As a real estate agent, you may feel like your real estate website is the mouse next to the sleeping Google elephant. If the elephant rolls over, it will mean more to the mouse than the elephant. Eleven months ago Google started penalizing real estate websites for certain linking strategies that once worked to improve search engine ranking. As disastrous as that was for some real estate websites, marketing lessons were learned … or relearned.

Relearned is that content is, was and will be the driving force in keeping real estate websites high in a search. In one move, Google increased the load for keeping real estate websites ranking onto the shoulders of the real estate agents (and their writers). Google had already begun ignoring keyword meta tags, now the mechanics of linking fell more under the “content” scrutiny versus the “inbound link” scrutiny.

Two results: the ability of real estate agents to add content to their website increased in importance and the inbound and outbound links need to have a good contextual surroundings. Blogs and article manager tools have taken on greater importance in the strategy of ranking. Not by the number of articles or entries so much as the content of the entries. Regular and weekly (at minimum) updates are definitely part of the strategy, but the big points are for content.

Content, theoretically primarily educates or helps your website visitors. Secondarily it is to clue the search engines in on what you website is about. Writing for website visitors, using keywords and phrases in the content as they would occur naturally and not placing keywords all over the place is what the search engine algorithms are checking.

Think of the search engines as trying to mimic a website visitor when it indexes the website content and links. The algorithms check the content for percentage of keywords used to number of words used in the article and if the link has relevance to your website. Rule of thumb: write naturally and sprinkle in the keywords, but don’t try to form the article or entry around the keyword. Using variations on the keyword also helps to cover more keyword searches and seem more natural (and less boring to the reader).A content check is “Would this entry read the same or this link be useful if there were no search engines?”

Fortunately for real estate agents, the software to write blogs and articles has improved and WYSIWYG text editors allow real estate agents to write in a familiar environment. When the elephant rolls over, reposition and keep going.

Want to improve your real estate website’s search engine ranking? There are several ways to benchmark your website against other real estate websites in your local property market.

For this benchmarking study, let us assume that your real estate website is an agent website built with the help of a professional website developer with some customization. We are making this assumption since a professionally set up website has the graphics, search engine optimization and folder/file structure foundations necessary to compete in this intensely competitive arena.

First test, simply type your competition’s domain name in Google and Yahoo searches. Their website should come up first, but that is not what we are interested in finding with this search. What pages do the search engines list for the website. If it is not the index.html page, check the page to see what kind of content they have on the page.

Do they have a blog or neighborhood news tool that allows them to easily add content?

Next, scroll down the search results to see what other websites have links or mentions of the real estate website’s domain name. The more high ranking the website, the more search engine entries there should be.

Study the entries to see on what kind of websites they are appearing. Are they posting on Active Rain or other real estate blogs? Do they have solid links from a real estate brokerage firm like Keller Williams or RE/MAX? Are getting search results from social networking websites like Facebook or LinkIn?

Are there links from professional associations, chambers of commerce or related organizations such as title companies, banks, credit unions or mortgage brokers? Make a list of different organizations you can target to place links to your real estate website. Only seek out those websites that are integral to the real estate business. Remember many directories promising great rewards may well cause you to disappear from the search engine index and never rank.

While checking the inbound links, you may also realize that the most successful Internet marketing real estate agents do not put all their Internet marketing dollars in one basket. They utilize the strategy of one website per niche market. This maximizes the real estate agent’s exposure and allows each website to leverage the Internet’s ability to serve up more specific websites to the more specific keyword searches. Less traffic, yes, but the traffic is specifically those real estate Internet searchers who you are seeking to attract.

As the wisdom of the cowboys says, “You can tell a bunch by checking a person’s back trail.” Like how the top real estate websites got to where they are now!

While benchmarking your real estate website against your competitions’, you can check what real estate niche market, key phrases and keywords they are targeting.

The most obvious way is to type in different keywords or key phrases in a search engine and see if and where your competitions’ real estate website rank. This only tells you if they rank for the keywords that they are targeting, not necessarily which ones they are targeting. There is an easier way to research their keyword targets.

Go to the real estate website’s home page and on your web browsers dropdown menus go View > Page Source, Source or View Source (depending on if you are using Firefox, Explorer or Safari respectively). This opens a page of what looks like computer programming text - don’t worry. Look up at the top for the meta tags that give “description” and “keywords”. This is the list of real estate keywords and phrases that the webpage is targeting.

