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How "Getting Listed" Helps You "Get Found"

By RealtyTech Inc.

Real Estate Technology with Real Estate Technology and Marketing

December 10, 2010 04:09 AM

You've more than likely heard about search engine results pages' "local listings." These can be a terrific means for your real estate website to get found by local prospects when they're looking to buy or sell a home.

Local listings are great because they more than likely allow you to include a direct link to your real estate website or a specific page within it, as well as your physical address and the phone number and e-mail address you wish prospects to use to contact you.

Here's how to get listed:

Go to the Big Three (search engines): Google, Bing/MSN and Yahoo!) and follow their instructions on how to register in their directory (Google's is Google Places, for example).

Then promote your listing. You do this by submitting your listing to several directories. You can do this manually but there are paid services you can use to do this for you. One is Universal Business Listing (UBL.org) and for $30 a year it will send your listing information to several directories.

Pingler.com is another service to consider. Pingler will send your site to "ping" services. Pings are notifications to the Internet that something new has been done to your site (you added a page, you wrote a new blog post, etc.). The more changes you make the more pings will be sent out -- a very good thing since search engine crawlers stand up and take notice when changes are made to sites.

The more directories in which you're listed, the better, because this give your site more credibility. The reason this is so is that other websites (the directories to which you submitted your site) are aware of you and, more importantly, "like" you enough to index/list your content, which raises your search engine results rankings. All of this is akin to high school popularity: If you're friends with one or more "cool" kids, the "cooler" you are perceived to be.

Come to RealtyTech.com to distribute your real estate website to the hundreds of Web directories available. We look forward to helping you attract more home buyers and sellers to your real estate business.