By Matthew Ferrara

With more and more consumers starting their home search on the Web, search engine optimization (SEO) should be at the top of every broker’s mind. Vast amounts of traffic start at Yahoo, Google and other primary portals. Presented with a seemingly bottomless list of Web sites, consumers will habitually check the first or second page of results only. Climbing higher, therefore, into the top 20 results is critical for any Web site or online business.

At the same time, the search engines have changed the rules of the game – for free and pay optimization – so that SEO has become both a financial and content challenge. So how do real estate brokers, most with a limited online marketing budget, have any hope of climbing higher in the ranks?

Trading Links

For starters, companies must have a “networked” approach to their Web sites; they should continually swap links with other sites of relevant or supporting content. The main reason for this isn’t that links per se make search engines think the site is more relevant to a particular search. Rather, it is a simple strategy to get more traffic from outside of the search-engine-first traffic.

For little cost, this approach shares potential new customers, and the increased visitor traffic influences the algorithms that the search engines use to “weigh” the quality and relevance of sites to be considered as top results in a search.

When exchanging links with other sites, don’t just make a single list of “recommended” links, either; it’s far more effective to distribute relevant links throughout your site, so that every page becomes a connection point or landing page, to and from other Web sites. The linking strategy makes your Web site broadly interconnected in the Web, not just intensively connected to other sites from one directory-styled page.

After improving your general traffic, the next step is to improve your relevancy to organic searches that are conducted by consumers. To climb in the ranks, your site must have content that directly matches the search terms used by your potential consumers. If a consumer is searching for “homes in Chicago” then your site needs to have “homes” and “Chicago” frequently appearing throughout the site to be more relevant than other sites that are simply “homes” in “Illinois.”

Ironically, most real estate listing inventory does not contribute to content relevancy, because search engines don’t index your database. So they don’t see the addresses and cities or even property descriptions of your inventory as relevant to your content. Yet they do look at and index every other word and image on your site. And that’s where your opportunity exists to create content-driven relevancy.

Blogging

A cost-effective and easy way to improve relevancy through content is to add a blog to your site. Blogging is essentially writing “mini articles” that you post to your site in journal format. At least a few times a week, you can post ideas, articles, short tips, industry news and other content that contains the words and phrases you believe your potential consumers might use when searching online.

If you think your consumers start looking for real estate by typing “homes in Chicago,” then post blog entries that use that phrase frequently in normal sentences in an article.

Don’t just put “homes in Chicago” all over your site (or in tiny letters in white fonts on your pages), because SEO systems disqualify “word farming” approaches. However, you can write short, frequent entries on your blog that reference key words and phrases that can trigger your site as a closer match than other sites when consumers conduct a search.

It is important to think like the consumer, too. Don’t post entries that feature a lot of industry jargon, such as MLS or PMI. Many first-time buyers search with simpler terms, such as “list of homes” or “what is mortgage insurance.” In fact, a good approach to blogging is to think of the common, everyday questions you are asked by consumers you already work with, and use this to develop a topic list for your ongoing blog releases.

Keeping blog language straightforward and simple will improve the likelihood you’ll achieve a match – and rank higher – when ordinary consumers ask Google and Yahoo for help.

Of course, blogging itself creates a new standard for relevancy, and higher ranking, in search engines: frequency. Once you start competing for ranking based upon your blog entries, a second standard of ranking will be applied to your site: freshness.

Even if you have a substantial number of entries with frequent use of relevant terms, if the entries are old or rarely added, your site may lose rank compared to very similar sites whose content is updated weekly, daily or even hourly. Developing a strategy for posting frequently and consistently is as important as writing clever blog entries using key words and phrases.

Both approaches – blogging and improving traffic through linking – offer any Web site the opportunity to improve traffic from search engines at little technology or financial costs. As the number of sites online proliferates exponentially every month, SEO strategies that leverage affordable and sustainable activities become the best methods for capturing a piece of the consumer business that starts out at the major portals every minute of every day.

Matthew Ferrara is CEO of Matthew Ferrara & Company, a technology organization that delivers training, consulting and technical support to real estate companies worldwide, including through its tech hotline “Support on Demand” REALTOR® help desk, which is available at 866-316-4210 or matthewferrara.com.