The description is the most important since it is taken into account by Google, Yahoo and all the search engines. Google ignores the keywords, only Yahoo, MSN and the other search engines take them into account. Once you have an idea of their keywords, close the browser window showing the source code.

Next, read the page itself to see if the keywords are used in the content. Search engines have been programmed to weed out the “keyword stuffing” in the meta tags and only index them if they also show up in the webpage’s content.

Next, look at the page’s title and all its major headings to see what keywords or phrases they are targeting.

You can repeat these steps on other pages within the website to get a good idea what is the overall pattern of keywords.

Once you have researched a few competitive real estate websites, you can begin to see the pattern of what are the most targeted keywords in the industry. Better still, you may detect what isn’t there - keywords or key phrases to an untapped niche real estate market.

Once you find this untargeted market, create blog entries, neighborhood news articles, mention it on your bio page as one of your strengths and basically research that market to add content to your site. If you are working with a real estate website developer, keep them in the loop so they can search engine optimize the new pages.

Though the code page is seemingly daunting at first, you may find yourself getting in the habit of checking pages for their keyword targets in your regular browsing. Or maybe that is just a real estate web developer’s habit. And if the code route is daunting, well, you can rely on your website developer’s SEO skills to check on the competition.

Real estate website designers are well aware of Google’s content guidelines for website content. But many real estate agents who faithfully work on their website’s blog or neighborhood news articles may not be aware of the website content guidelines.

Whether it is pages added to your real estate website, entries added to your real estate blog or articles added to your neighborhood news tool, they are all avenues to add information-rich content to your real estate website. In order to get maximum mileage from your work, apply the Keep It Simple rule. Search engines are try to index a page for one idea or a set of similar keywords. Before you write, list the one to three keywords you are targeting in your entry. If your entry or article begins to get too big and encompass more than one idea, see where a natural break is to turn it into two entries. As Google puts it “write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content”.

When deciding on keywords, check them out on a web browser or a site like WordTracker to see if they are, indeed, the words your target market is using. To cover all bases, design a series of entries that cover on or the other of similar terms. For instance, you can write one article on your area’s real estate market using the keyword “Realtor”. Then write another article on another real estate subject using the keyword “real estate agent”. This way you put your real estate website on the search engine radar for both keywords.

Adding images to your blog and articles tremendously improves their impact with your readers, but the visual content is lost on the search engines. Make sure you describe in your text whatever imagery you are conveying in your graphics. Having a picture of a home for sale is enticing, but having the keywords “home for sale” in the article is search engine attractive, so to speak.

Make sure your titles, file names and any ALT tags are “descriptive and accurate”. File names carry weight with the search engines, don’t lose the opportunity to draw traffic by naming your neighborhood news articles “article_23.html”. Much better is to use variations of “my_hometown_real_estate.html”. Use the underscore (or with blogs use hyphens) to separate words. Remember not to use spaces in the file name - the Internet doesn’t see what is after the space as connected to what was before it.

Monthly or quarterly do your house cleaning and run a link check on your real estate website. Broken links tell the search engine that your website is old and, what is worse, they frustrate your website visitors.

Keep your links on a webpage to a reasonable number (less than 100) and in shorter articles and blog entries 3 to 6 is reasonable.

Make the most out of your articles, both for the information you give your clients and for the search engines, who, along with your competition, read every word you write.

As a real estate agent, you don’t want to spoil all the hard work you and your website designer have spent to get your real estate website active and ranking on the search engine. Unfortunately, vendors interested in seeing your money in their pocket offer several “Internet marketing programs” that will cause your website to disappear from any search engine ranking. Sure these Internet marketing salesmen spin the beguiling promises of great returns, tons of traffic, and higher visibility for your real estate website, but better to listen to Google and the professional website designers who have your best interests at heart.

The biggest mistake a real estate agent can make with their website is to sign up for a link scheme that promises to increase your ranking by providing you with lots of links to your site. Google does look for links, both inbound (other sites linking to yours) and outbound (the helpful ones you provide your real estate website visitors). Search engines do use inbound links to check your site for context about your website’s subject matter, and as an indication of your website’s popularity and quality.

Search engines check the relevance and the quality of inbound links - are they from “bad neighborhoods”, a hosting services known to be used by spammers. For a real estate website, inbound links from Chamber of Commerce, banks, mortgage brokers, property appraisers, building maintenance and repair company websites are relevant. Links from directories that list everything under the sun are not relevant links.

