10 ways Realtors® can increase search engine visibility

Developing a strong online presence can be one of the best ways for a Realtor® to be found by more home sellers and buyers.

For a real estate professional to be found online, they need a strong search engine optimization or “SEO.”

Even though there are numerous search engines available on the Internet, Google is among the top sites for search rankings.

Here are several tips from Google for a better SEO ranking:

1. Create content that isn’t time sensitive. Put good quality content on your website that won’t go out-of-date in a few weeks or months. By making the content you use useful now and in the future you won’t need to remove it and replace it over and over again – you can simply add to it on a regular basis.

2. Think about your customer’s needs. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think about the actual words they may type into the search box in order to find your website. Then check how popular these words are with an SEO keyword tool, such as the free one supplied by Google. One of the quickest and easiest ways to achieve good SEO is with good keyword selection. Then all you need to do is include your SEO keywords in your website content.

3. Do some guest blogging. Google loves links so the more quality websites you can create guest blog posts for the better your SEO campaign will be. Make sure that the guest blogs all link back to your website and that they are relevant to the subject of your website.

4. Links links and more links. As the above tip points out Google loves links – but only when the links are genuine and they link to and from other authoritative sites. You run the risk of blacklisting your website and ruining a good SEO campaign by either purchasing links or blogging on unrelated sites and linking back to your site. There are loads of other SEO techniques available so don’t go down this route.

5. Create an informative video. Informational videos with back links to your website are another great SEO tool. Businesses can make a short video explaining what they do, who they are etc. while vendors can demonstrate their products if appropriate. If you can, distribute your video over multiple platforms then watch as your Google rank increases.

6. Update your website on a daily basis. If you can add content to your website on a daily or bi-daily basis, Google and the other big search engines start to recognize your site as an authority in its niche. By changing your choice of SEO keywords on a regular basis as well you will begin to rank highly for a good selection of keywords and eventually the majority of keywords related to your site’s topic (or your business) will get your website noticed and ranked among the leading sites.

7. Concentrate on your article titles. A simple SEO tip that many people forget, revolves around the wording of their content or article titles. A lot of search engine spiders/bots initially read the first few lines of a webpage to determine the topic of the content. If you can include your top-ranking keywords in the title of whatever you’re writing, it will help your site’s SEO no end.

8. Avoid flash-based websites. Flash websites look lovely and stylish and expensive, but they don’t sit well with Google or your SEO efforts. It takes a number of sophisticated tricks to make Google notice Flash websites and so it makes more sense to use another platform, if you want to improve your rankings.

9. Use article submission sites. Article submission sites are a great SEO tool as they distribute a single article written by you to hundreds of article directories with the aim of getting it published and noticed. The articles you submit can be published for free but any websites that choose to publish it have to include your bio and a link back to your website. Most article submission sites do charge for the service, but they can cut months off your SEO campaign.

10. Hire a professional SEO agency. The nine SEO tips mentioned above are quite simple to put into place but they take time, effort and patience. Not everyone has an abundance of these qualities so it may be worth hiring a professional SEO agency to do the work for you. Of course this will cost you money but if it gets your business website onto page 1 of Google within a few weeks it’s definitely a price worth paying.