How many of you remember "back in the day" - say, in the year 2000 or so, when just HAVING a website meant you were automatically guaranteed to get customers?
I mean, having a website meant everything back then. It meant you embraced technology, that you were on the "cutting edge" of the Web. If you had a website, you were in the top percentage of real estate agents who were online, because so few people knew how to make a website, let alone attract the attention of search engines (if memory serves me right, Google wasn't even a major contender back then!)
Well, in just a few short years Google has become THE place to search, and they report that REAL ESTATE is their most searched category. I found that amazing in and of itself, considering the thousands of other things people search for on a daily basis!
Now, having a website is the LEAST you can do to get noticed.
Fortunately, you don't have to have been online since the mid 1990s to make it big online today. Just look at Google. Here they were, the small fry of the search engines, and look at them today.
There are some things you can do to improve your real estate website rank in the search engines. Since real estate is such a competitive term, consider the following:
- Make sure your site doesn't use Flash (or if it does, only sparingly). Flash is a sophisticated form of animation which looks beautiful but - like any other computer graphic - can't be read by search engines. Also make sure your site doesn't use Frames. Many sites back in the 1990s did, as this was the main way to lay out a site and make sure your navigation and content was always visible to the viewer. If you're still using frames, fire your web developer right now. Search engines hate them and so do your visitors because every site they visit AFTER they visit yours will load in YOUR site's frames. It's like having a miniature screen-within-a-screen to view web pages from.
- Ensure you're situated in a particular niche for your local area or your specialty. If you're a foreclosure specialist in Fresno, make sure people know that you're the person to come to in that area! You can rank high in the search engine results when you shrink your perspective to focus on the particular towns, cities and communities you serve, or your particular specialty. Once you have a high ranking for a particular town's real estate search, focus your efforts on the next area you serve and keep going from there. Concentrate on one area at a time - don't overwhelm yourself with trying to scramble to get all the areas at once - just build your "website empire" one local area at a time.
- Make sure your site is tailored to bring in links that relate to your keywords. Keywords are what your prospects - and the search engines - use to find your site on the web. So when someone links to your site, make sure they link to you using your keywords. So if you're a client referral company, you might request that they link to you using the text real estate client referrals - it helps your search engine ranking considerably when other people use the same text you're using on your own site to help people find you!
- Ensure you're writing lots of fresh, relevant content for your particular area. Keeping your site "fresh" with new, updated articles (consider starting a blog on ActiveRain and link it to your local web site for great exposure!) and information about your local area. You never know who might be looking to relocate and want to find an agent there!
If you'd rather not take all the time to do all this yourself, why not join a company that's done all the work for you? Call me at 1-800-977-7058 and put our high ranking, professionally designed real estate websites to work for you in getting new referrals in your area - wherever you are in the U.S. or Canada! Learn more about this this works!