Think of inbound links as an extension the relationship building part of your real estate business. Your business, professional reputation, and the unique, informative content of your website should be the natural magnets for inbound links. A good rule of thumb is anything you need to pay to join to get a link should be something you would join anyway as a part of your professional career.

The second biggest mistake real estate agents can make with their website is to use a computer program to submit the site to the search engines. Usually your real estate website designer takes care of site submittal and knows the best way to submit your real estate website to the search engines.

Steer clear of these two easy to make mistakes and you will save you and your website professional plenty of trouble repairing damage with the search engines. Think of it as “keeping your good name” with the search engines.

Other websites’ links to your real estate website are an important part of maintaining and improving your search engine ranking. But there is a science to fostering those links. Links from the wrong websites may penalize your search engine ranking. Follow these tips to bullet-proof your website linking strategy.

1. Be aware of “link reputation”.
Inbound links should come from websites that it makes sense to have a link with. The contextual relationship of links is reviewed in the search engine algorithm. For real estate websites, inbound links from a mortgage company or bank website - especially a page relating to real estate, from Realtor.com or Realtor.org score high points. Work to get links on websites that are good resources in the real estate industry. As an industry professional, you can post comments to articles on different real estate resource sites with your website domain name in the signature.

Beware of directories that offer to list your website for free. They have two strikes against them, they are not a focused content-rich information source so the search engines penalize for the link and they are often in the business of farming email addresses. On the contrary, a link from the DMOZ’s Open Directory is a plus for your website.

2. Edit the wording of your link on the other site, if possible.
It is better if the hyperlinked words are your targeted keywords. Instead of just hyperlinking on your domain name, as a real estate agent, you would want the link to be “Yourtown real estate agent” or “Yourtown luxury homes for sale”. The more descriptive the link, the better.

3. Understand “link popularity”.
This is a measure of how many sites link to your real estate website. Several years ago, this was very important. Now, after people linked to every site they could, search engines have not counted it as highly, checking more for the link context, though it does still factor into the rating equation.

4. The multiple sites on one hosting address.
Search engines do not count, and sometimes penalize, websites that share the same URL address (multiple domain names that point to the same website). Search engines check for this since it is a technique of spammers to inexpensively launch several different websites from one hosting service. They link all the sites together to make it appear that they are popular sites.

Keep these points in mind as you actively work on adding inbound links to your real estate website. All upward movement in search engine ranking translates into more hits and more contact leads.

“Permission Marketing” author Seth Godin gave several great tips for your real estate blog in a recent interview with Wordtracker.com’s Academy, a leading keyword analysis company. Tips from a successful writer who understands marketing and creating loyal customers as well as writing are always helpful.

• Story telling is most effective when told right. “The story has to begin with something compelling enough that you want to learn more about the story. The mistake marketers make is that they tell all the story at once, take it or leave it. People need to realize they have to ensure an unfolding dialogue.” Your stories can be like the jokes in a Crosby-Hope Road Show, a theme that keeps popping up and changing to add liveliness to the scene. Your client’ testimonials can be a great source of anecdotes that add to your unfolding story.
• Create your own feedback loops to spur improvement or cover popular themes. When Seth was asked if he felt under pressure to always be coming up with new ideas, he responded “I do it because I want to do it. Every time I am interacting with the outside world I‚m thinking about why that interaction happened, whether it was a good one or a bad one.” If your entry is a “good one”, the result may be your client receives information helping them with the selling or buying process or impels them to respond to your call to action. Listen to your clients when they give feedback on your real estate website.
• Sit down and write, don’t let the perfect kill the good. “I am not a perfectionist. I think that I am very focused on doing the best I can quickly and fixing it to make it better. A perfectionist doesn‚t do things quickly, it takes them too long to shift.” A short entry with good information that carries your personal enthusiasm is much better than sporadic short pieces that have been crafted with the word crafting ability of Edgar Allen Poe. Plus, by the time you get that blog entry perfect, the real estate market may have shifted!
• Content is king. Asked about search engine optimization (SEO), Seth pointed out there are no short cuts. “The best SEO is great content. Don’t do that and you don’t get much.” The reason real a estate blog helps with your search engine ranking is that it is a great opportunity for adding useful keyword-rich information to your website.

Wordtracker offers a free keyword search trial at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/. You can type in the keywords you are planning to use in your real estate blog entry and see what variation is the most used one on the search engines. Then you can modify your blog entry to use that keyword variation.

