Real estate agents are constantly in search of tips and advice on how to get their website to earn the top ten rankings in major search engines, such as widely known google.com and yahoo.com. Agents sometimes spend hundreds, if not thousands, consulting with web developers and “SEO Specialists” in regards to their personal website and how to earn more traffic. I’ll admit; at one point I was one of those guys.I learned a few things a while back that really stuck with me from various informational sites that had experienced users who had success with SEO or “Search Engine Optimization”. In this article I will share a few of those key points with you.
There are a couple major factors when working on your site to develop it for the web, or optimize it as some will call it. There are also shortcomings that can indirectly effect the income of your business.
It Takes Time and Money
Time and money isn’t something that we all can say we have in the real estate business early in our career. I want to stress to you that good search engine rankings take time; sometimes lots of it. I’ve read and experienced that a search engine such as google.com will take the age and domain registration length into consideration when determining it’s rankings. Therefore, we can conclude that even if you had a nice domain name, such as [Insert City]MLS.com, that doesn’t mean you’ll get to the top right away.
The early stages of web design and development aren’t always dollar productive since spending time on your real estate website doesn’t produce direct results right away. Usually that time could be more effectively used on vital activities, such as training and development and lead generation. You’ll find that the domain registration, hosting, and time actually spent developing content all equate to lost money in some form, whether it be through lost time or the actual tender of cash for product and services. Therefore I have come to the conclusion that unless you have cash reserves (at least 3-6 months worth), your time could probably be better spent elsewhere for now. Work on some dollar productive activities such as lead generation that can directly effect the commission you plan to receive.
The reason I make this statement is simple. I invested the first eight months of my real estate career building my site and earning practically minimum wage. A year and a half later, I can now see that it is now getting a great traffic (or visitors) and I receive a steady flow of leads. Would I have approached it a different way? Absolutely. I would have focused on prospecting, THEN when I had enough to last a while, spend time on my site. Those first eight months were torture on my personal finances. Building sites can be consuming, especially if you’re a perfectionist such as myself.
Moving forward, let’s say you have the reserves or perhaps you don’t agree with the previous suggestion. I’m alright with that; it’s your business! That’s the beauty of our industry. You can decide what deserves your attention and what doesn’t at any given time.
Our next step should be considered during the planning phases of your real estate website.
What Makes For Good SEO
There are three key factors I consider when optimizing my site for the web. I consider keyword density, content, and most importantly, quality inbound links.
The key word density is also considered and usually goes hand in hand with your content. The content of your site must be filled with key words that are relevant to the theme of your site, such as “real estate” or “listings”. Why else would someone searching for your site pull up yours? You must have some form of indication that what you have on your web page is relevant to the user’s search query. I suggest a value from 6-10% of how many times your target keywords should appear in the article amongst other words. I will research this in more detail so that perhaps I share more insights with you.
The content on your site has to be of good quality, and continually updated. When I say quality I am referring to articles that really mean something to your readers and visitors. Talk about foreclosures, the market, anything real estate related. I suggest you just keep it current and informative so that your readers have a reason for coming back to you. If someone bookmarks your site, you’ve hit the nail on the head.
The last item of importance is quality inbound links. Other sites need to feel that yours is important as well. I do not mean to past your URL (or link to your site) everywhere you go online; the site referring traffic to you must have some form of relevance. A site about the maintenance of dogs referring to you will probably do little to affect your rankings in Google. However, your link on a site that already is held in high regard in the real estate industry such as inman.com would certainly help boost your rankings. The key is figuring out how to get your link there. Inman.com is a real estate news portal so perhaps you could write a fantastic article for buyers about buying homes and they would pick it up and link to you. Who knows?
Conclusion
As you can see, there’s quite a bit of information to be absorbed when thinking of building a site, and optimizing for the web. Be sure you are ready to take on this major project before embarking on the endeavor. Doing so without thinking of how time should be spent in advance could lead to you making irrational decisions on the use of your time, and your business could temporarily suffer. Learn from my mistake and make sure you do have the cash reserves before you decide to take on this animal yourself.
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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.
One of the tools I have that I see very agents under-utilizing is the 
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