Taking a trip back in Internet SEO time, it's easy to think fondly of how we attacked Search Engine Optimization in the earlier days of development of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft (before it was Bing). You just had to use the same keyword phrases over and over (and over), and you could get a URL onto the first page of search results. We didn't worry so much about the site visitor stumbling over that "MyTown real estate" phrase every few sentences, as we had accomplished our goal to get them to the site.

That didn't last long, as black hat SEO practitioners used all kinds of tricks and hidden text to hijack our position. Unfortunately, many of those hijackers were grabbing off our leads and selling them back to us or our competitors. But, Google and the other search engines are very competitive, and their goal is to take searchers to highly relevant content that meets their information or buying needs. So, they just kept developing their algorithms, and this brings us to why things really are better today.

Service and Information, Not Selling

First, let's recognize that we're in a service business much more than sales. Start tracking your time and customer involvement in each deal that makes you money and you'll see that you're spending very little time selling and lots of time explaining, answering questions, and delivering information to get the deal closed successfully.

Now, translate this knowledge to our websites, and we have the key to today's SEO approach. Sure, we still need to use keywords and phrases, particularly those that relate to our location, as our real estate isn't moving around. Visit Google's page about promoting a local business to get some valuable instruction in how to make Google aware of your location and help your site to climb in results for local searches, particularly those done from mobile devices. There is also information there about setting up your URLs and a sitemap to help Google to index your site and send you more focused traffic.

Though the referenced Google help page uses retail as an example, there's a valuable real estate SEO tool hidden in this instructional quote:

"Pick a canonical (preferred) URL for each of your product pages, and tell us about your preference by submitting these canonical URLs in a Sitemap. Say you have a clothing site and one of your top items is a green dress. The product page for the dress may be accessible through several different URLs, like this: http://www.example.com/products/women/dresses"

Instead of always having to make sure that you get the "local" keywords into every post, article, or page--group your information and do it with the URL if you can. So, you may have:

• http://examplesite.com/toronto/homes/listings
• http://examplesite.com/ottawa/real-estate/transactions

Group your articles about title insurance under the transactions URL, and if you have enough of them, add a section, like: http://examplesite.com/ottawa/real-e...itle-insurance.

You should take it a step further and break your URL structure down into smaller areas, as an example the East York neighborhood in Toronto. If you're writing some posts/articles about that area, such as home styles, shopping, recreation, and culture, you'll do well with each article falling under a URL path like http://examplesite.com/toronto/east-york/...

Your sitemap will group a lot of relevant information into these URL baskets, and all of it is referenced to the location through the URL, as in Toronto or Ottawa. This structure becomes the foundation of today's real estate SEO approach. Lots of information is freely provided, much of it related to locality, and plenty of answers to questions we know our prospects, customers, and clients always ask.

Content isn't King anymore. It's an absolute all-powerful Dictator

The SEO approach explained so far is all just the foundation. The structure is your content, and it must meet the needs of your site visitor above all else. The search engines are honing their algorithms and tracking visitor actions on your site, and they know when that visitor is happy with what they found when they arrive from a search.

Start writing down every question you're asked about the business of real estate and your area. Do a search of your emails to gather questions. Each answer is an article idea, and they're questions searchers will type (or talk) into Google, Yahoo, and Bing. You are an expert in local real estate, so all you need to do is to take what you know and do a brain dump as website content. Real estate SEO really is better today than in the good old days. The search engines want your expertise as content, so give it to them.

To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.