Google recently announced a long list of search engine algorithm changes and tweaks they performed in March 2012. SEOs and others who closely monitor their search engine positions reported a lot of volatility in the SERPS in March and there are a few areas in particular that Google targeted that would be primarily responsible for the changes in positions.

Google was conceived and developed around the central idea that a link to a web page is a vote of confidence that the content on the page is probably of good quality and therefore the page is worthy of being included in the search results for a query for keywords that are found on that web page. That has not changed and Google is always looking for ways to improve their ability to identify which are the best links that merit consideration. In March they made some tweaks in their handling of a link’s anchor text (the visible words that one clicks on) that allows them to better interpret and use this anchor text.

This may be the biggest factor in the recent ranking changes as links are added and dropped from inclusion when considering the value of a web page. It is not just external links (links from other websites) that are affected but internal links as well. The link text that you use in your site’s navigation menus and links between pages of your website are very important too Google. There is some discussion that changes to how the link text of these internal links are handled may indeed be one of the biggest reasons for recent ranking changes. Optimizers have long known that link text of internal links were important and have optimized accordingly. Discussions amongst search engine optimizers show that they are reaching agreement that beginning in March many more of these internal links are being deemed over optimized by Google and this is resulting in ranking drops and even over optimization penalties.

Another area of change that would have had a big affect on ranking was in how Google treats synonyms. The synonyms that you use on your web page that relate to the keyword being searched can affect your positions in the search results. Google has made changes to how much weight synonyms are given when determining whether to return a web page for a specific search query. The indication is that they are being less aggressive in their use of synonyms and this too would affect sites that could perhaps have been over optimized.

Google has also made improvements in their ability to detect older stale web page content and in particular for blog and forum pages. This may have a bigger impact than is apparent at first. What it means is that blog posts that you may have written a few years ago with the idea that you were building this vast store of content that would allow you to appear for a multitude of “long tail” search terms  have a shelf life. If you wrote an article three years ago about real estate in a neighbourhood you specialize in it may have resulted in a lead or two a few years ago but is unlikely to now. A newer article perhaps written by a competitor six months ago would be generating the leads now. Blogs are looked at as “news” by Google and not really as static content. For that reason it is probably better to have both a website and a blog for your Realtor web promotion strategy rather than using a blog format like WordPress to be both your website and your blog.

Google also made updates to what signals they use when personalizing the serps for each individual search. You should by now be aware that the search results are different for pretty much every single person that searches Google.

If your rankings have changed for the worse recently this gives you a few things to work on to get them back up.  If your blog does double duty as your website you may want to evaluate that strategy as well.

What determines whether someone entering the real estate field will enjoy success? You probably already know the answer.

When I began my training to become a Realtor in late 1989 the economy was just beginning to turn south and a recession was on the horizon. In my city, home prices had already peaked and were on their way down. Much like the situation in many cities in the US today, most homes were worth less than what the owners had paid for them. To make matters worse,  mortgage rates were in the mid teens! In my city house prices did not recover for over ten years. Of course, most of us who began the real estate course were unaware of what the market was like and what the future may hold. Memories of the late boom market were still fresh and many of my 70 or so classmates entered the course thinking selling real estate would be easy.

By the second week  of the course I had formed some opinions about a few of my classmates. There was James who had just sold a multi million dollar business and lived in a large house in one of the city’s most desirable  neighborhoods. He was well connected, smart, and had the gift of gab. I suspected he would do well. At the other end of the scale was Tony who previously worked in an auto body shop. Tony wore an ill-fitting cheap brown suit, drove a $500 car, and lived in the city’s worst neighborhood. Tony seemed barely able to string two sentences together and clearly he felt he was a bit out of his element. Many of us silently voted Tony the “least likely to succeed”.

The course was not easy. Only about half actually passed -  including James and Tony. James enjoyed success relatively quickly. It seemed that he had a few wealthy friends lined up ready to sell their homes the day he was licensed. After that he went about aggressively pursing expired listings of which there were many because of the declining home prices. Tony did not enjoy immediate success but he too pursued expired listings and FSBOs in his part of town.

After 5 or 6 years there were only a handful of my classmates still in the business including James and  Tony, who had moved up to a nicer car, a nicer suit that fit, and now had a confident manner about him. Today, some twenty years later, there is just one of my old classmates still selling real estate – Tony – the fellow voted least likely to succeed.

Tony succeeded where others didn’t simply because of persistence. It doesn’t matter where one lives, what one drives, how connected one is or how well educated. It doesn’t matter how much money you begin with. Success really just requires that you persist.

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated failures. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

Calvin Coolidge

This morning I came across a great article listing the five best practices for using Facebook in real estate marketing. Check it out for some more in-depth info.

Here are the best practices Realtors can use to market themselves in Facebook:

1. Use Facebook To Connect with Potential Clients
2. Maintain a Consistent Flow of Communication
3. Integrate Facebook Into Your Existing Marketing
4. Consider Using Facebook Ads
5. Create and Maintain a Professional Image

According to the article over 80% of Realtors are using Facebook. Are you?

