SEO 101: Using Social Networking to Boost Website Traffic

On its own, writing stellar content for your real estate site isn't going to make any money for you. You'll need to figure out a way to attract potential clients to your website, who can be converted into dollars. This should be the ultimate goal of every business.

SEO stands for search engine optimization and it's exactly what it sounds like. It's how optimized your blog or your website is for the search engines that are crawling it when someone types in a search query. It's a huge factor in making sure you get traffic to your site and, more specifically, that it's the right kind of traffic—people who are looking for you to solve their problems.

If your real estate website isn't generating a profit, then you need to ask yourself some hard questions – what benefit does it really have for your business? No need to panic if you are still waiting for a breakthrough. I'll cover some of the most important SEO factors and some hands-on techniques that you can put to use right away to increase the traffic to your website.

Promotion Is King

One way to promote your website is by paying for online ads in hope of snatching a client once they land on your page. This model can be a huge money pit. But as soon as you stop paying for online ads, usually the traffic to your site drops like a rock.

Frustratingly, it cost me more to lure people to my website than the revenue that they brought in. This was the time when I decided that I was done with paying for traffic and that I wanted people to be organically interested in my website. My favorite and most rewarding solution to paid marketing is content marketing or blogging.

While it is easier said than done to "just create great content," it's possible to build on that concept.

The truth is that there is way more to SEO than just writing content. One piece of the puzzle is that you'll need to get others' attention by proactively positioning your articles to be seen by them. It's really no different from dating. You can be the best looking person with all sorts of positive attributes. But if you never leave your home, it's going to be hard to meet other people for a date!

The Real Purpose of Content Marketing

In spite of your best efforts, it has nothing to do with your business, unless the visitors become paying clients. Getting thousands of likes and shares for well-written content is not the number one goal. The real purpose of my real estate blog at Great Calgary Real Estate is to support and provide domain authority to my local community pages.

Most of my visitors who become clients typically look for real estate listings in communities that I work in. For example, they might search for the term: "Homes for Sale in South Calgary." It can be difficult to rank for these types of search terms as the competition can be fierce. But supporting these internal pages by linking to them from my blog is going help them to rank higher.

What Drives SEO?

In as little as five years, Google has totally revolutionized how their algorithm works. Many SEO techniques that worked before had to be abandoned or changed to fit new standards.

Today, there are at least 200 factors that affect the rankings of a website. It is still generally agreed among SEO experts that having inbound links from other websites helps rankings.

It's important to keep in mind that Google doesn't like websites that are caught manipulating their rankings by creating spammy backlinks. Link building still exists and it is a vital part of SEO. But, by all means, you must make sure that the links are pointing towards your site from a credible source with a legitimate reason.

After All, Google is Right!

Google is usually right about the concept of creating good content in order to rank your website. What they forgot to tell you is that good content is only one part of the puzzle. Getting other people to link to your articles is the mountain that needs to be climbed. Lacking the endorsement of other websites is one of the missing parts of being ranked on page one of Google.

Promote Your Content Like Your Life Depends on It

One way to get others to link to you is by creating amazing content that gets picked up by others and it goes 'viral.' This approach is known as the hope and pray method. Usually, it's a very unreliable way of running a business.

You can easily turn blogging into a full-time job and write content until your face turns blue. But unless you already have an established group of followers to promote your content, or an everlasting bank account to pay for marketing, you will need to take matters into your own hands to get others to talk about you through promotion.

Finding Online Friends With Benefits

Promoting your content through social media is an affordable way of helping others to find out about your work. But you're setting yourself up for failure if you think that social media is all about you. The secret to establishing any friendship is to look out for their best interest ahead of your own. This concept works both offline and online. One of the best ways to have your content to be picked-up by others is to share their content first.

Becoming friends with influencers in social media can be very meaningful for your website's ranking. Be generous with linking out to other bloggers with quality content that are relevant to your topic. Sharing their content with your own audience is most certainly going to be reciprocated by them.

The topic that you write about doesn't matter at all. As long as it is related to your industry, it's going to be fairly straightforward to dovetail others' references to expand your own article. The three most popular best practices to link out to other websites from your own content are:

1. Hyperlink from within the content
2. Provide a list of additional resources
3. Write a roundup post about a topic

As an example, a round-up article of the Best Real Estate Posts that I had written in the past turned out to be a huge success. It received hundreds of shares and views of well beyond 13,000.

The Key to Making Content Marketing Work

By using content marketing sites and bookmarking sites, your articles can get a boost in the search engines.

One of my favorite content marketing sites is Scoop.it. It is a powerful platform to use to make your content more visible. As an example, you can take a look at how I have summarized real estate content on scoop.it, added extra perspective to the topic and posted them on the page with a link pointing back to the original post.

A similar site is Storify, which allows you to organize and collect content from all types of sources to build a topic. You can take a look at several examples of my Storify collections here as an example.

Notice how I don't just insert the link, but I add new content around it? The key to getting SEO value out of using the above platforms is adding your own comments to create unique content. It is not enough to just copy and paste a link on the page and perhaps grab a piece of the original content. In order to be acknowledged by Google, one of their many requirements is to create unique content! These two content marketing sites are probably one of the best SEO strategies that you can put to use right away.

Start ranking...

As you can see, there are many different sides to giving your website an SEO boost. Writing content that people crave for and learning how to properly promote it through social networking is going to propel your site's ranking. No doubt that it takes a great amount of time and effort before you see the needle moving. By taking one step at a time and coming up with a plan, I am confident that you will end up on top!

About the author
Joe Samson is a well recognized real estate marketer and REALTOR® in the Calgary, AB area. Joe and his team have been helping homebuyers and sellers to achieve their real estate goals since 2005. He is representing CIR Realty, the largest real estate brokerage in Calgary.

To view the original article, visit the Contactually blog.