As a real estate professional, time is your most precious commodity. What's the most lucrative use of your time? Showing properties to interested customers, of course. It's only by doing this that you can close the deal and make the sale (and thus make your commission).


What boggles the mind is how many real estate professionals spend so much of their time doing things other than property viewings. As a professional, you know how valuable your time with the customer is, and how difficult it is to get a qualified, interested customer for a property you can show.


From a customer's perspective, there can be nothing more daunting than trying to get in on a real estate deal – there's all the technicalities, and trying to find a property in a neighborhood they want, and this is where a good search engine optimization campaign can really help.


Search engine optimization is tailoring your pages (and AdWords) to specific key phrases that someone is likely to enter into a search engine. For example, someone searching for real estate in a given community, such as Aspen, Colorado might enter "Aspen Colorado houses" or "Aspen Colorado Real Estate" or even "Aspen Colorado, 3br 2 bth" to pull up sites with information on those subjects.


It's more than AdWord placement – you also need to make sure that your site gets visited regularly by the search engine tools, and that they find the site to be worthwhile, not just randomly strung together paragraphs laced with keywords. A good Search Engine Optimization campaign starts with your sell sheet, and then tweaks it to make sure it comes up high on search engine pages, in the first two or three links. (Roughly 60% of the people who pull up search engine results click once in the first three links displayed – more than 90% of them don't click on more than three links in the first page of results.) Getting your listing up there is the key to generating a lot of traffic for your site, and a lot of inquiries about properties that you can show.


Search engine optimization campaigns need to be tailored to seasonal and cyclical market demands, while maintaining a strong base on the general topic. We can tell you more about it at Myrtle Beach Site Design. Drop us a line if you're looking to build a map to the houses you want to sell, and put it in the hands of people looking to explore.  Randy Zlobec