One of the more popular public faces of Google, Matt Cutts, has answered a few questions from webmasters recently and I thought a few of the things he said were worth remembering. Most of what he said was nothing new but still will be new to many reading this.

Matt restated something that I first heard and wrote about a couple of years ago and that is Google makes over 500 algorithm changes each and every year. Your website rankings are going to fluctuate accordingly. In most cases if you are doing all of the right things and your website is of value to visitors you will still rank relatively well. Obsessing over each minor ranking fluctuation is probably a waste of time however as often another change is right around the corner that will change your rank once again – usually restoring positions that you lost in the last fluctuation.

Another thing he mentioned was about the Meta Description tag. Google does not use the Meta Keywords tag in ranking but does use the Meta Description tag. Not only is this tag the first place it looks for the “snippets” displayed for your site’s description in the search results but Google also compares the contents of the description tag to the keywords being searched for to see if the site is a good match for the search.

He also addresses links. You may see that a site has thousands of links pointing at it but that doesn’t mean that Google is considering any of them when ranking the site. The only links Google considers in a positive way when ranking a site are links from sites that Google trusts. The rest are just ignored. Links that are deemed to be purchased or obtained from a “link farm” or similar scheme can still get you penalized and not just ignored. The message is to acquire good quality links and to not waste your time on the rest.

There has long been this misinformation floating around that the best top level domain (TLD) to have for your website is a .com domain. According to Matt that is not the case. All TLDs are treated the same. He did say that if there were a particular TLD that was primarily used for spam content Google may approach a site with more caution. For me, I would think a good example of that would be that having an english language site in a .ru (Russian) domain. That would not be a good idea as that domain is widely used by Russian spammers for english language spam. I doubt most Realtors and their real estate webmasters would be considering using a .ru domain, right?

Thanks for the reminders Matt!

Back in the 1990′s Realtors were being told that they need to embrace the Internet if they were to be successful in the future. We were being told that the next crop of Realtors were likely going to come from the tech industry and they were already familiar with using the Internet. As well, all those still in schools and universities were equally as familiar. If we wanted to compete in the future we needed to embrace email and the Internet right away.

All of that turned out to be true of course. Along the way however, the Internet and how it was perceived changed in the eyes of Realtors. As I pointed out in my previous article on how to generate more leads from the Internet, the early adopters recognized the Internet as a communications medium and enjoyed great success with little competition. Information-providing websites and email were used to communicate with potential clients and personal responses from web queries allowed the building of relationships which ultimately led to converted leads.

Then came commercialization. Realtors began to think of the web as an advertising medium and a place for promotion and data mining – not for building relationships. Often costly technology and practices that did not necessarily enhance relationship building became the norm. Having IDX listings on a website today is considered a “must” but did you know that many early adopters of IDX actually found that their leads went down and not up with IDX? It was a barrier to relationship building as it had been done up until that point in time. Before IDX, people would more readily contact the Realtor for housing information.

Blogging has since come along and the act of blogging is a return to the practice of initiating a relationship by providing information that enhances your profile as a knowledgeable Realtor with clients’ interests at heart. Those that use their blog for more than blatant self promotion enjoy success generating new real estate business.

Just as back in the 1990′s Realtors were being advised to embrace the Internet, today you need to embrace Facebook because it is the ultimate relationship building opportunity. Just as back in the 1990′s the next crop or Realtors were already ardent users of the Internet, today’s next crop all already use Facebook and have 100′s of people who they connect with on a regular basis. In many cases, they have an ongoing relationship with everyone they ever went to school with and worked with. When they enter the business they will have hundreds of people who already know and trust them and who are likely to do business with them instead of with you.

If you haven’t already, it is time to stop thinking of the Internet as an advertising medium and get back to thinking of it as a relationship building opportunity.

What is required of Realtors today to enjoy leads from the internet? Realtors today need to think of the internet in the same way as the first Realtors on the internet did. The increasing popularity of social media over the last few years is not a major change in the the internet but a return to its core.

The internet has always been a social and communications medium. Before the World Wide Web (the graphical part of the internet that you see in your web browser), people interacted socially on bulletin boards and communicated with email and private messages the same as people do today.

There were places one could go to find information and good resources that were liked were recommended to others – the same way people like and recommend through social media today.

Realtors were actively participating and had their own groups and bulletin boards for exchanging ideas and referrals in addition to contributing in other areas that interested them.

When the World Wide Web came along people began to create web pages and Yahoo began as the place to go to find things on the web. It was a directory where all the entries were added by actual humans so everything listed there was “liked” by others – approved for you to visit.

Commercially oriented sites were few and far between as the internet was not a place where those with commercial intentions were “liked”. However, those first, actively participating Realtors who set up a website offering information were rewarded magnificently!

