Hello readers! Since this is my first post… ever :) … I will start by quickly introducing myself. I’m an Industrial Engineer, and after working several years in dairy and meat processing plants (yes, I love cows!) I decided to open my own business in technology, basically because I love programming, and I have been all of my professional life involved in some way with software development, so that led me into ERA Latin America, and now I’m here to share… and learn. My posts will be tech related, but if I find some other cool subject where I can contribute, will share it with you. Ok, enough said, let’s get to the meat!
High season, the lapse of time between mid December and March (June in some countries), that concur with the end of the rainy season (hurricane season), is when the web searches for real estate increases. The graph below shows the Interest Level for the search term ‘costa rica’ in Google’s Real Estate category, very similar graphs for other countries. To learn more about how Google calculate the Interest Level, please visit http://www.google.com/support/insights//bin/answer.py?hl=en-US&answer=87285.
As we have been extensively working on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for the websites in the last 6 months, and although the algorithms used by search engines to index web pages are complex and unknown for us, simple mortals, we have seen that some listings outperforms others on the Search Engine Results Pages, why? Let’s review some of our findings.
- Property description texts. Well ranked listings have more and better information, the address includes the city, neighborhood, or important cities/locations around. The Introduction and Short Description while inviting visitors to read more, have keywords (words people use when searching properties on the web) that increase the relevancy of the listing. The Long Description is rich in keywords and synonyms, and is at average 5 paragraphs long.
- Property photos, quality and quantity. Although it is a good practice to have the best photo as the first one (the one used for listing’s thumbnail), people will not find the listing on the search engines because of that, but because of the text associated with each photo. This text is the Title of each photo, and should describe what the image is; the more images you have, the more titles you can add. Remember to include keywords too!
- Agent profile. Almost all listings performing well on the searches have this info. This area not only demonstrate what you know about real estate, but also is a good place to add keyword rich content, about yourself, and about your city and neighborhood. If you are serious in developing a career in the real estate industry, use a photo too, this way your image will be associated to the real estate business.
Basically, what makes the difference is the quantity and quality of the content. Descriptive and keyword rich text will attract a wider audience than small, keyword-less property descriptions.
Now, do you know what keywords to use? What people are actually searching for on the web?
There are several tools, being the most popular Google Adwords Keyword Tool and Wordtracker Free Keywords. However, I highly recommend this one too, Google Insights for Search, as it provides more info than the others. ERA Agents: We have embedded some graphs at the myResources page, so you can have them handy when uploading... or improving your listings.
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