Internet marketing or eCommerce is a — powerful tool that real estate brokerages can leverage to increase lead generation from their real estate websites. A best of all possible worlds may be all the sales agents attached to a real estate brokerage showing property and closing deals. Not spending any time finding and qualifying leads. Admittedly an unrealistic scenario, but by scientifically positioning your real estate website’s message, you can get closer to that perfect world.

Positioning #1:
Talk to each client. Traditional advertising takes the shotgun approach a blasting a general message to a general segment of the population. Internet marketing, by its nature, is one-to-one marketing. In your message use the keywords that an individual looking for a specific piece of real estate will use. Maybe only 10 people in your market use those keywords in a month, but when they contact you, they are a qualified lead looking for exactly what you have to offer.

Positioning #2:
Measure and adapt. Use your keywords in a testing of the market manner. Measure the traffic certain keywords or pages draw to your site. Tweak pages or keywords with low draw and create more pages with the keywords successfully driving real estate leads to your website.

Positioning #3:
Don’t profile. This goes against the prevalent advertising strategy of targeting demographics. Internet marketing is most successful when it targets a buyer’s or seller’s behavior or activity. For example, instead of targeting middle income, male, householders, target people looking to buy their dream home in the mountains near a skiing resort or on the waterfront near boating access ramps. No one does searches for real estate using the keywords “homes for sale for male householder”, but they do search for “Breckenridge mountain real estate near ski resort”.

Positioning #4:
Utilize the Internet’s capacity for interactivity. Your real estate website client used the mouse and keyboard to arrive at your site. The brain is in the typing, clicking mode. Make your call to action initially a call to simply type or click to request information of give contact information. Do not push them to call initially. Keep them on your real estate website. The more information a website visitor reads on your site, the more likely they will convert into a warm sales lead.

Several successful real estate companies redefined their marketing position by measuring the warm leads directed to sales. Traditional marketing that was ineffective in attracting leads fell in the category of “not doing your job”. By following these simple Internet marketing positioning steps, your brokerage office can harvest the leads generated from the site and feed them to sale agents. Real estate sales agents working on warm leads close more sales than the ones who are trying to find the leads that saw a magazine ad and are thinking of buying in the near future.

Real estate agents and brokerages need to pull out all the stops to effectively keep their real estate websites positioned on Google and Yahoo, the two leading search engines, and to adapt to market trends in today’s slow real estate market. There is a two pronged real estate situation causing some real estate agents to get corralled into unproductive labor to secure listings.

Google and Yahoo have apparently tweaked their search algorithms to give priority in front page ranking to mega real estate websites such as Trulia, Zillow and Realtor.com. The slow down and price drop in the housing market has caused 12% more of the sellers in the market to try the “for sale by owner” route, instead of listing with a real estate agent.

With listing information more available and a slow housing market, some real estate agents have taken to painting houses, doing clean up and maintenance to build relationships and win listings. While extra help, such as giving a client a lift back to work after a showing, is usual, recent efforts to secure clients has raised liability and loss of sales time concerns.

Is there a better way to roll with the internet marketing punches? Yes. Trulia has a free linking section and an Agent Feature Listing program that provides even more opportunity to funnel traffic to your personal real estate website. Realtor.com also has a feature allowing real estate agents that are MLS participants (and who’s Multiple Listing Service must be a REALTOR.com® data content provider) the ability to upgrade their listings with more photos, contact information and web links. Zillow allows real estate agents to add their picture and contact information, such as your website, to your listings for free. Top real estate companies such as RE/MAX and Prudential are actively utilizing Trulia’s additional market reach.

The Trulia Voices section allows real estate agents to further their market presence by answering questions from active buyers and sellers. In your answer, you have an opportunity to guide the reader back to your website for further information. Most effective, of course, is finding the questions from people in your market area. Trulia Voices can also serve as part of your market feedback loop. After reviewing questions posted to the site, you can create an informative blog entry on your real estate website and direct your reader to that entry in your answer.

According to Trulia, 68% of their visitors checking their website listings are not working with a real estate agent yet. By increasing your visibility on Trulia and Zillow, you can ride your part of the 10 million visitors a month wave and harness Zillow’s and Trulia’s commanding search engine presence to capture those untethered warm sales leads.

By integrating Trulia and Zillow into your internet marketing strategy, you gain exposure to a larger market that can show your listings, but better still, drive traffic to your real estate website so you can capture the leads. The greater visibility translates to the potential for a faster sale. Real estate agents now have even more to offer the “sale by owner” sellers who would willingly trade their perceived savings for the quicker sale.