Developing Top Ranking Web Pages for Real Estate Marketing

Many real estate agents wonder about the point of blogging or posting quality content on the web. Beyond appealing to potential clients, the simple fact is that search engines use links to help evaluate the importance of your web pages and links help to determine crawl frequency and indexation of individual pages.

Search engines do not index every page available on the web instantly, and in some cases, pages may never be indexed. The point of indexation on the web is so that your website content may be used in the search engine results pages when home buyers perform searches for real estate. It takes time and “relationship building” by creating links for the engines to crawl and index many pages of your site.

The search engines have trillions of pages in their index, so to they must consider only the most authoritative web pages as potential candidates for a search engine results return. If your web pages have no authority (no inbound links) you are not even in the game. Furthermore, if your real estate website’s architecture and optimization are not structured so that search engines can make sense of the content or are blocked by sign in requirements or other walls that inhibit the search engine “bots” from crawling all of your pages, you have an uphill battle for getting visibility on the web (that means traffic)!

Links that use relevant anchor text (linking text) are very valuable to help define the content on your pages so when you blog, be sure to use variations of your keywords for which your site is optimized within your post and turn those words into a hyperlink that points back to specific pages on your site. Quick links are usually not worth the effort, so keep this in mind when someone solicits you to buy a program where you can get a 100 links for cheap. Quality links, built over time and from real estate relevant resources are the most valuable.

A lot of clients ask me about the importance of Social Media links. The pure SEO value of social media links is hard to analyze, but even if they are “no follow” links, that doesn’t mean that the search engines ignore them, in fact, most SEO’s have strong reason to believe that it’s quite to the contrary. The level of involvement in social media (make sure your profile(s) have a link to your primary website) is very likely one of the metrics used to evaluate and award placement to web pages. The value of engaging colleagues and potential clients through social media is of course, priceless.

Get involved in conversations online. Offer something of value when you’re participating in conversations such as blog commenting or responding to posts on your Facebook Business Page. Putting hardly any thought or time into it will likely result in very little return. People remember things that are memorable….stating “nice post” or “thanks for sharing” isn’t going to get you remembered or keep the conversation going.

An important concept to understand about Internet visibility and real estate marketing success on the web is that it doesn’t happen by luck or chance; it comes about through strategy and sweat equity. Engaging potential customers online can be as simple as sharing your knowledge on a particular subject. Develop trust as an authority over time through your social media profiles and blogging and you can truly leverage your efforts in online marketing.