We’ve talked before about what Search Engine Optimization is and why it is important to your real estate business.  Now it’s time to delve a little deeper into the subject.  Let’s think of some ways to improve SEO and drive more traffic to your site.

Just by way of reminder, SEO is the way we get our website to appear at the top of the search engine results pages without buying the space.  Top ranking is important because most web surfers are going to take the time to examine all 4700 pages of results.  They’ll most like choose one of the top 10 ranked sites appearing on the first page of results.  You want them to come to your site first, be very impressed and become your newest client.

This process used by the search engines is complex and they are very tight-lipped about their ranking processes.  There are professionals available to manage this aspect of your site and hiring one would not be ill-advised.  After all, you still want to leave enough hours in the day to show and sell homes.  As an agent you can only spend so much time up to your elbows in your website.  There are some steps you can take yourself to get your site noticed by clients and engines alike.

Keywords

Know your keywords.  Even if you hire a company to do your SEO, you will still need to provide keywords and phrases for them to incorporate.  Your current clients are a great source of information for keywords.  Ask them if they looked on-line for agents (chances are they did) and ask what they typed into their Google toolbar that led them to you.  Find ways to incorporate these terms naturally into your website.  Blogs and FAQ pages are a good place to start weaving these important phrases into your text.

Participate in the Community

It’s always good practice to be an involved member of your community.  In this case, we’re talking about the on-line community.  Have you seen the comments section at the end of someone’s blog or article?  Most have a line for your web address and name as well as the body of the comment.  Every time you post your site’s address, you create something called a backlink to your site.  When someone posts a comment to your site, it creates another backlink from your site to theirs.  Search engines take relevant links into consideration when ranking your page.  It pays to be an active, intelligent participant in on-line discussions.

Put some thought toward your keyword and get active on-line.  With time, you’ll reap the rewards with improved rankings.