Then along came search engines such as Webcrawler, Lycos, Infoseek and Altavista to spider the web and it was “game on!”. Yahoo’s human edited directory was still #1 but being “found” was now equally important as being “liked” – for a short period of time anyways until Google came along.

With Google, being “liked” meant that someone thought highly enough of your site to link to it. So “like” equaled “links” and acquiring links became the focus. This worked well enough long enough for all other search engines to be rendered insignificant.

Because it was easy to manipulate, Google’s version of “like” also meant that Realtors could enjoy success on the internet without actually having to actively participate as they once did.

The social aspect of the internet did not go away though as the explosion of Facebook and Twitter onto the scene clearly demonstrated. Facebook and Twitter are changing the way people find websites. Personal recommendations are back in a big way just as they were in the early years of the internet.

Facebook allows people to click a button to signify that they “like” something and when someone sends a tweet over Twitter it is essentially a recommendation when the sender is a trusted source.

Competition from social media has forced Google to change the way it “likes” sites and they are moving away from just equating linking with liking. Google is now using Facebook “likes” and Twitter Tweets and Retweets in their ranking of websites.

In the recent past it was possible to enjoy success on the internet without any active participation by paying someone to SEO your website or by endlessly exchanging links to make Google think you and your site were “liked”. Now and in the future however, Realtors who want to gain or maintain the business received from the internet will need to return to the past. Active participation is the way to be “liked” once again.

Just counting on your website being found in Google for your internet business is no longer enough. There are a huge number of people out there who no longer rely on search engines to find things and are relying on social media instead. If you are not active on Facebook you may be ignoring up to 500 million internet users.

Do I hear groaning out there? It really is not as hard as some may think. Do you ever say anything that others find interesting or amusing or of value? Come on, you must have something intelligent to say to your clients or they would not be working with you!

Starting on the road to increasing your business from the internet can be as easy as just writing that down in your blog and/or Facebook account. Both are free by the way

While participating on Facebook and Twitter can be of value in raising your rankings in Google, there are even greater benefits to participation. Leads directly from social media can be of higher quality than leads from search engines because they are more like a warm referral.

When you post something on Facebook for example and someone “likes” what you have had to say – all of their friends are made aware of it. For a Realtor, these “likes” can be golden! The more you participate, the more chances you have of essentially being “referred” to the friends of others. You gotta like that!

These likes/referrals can be acquired from places other than Facebook too. People can notify their friends that they like a post you made in your blog or a discussion you participated in at the real estate forum at AgentsOnline.net and other places too. You need to participate to enjoy the benefits though.

In addition to the “likes”, your friends and clients can and will post positive messages about you on your Facebook wall or on theirs and all of their friends and yours are notified about it immediately. A happy client posts “I can’t believe we got the house for such a low price – what a great negotiator!” becomes an instant testimonial that is not just hidden away in your website but broadcast immediately to that person’s friends and to yours. This is a Realtor’s dream!

Get with the program! To enjoy more leads from the internet, Realtors today need to go back to thinking about the internet as a communications medium and not as an advertising channel.

We make it easy for you. Helping you set this all up is included with our package of fully managed Realtor websites.

There have been some good discussions in the Real Estate Forums lately about things Realtors need to know to effectively promote themselves on the internet. I participated in some of them and thought I would aggregate the information from a couple of the posts to “put it all together”.

To effectively promote yourself on the internet requires a more comprehensive approach with more moving parts than it used to. There are some basics that still are important and require more attention and knowledge than in the past. The first necessity is a search engine friendly website and that website should be the focus of all of your other promotional efforts. A blog is also a necessity and so is using Twitter and Facebook. Other activities such as forum discussion participation, guest blogging, and blog commenting may be necessary if you really want to be effective in a competitive market area.

You may want to check out a couple of the forum threads for more detailed information…
How To Increase Website Traffic
Organic Traffic Tips

What is new is the increasing use of social media on the web has meant that Realtors really do need to participate more if they want to enjoy success and gain business from the internet. Google has confirmed that it now uses interactions in social media in their ranking algorithms and that the use of social media in search engine rankings will probably grow. Bing uses social media interactions too. The interactions and links in social media is becoming more important while the importance of acquiring links from conventional websites is becoming less important.

As well, if you don’t have a Fan Page in Facebook that targets your market keywords you are probably missing that whole segment who search Facebook when looking for services in their area.

This may seem overwhelming to some as most Realtors do not have the knowledge nor the time for the required learning much less the time for all of the activities. We can make that a whole lot easier!

The package of search engine friendly websites we provide that have some included SEO is managed for you – there is nothing for you to do other than input listings you may wish to Showcase. We will also help with setting up the blog, a Twitter account that is essentially automatic, and a Facebook Fan Page. Once it is all set up your required activities can be as little as just taking 10 minutes to write a blog post about the areas you work or listings you may have on a semi-regular basis.

You do need a comprehensive strategy and need to be more involved in order to enjoy success on the internet but you don’t need to do it all yourself.