Content Enhancement

We feel that appropriate and correctly formatted content is one of the most important tools a real estate agent can use in today’s market to achieve exposure through search engines. However content is the piece of the puzzle that is overlooked the most.

For example very few people have the time to write hundreds of pages of content regarding their personal real estate market. As a result, most of the content on the internet is just copied from other sources like your local chamber of commerce, local magazines or other real estate sites like Realty Times.

The majority of realtors do not realize how tightly they are binding their hands by copying and pasting content. This article covers how important content is to creating a strong footing in this competitive internet world.

After years of research and the quest for search engine knowledge, we have acknowledged that creating as much unique information for your site may be the most vital component in achieving lasting rankings. Let us look at it from a search engines’ perspective.

Originally the internet was created as an information source. You typed in a phrase and the search engines provided you with sites which included those words. As the internet grew, search engines had to evolve to not just look for words but groups of words, then whole sentences and in the near future, the content of the whole page before deciding what results to provide their user.

By using copied content, a search engine can’t define the differences between one website and another website. For example, template websites have tons of content on each website. However all that content is also on all the other template websites. So from a search engine perspective, how would a search engine differentiate one site from another? The short answer is that they don’t. They may use it to index your pages properly, but they won’t give you top placement in the search results. Therefore having copied content on your website is a strike against you in regard to search engine rankings.

As search engines progress they are really cracking down on duplicate content. From their point of view all they want for their user is quality unique information for which their user is searching.

By having a template website you are not giving the search engines the chance to showcase your true understanding of your business. If your web presence has information that reflects the personal knowledge of your business, then you are providing them with a reason to give you top placement in their results.

Does this sound a little like all the offline marketing secrets you have been taught? You would be correct. Unique content allows you to separate yourself from your competitors. We feel that having a custom website is the first step to obtaining a long and successful life on the internet.

Lastly, there is nothing wrong with being inspired with someone else’s ideas. If you have a custom unique presence which is based on other ideas you have collected, fabulous. There is no need to re-invent the wheel. Just make sure you present it in your own words with your own spin.

If you focus on making sure that everything from the graphics to the text are unique and you continue to grow out your website with resource pages and articles about your personal market, how could you not be a good resource for the consumer? As painful as it is, the benefits outweigh the costs at the end of the day.

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