RSSO.K. I am not an SEO specialist. But, it is something that intrigues me, interests me and I enjoy learning about. Besides, the more I learn about it, the better exposure I can get for my business because of it. My first run at optimizing my website sent my main website to the penalty box in Google for 60 days and I quickly learned that trading links with other real estate agents to artificially inflate my websites pagerank was a no no. Since then I’ve also come to believe that if you write something of value, people will link to it and that will help you increase your rankings.
As a real estate agent it is critical that we market ourselves and our clients homes for sale be it on the internet or otherwise. to do this, we must send direct mail or create press for ourselves in some other way. Maybe it’s hosting a neighborhood garage sale and advertising it for the neighborhood. It can be anything really…So it goes on the internet as well. I think it’s great when people link to you, but I think it’s important that we utilize our knowledge to market ourselves online as well. So I employ several things that help increase my visibilty on the internet. By no way at all does that mean that I ‘game the system’. Instead, I try to do things that will add value to someone on the internet if they come across it. I also have a ‘main’ source that I want them to go to so I try to point people in that direction.
So, SEO for me now is about offering something of value in places that I can find that other people will read and pointing them back to my main website. All the while hoping that some of what I write about is worthy of enough attention to garner some links from others because of the quality.
Along comes an opportunity to learn more with an announcement of a contest to attempt to rank for the term “greatest real estate agent in the world” and I saw an opportunity to join in the fun and hopefully learn something that will be helpful in my ongoing pursuit to find ‘white hat’ methods of building up authority to create more exposure for myself and my clients. Here is my entry for the greatest real estate agent in the world. If you happen to run across this, please feel free to comment on that entry and let me know what you think or share your ideas with me as to what you think might help me win the contest.
In the end, the goal of the contest is to be able to apply what is learned on other projects from increasing exposure for a listing to higher ranking for my website and other blog posts. Now I’m off to check and see how the rankings are right now…