80% of people looking for real estate use the internet and most of them start looking with search engines.  So it’s important people can easily find your website in search engines.  In this article I’ll show how real estate representatives earn high rankings in the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search.

The two main ways your website earns high ranking in search engines are:

1)    Other Websites Linking To Your Website
2)    Your Website’s Written Content

Other Websites Linking To Your Website

The main way search engines rank websites is by your website’s popularity on the web.  Your website’s ranking increases when other websites have your website’s links on their pages.  For instance, if 80 web pages on other people’s websites had your website’s link on them, your website would rank higher in search results than another real estate sale rep’s site where only 15 web pages on other websites had their link on them.

Website Written Content

Search engines also rank websites by their written content.  For instance, if you want people searching the keywords “Markham real estate” to find your website then your website must have lots of instances of the keywords “Markham” and “real estate”.

The best way of increasing your search engine ranking is this: be an article junkie.  What I mean is you should continually search for articles your target market would find interesting and add them to your website.  The articles can be anything to do with your farm area.  This makes your website interesting to your target market, making them want to stay longer on your website and sign up for your email list.  Learning more about these areas also helps you better advise your clients on finding what they’re looking for.

A great place for lots of neighborhood-specific information is Wikipedia.  On that site look up the cities your farm areas are in and you’ll find a list of neighborhoods in each city along with an info page for each neighborhood.  If you can’t find web articles pertinent to your farm area, look at offline sources.  Government sources are best.  Go to the local library and ask for any information on your farm area.  Your farm areas may have a neighborhood Business Improvement Association (BIA) and they’ll definitely have a Chamber of Commerce/Board of Trade.  Look to them for lots of interesting local economic information.  The added advantage of digging up non-internet sources of information is you’ll probably get original content not currently found anywhere on the internet.  Search engines prefer new and original written content to content simply copied from other pages.

This may sound like a lot of work, but I assure you it’s worth it.  Just make your article research part of your daily routine.  If you just add two articles every day, within 6 months you’ll have over 350 external pages linking to your website, far more than most other real estate sales reps will ever have.

Remember, the more interesting your website is to your target market, the longer prospects stay on your website.  The longer they stay, the more likely they’ll sign up for your email mailing list.  Getting prospects to sign up for your mailing list is your website’s main purpose.

You can expect a search engine optimized, high ranking website will get you many more leads than a print ad.  My RECO approved “Building Your E-Commerce Business” course gives much more information on boosting your website’s ranking in the major search engines.