How Can I Get More Traffic To My Site?
Such a simple question… I wish the answer was that simple. There are many things that you can do to bring visitors to your site. The obvious thing most REALTORS® think of first is business cards and other print-type marketing. While this is a good way to meet people, when was the last time somebody told you about their site and you actually sat down at the computer and visited it? Rarely at best? Ever? I didn’t think so.
Most people find websites by surfing. While there are many different ways people can find you by surfing, usually, they use search engines. Considering that there are millions of Real Estate Websites, “Getting Found” on one without a little know how is about as likely as me becoming a rock star. Chances are your website will appear on page 650,234 (or thereabouts) when someone searches the term “Real Estate”.
So now, the problem becomes: How do I get a good search engine ranking? For that matter how do I get listed at all?? To answer this, you should know about search engines and how they work. First, let’s start with Google. Google actually “powers” most of the thousands of other search engines. In other words most search engines pull results from Google to fill in the gaps in their own database. So, if you get a good ranking with Google, you will show up better on other sites.
It is important to understand how a search engine works. Basically, a search engine is a really big searchable database. Results are returned based on different parameters. The two most important parameters at this point are Keyword Density Ratio and Link Popularity. These are the ones we will look at in this article. There are more, but they are outside of the scope of this humble article…
Let me introduce you to Googlebot your friendly neighborhood search engine spider. A search engine spider is a program that endlessly “crawls” the web indexing web pages as it goes. When it comes to a link it will follow it. It keeps going day and night. If any other website links to yours, chances are Googlebot (and others) will eventually find it. However, to speed up the process you can submit your site and Google (I use Google as an example because it has so much influence.) will schedule a Googlebot to visit your site. This can take a considerable time for it to get to you, due to the enormous volume of sites out there. Once your site is indexed the Googlebot will visit periodically to see if you have posted any changes.
Keyword Density Ratio is the first parameter we will look at. Keyword density is just that. The number of times certain keywords are used throughout your website, or on a specific page. When the spider (Googlebot in this case) indexes your page, it removes all common language (words such as “the” “if” “when” “but” “that” etc…) and saves the remaining text in a database. From there it counts the number of times the words and/or phrases appear on your page. It then counts the number of words in total on that page. For instance, let’s say the phrase “Real Estate” appears 37 times out of a total number of 1000 words. Your Keyword density ratio would be 37/1000. Therefore, when somebody searches for “Real Estate” your page is ranked accordingly. A website with a higher keyword ratio will score higher, a site with a lower keyword density would accordingly, score lower.
So, why not just write “real estate” over and over? Well, in the early stages of the web, that is exactly what they did. Webmasters would type key words over and over in the very smallest font size and the same color as the back ground (If this text were white for example). Even though the user couldn’t see the text, since the spider reads the code behind the page rather then the page itself, the spider could see and index the page. This form of “search engine spamming” is known as “Spider Lines”. Of course, it wasn’t long before the search engines caught on to this and now, if your keyword ratio is too high, then the search engine won’t list you at all. Of course, Google won’t tell anyone what the limit is, so you just have to guess.
Which brings us to Link Popularity, link popularity is the term used to describe how many other sites link to yours. It doesn’t matter how many sites you link to, rather how many sites link to that counts. This is an important distinction. You see you can not really control who links to you and Google looks at this as “Well, a lot of sites link to this one, therefore it must be important.” Moreover, the higher ranked the site linking to you, the more important Google considers the link.
As I said before, you can not control who links to you. This is one of the more difficult methods of SEO (search engine optimization). With this said, there are some things you can do to influence your link popularity. First, you can ask other people in related industries (builders, carpet cleaners, movers etc…) to exchange reciprocal links. This means that you link to their site and they link to yours. It helps both of you out. If you want to know how many other sites are linking to yours there is a handy link popularity tool at http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/ this will help you keep track of inbound links. Outside of that you can sign up for some community forums and include a link to your website in your signature. This will ensure that there is a link included every time you post. Then you are free to talk about anything under the sun while quietly advertising your business AND improving your search engine ranking.
I would be remiss if I didn’t say something about Meta tags. It is my understanding that Google no longer looks at Meta tags and completely disregards the information. For those of you that don’t know what a Meta tag is, it is simply a bit of code in your web page that tells search engines what the site is about, offers a description, and provides the search engine keywords and other stuff the public never sees. From what I understand at this point, Meta Tags have been devalued due to people misusing them and manipulating them for better search engine placement.
Now, for the bad news, you did expect some bad news, right? Google changes the rules as they see fit, which is often. Worse still, they don’t really tell anybody what the rules are, because they don’t want us to know. If we know, they we will all try to tweak our sites for top ranking (Google looks at this as cheating). Therefore, every week Google reassesses its rankings. This reshuffling is known as the “Google Dance”. It used to be a major event that happened approx 10 times a year, but since 2003 they do smaller adjustments more often. This is why your ranking will change from time to time.
So, what can you do? Simple, build a good site, and fill it will good useful, current information. Use a lot of text and write about what you do. Change it around and add stuff often. Exchange links with professionals you recommend and join forums or start a blog (I will be writing about blogs soon!). GOOD LUCK!!!
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