How Search Engines Rank Your Real Estate Website

March 26, 2009

With 80% of home buyers using the internet for their search and 85% of those people using search engines to find what they’re looking for, it’s important you understand how search engines rank your website.  Studies show if you’re not ranked somewhere in the first 3 pages of search results for a given keyword search, it’s unlikely your site will get found.  By anyone!

So here are the basic principles behind how search engines rank websites in search results:

Website Content

The words and phrases in your website largely determine how a search engine ranks it.  For instance, if you have the keywords “Toronto real estate” 50 times on different pages in your website, you will be ranked higher for searches on “Toronto real estate” than another website where these keywords only appear 20 times.  So it’s important to understand what keywords your prospects are using in search engines.  In fact, you should design your website around the type of prospect you want to attract.  The way to do this is finding lots of articles and content on your farm areas and anything else you specialize in and posting them on your website.  In doing this, you’ll become known to search engines as a top ranking site for your areas of specialty (eg. condos, particular geographic areas), and consequently you’ll attract people seeking more information on your specific areas of specialty

Link Popularity

This is the number of websites containing links to your website.  The more websites who have your website’s link on them, the more influential and worthwhile search engines deem your website to be.

But link popularity is not just about quantity.  The sites linking to your website should have similar content on them.  You don’t want your website being found on lots of sites unrelated to real estate because the search engines may index you under those other topics.  A website’s popularity is also important.  If your link is on a site receiving 10,000 visitors a day, that means way more to a search engine than if your link is on a site receiving only 100 visitors per day.

A word of caution: do not buy into the services who claim to build your link popularity by posting your website links to thousands of nearly identical sites across the internet.  Search engines recognize these sites as cheating their ranking system and they may ban you from their rankings if you use such services.

Learn more about how to get on page one in major search engines by taking my Building Your Ecommerce Business course.  This course was been approved by the Registrar, REBBA 2002 to qualify for 6 Credits.

Filed under: SEO For Realtor Websites

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