How Can SEO Boost Your Real Estate Clientele?

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO in short, is a strange business. Certain practices of SEO can render your site as spam, placing you, your site and your brand on Google's naughty list. Other practices, when properly instituted, can help bring your rankings and your potential clientele through the roof.

Learning the ins and outs of this intricate web of Internet-trolling spiders and robots can be somewhat confusing, and disheartening to any real estate professional that wants to get with the 21st century. However, starting with a basic foundational knowledge can be the key to opening up your world to a myriad of professional possibilities.

Here's a brief starter guide to SEO:

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization is the process of building a website so that it becomes one of the top results of a search engine's yield for particular keywords. When you type keywords into Google's search box, thousands of pages of results will appear. Most users of Google hardly go beyond the first page of results, making your presence on that first page absolutely critical.

How does SEO work?

Understanding how SEO works starts with understanding how search engines work in general. Search engines such as Google operate essentially as answer machines. How do they come up with answers to all the questions of the world? Intricate research.

Search engines have an intricate system of "robots" and "spiders" that troll the Internet through a series of links and interconnected documents. When engines find a page, they decipher the code and store selected elements of a page in a giant 'hard drive.' When a user looks for something online, search engines run through this database (literally going through billions of sites in milliseconds) and returns results that are at once relevant and useful.

Typically, what is considered relevant and useful is determined through site popularity, age, name, etc. Search engines determine popularity by running a mathematical algorithm based on hundreds of components.

How do you make SEO work for you?

There are several ways to optimize your site for search engines. One of the most important ways is to create a useful, information-rich site. Include a steady stream of keyword-rich content on your website. Some great keywords for the real estate business are: selling a home, realtor, real estate agent, home staging tips.

Make your website the ultimate resource for your clients by linking to sources within and outside your site. This is an excellent opportunity to not only increase your SEO, but also to showcase to your clients your range of knowledge of the business. Don't try to deceive clients or search engines by copying and pasting or cloaking content as your own–Google will notice these bad practices and bump down your rankings. The only surefire way to keep your site active and looking positive in the eyes of Google is to create 100 percent unique content and source out to any references used.

As you develop your site and delve even deeper into the intricacies of SEO practices, remember that your page is primarily for users, not search engines. Connecting with clients is the ultimate goal and at TRIBUS we strive to achieve this every day for our own clients.

Any questions about how to optimize your site? Please comment below!

To view the original article, visit the Tribus blog.