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In my last post on Social Media Marketing VS. Search Marketing I wrote about how important it is to get search traffic. Not just because it is less time consuming than the endless updating of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook and the thousands of others – but because it brings you a great deal of hungry, ready, willing, and able buyers and sellers to you.
The problem is, most people don’t understand how search marketing actually works. While most people can grasp that you want your website to be one of the first search result pages when someone searches for a term like “California Houses” – a lot of people have no idea how to get to that number one spot, especially if there are A LOT of different sites out there all trying to be number one.
In order to get search traffic, there is a simple formula you need to know:
Good Keywords + Quality Backlinks = Traffic
Keywords are the phrases that people type into a search engine like Google or Yahoo or Bing (these days I have to mention Bing or someone says “Well what about Bing?) when they are looking for something. If you go online and you need to find something, you’ll type in a few words to describe it – that’s a keyword.
There are two types of keywords – long tail keywords and short tail keywords. Long tail keywords are usually much easier to rank for, but they aren’t as popularly searched. An example of a long tail keyword phrase is “How much money do I need to buy a condo in New York?” A short tail keyword is much more shorter – such as “New York Condos”.
Obviously, you’re going to want to find keywords that get a lot of searches, and you’re going to want to rank highly for these keywords in the search results pages.
You can find basic info on search phrases from a very easy and simple easy tool – it’s called the Free Keyword Tool from WordTracker.com. You simply enter any phrase that you want and it will give you an estimate of how many searches per day. It’s not exact or entirely accurate all of the time – but I do know that it’s pretty darn close and that if you use it a lot you will never have an end of words to be targeting.
Once you research these keywords, you’ll want to add some blog posts and articles on your site that contain these words and phrases.
The next step is to build backlinks. This is the most time consuming and annoying part of getting your website to rank highly in search engines. Backlinks are when someone links to your site. For example, if I give Jay the Phoenix Real Estate Guy a link like I just did in this article, that’s a backlink for him and it helps tell search engines that his website is about a Guy in Phoenix who works in real estate.
Getting backlinks takes a lot of time, but it’s something that will continously pay off. Unlike social networking, which also requires a lot of time, once you’re ranking up there in search results pages you won’t have to do nearly as much work as often online. With social media however, typically if you drop the ball in updating all of your social sites, you also kind of drop a lot of traffic and interest.
Backlinks can be obtained in a number of ways – link exchanging with other relevant real estate websites (hit up other real estate bloggers you’ve met online that are in another target market) as well as a number of social networking sites and article directory sites. You might also want to try to swap some links with other local businesses in your area.
I know you were probably hoping for something a little more exciting or something that could be done instantly and automagically, but you’ve got to do a little work for it. Fortunately, it will pay off for itself many times over within just a few months most likely.
If you want lots of search traffic, research your keywords and build links to your site. It really is that simple.
Any questions? Comments? Share them in the comments below!
