers.

However, what does surprise me is that real estate agents in Houston are actually helping Trulia rank better than them. Why? It could be a for a couple of reasons:

• They don’t really care about rankings, and are perfectly fine with intentionally doing this.
• They are uninformed.

I seem to feel that it’s more a matter of the agents being uninformed than them not really caring.

It Gets Worse

What I find in common with many of these agent sites is that they are all from one provider. Number1Expert is a firm that builds real estate sites for agents, and for a fee, the agents can use them to procure business in the form of real estate leads.

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Do you like helping your competition when it comes to search engine optimization? I personally don’t like to.

However, it seems that many uninformed agents looking to increase the nifty features of their website are inherently harming their chances of doing well in search engine rankings.

How is this so? Eric Bramlett, Austin Real Estate Broker has brought it to my attention that the widgets that Trulia offers also include a keyword targeted link back to their site, which intentionally helps improve their search engine rankings.

Why do many agents still use the widgets? I believe that it’s simply them being uninformed about the real intentions of the widget feature. That is why I’ve decided to increase awareness by posting about this here at TechForAgents.com.

Trulia is truly kicking butt in the SERPs (for big time terms, and for long tails) because they’ve cooked up some solid linkbait in the form of widgets.

If you are currently using their widgets on your site, I would either:

• Discontinue the use of the widgets all-together.
• Take Eric’s advice, and modify the script to use the widgets without hurting your search engine rankings. You can see an example of this modification by following the source link below.

Source

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One of the tools I have that I see very agents under-utilizing is the Google Alerts tool. It’s a very simple tool to use; enter your search criteria, do some minor configuration on frequency of updates, and submit your email address. Voila! You have real-time updates to Google’s index.

How I Use This Tool

The search query I use the most is “site:www.sitename.com”. What this will allow you to see is when pages of your site get indexed by Google. You are then given the opportunity to re-visit the page, remind yourself what keywords you were targeting for, and check their ranking in Google. You can automate this process by using this handy keyword analysis tool at McDar.net.

You can also use the Google Alerts tool to notify you of when new topics are indexed regarding specific keywords that you are looking to gain rankings in. The most common use would be “area real estate”, where you would replace “area” with your market location. This will allow you to see when new blogs, news articles and even competitors get their sites indexed by Google for the various keywords that you’ve chosen to go after.

If you are currently using Google Alerts, what nifty ways are you using them to better your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts?

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