7 Ways to Boost Your Online Visibility

by Brandon Cornett

Every real estate agent wants his or her website to rank well in the search engines. Search engine visibility can increase the amount of qualified traffic to your website, and that has a direct impact on client acquisition.

But with so much information (and misinformation) swirling around about search engine visibility, it can be hard to decide what actions to take for best results. I hope to put some of this confusion to rest by offering seven specific strategies you can focus on.

1. Add 10 Pages of Content to Your Site

Writing content is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to increase your search engine visibility. If two websites are similar in most regards, but one is twice is large as the other, the larger one will rank higher in the search engines.

Creating additional web pages is easier than you might think. See the seven items listed in this article? I could easily make a web page out of each item, if it benefited my readers to do so. I would simply expand them a little, link them into my navigation structure, and presto...10 new pages of keyword-rich content to inform my readers and feed the search engines. Glossaries and Q&A pages are other ways to implement this tactic.

2. Acquire Inbound Links

An inbound link is exactly what it sounds like, a hyperlink from another website that leads to your website. Most search engines, and Google in particular, use "link popularity" as one of several criteria to evaluate and rank your website. Link popularity refers to the number, quality and relevance of inbound hyperlinks from other websites to yours.

The practice of seeking and acquiring inbound links is known as link building, and it's the quickest way to get your website found by search engines in the first place. You don't need a "submission service" to submit your website to the search engines—just get a few inbound links and the search engines will find your website in a matter of days.

If your website is already listed in the major search engines, additional links will improve your ranking (and by extension, increase the amount of traffic you get).

3. Blog Regularly

If you're serious about search engine visibility, you should consider using a blog. The benefits of blogging are many. It helps you grow your website, acquire inbound links, build your reputation, inform your readers, reinforce your brand, and of course, increase your online visibility.

You can set up your blogging software so that each post is saved as its own page (in addition to being part of the chronological tally on the blog's home page). Blog three times a week for a year, and you'll have more than 150 pages of additional web content. A blog can also help you tap into the social aspects of the web, which can lead to more links, more readers, more traffic and more business!

4. List Your Website in Directories

Search engines and directories have the following things in common. Both have databases full of websites, both have a search field where you can enter key phrases, and both provide search results with websites ranked by most to least relevant. But the similarities end there.

A directory is basically a big catalog of websites that's edited and managed by people. With a directory, human editors find websites, screen them for quality and relevance, and add them to the proper category of the directory's database. This "human intervention" is what makes a directory different from a search engine.

In addition to providing direct traffic to your website, directories can help you rank well in the major search engines as well. When a website is listed in a directory like Yahoo, or Microsoft's Small Business Directory, it can score more "points" with a search engine like Google. Being included in a directory is a vote of confidence. It means a human editor (not a robotic web crawler) has reviewed the website before adding it to the directory. This tells the search engine that the website has some degree of quality, legitimacy and relevance.

5. Publish a Press Release Online (Optiona)

Did you know you can publish a national press release online (with keyword-rich links back to your website). It's true, and it's a tactic I use about once a month for publicity, direct exposure, and yes, SEO benefits.

I use and recommend PRWeb.com. It costs $80 per release, but it's worth doing once every other month, or however often you have news. You can also hyperlink some of the key phrases within the body of your release. Remember, links to your website with key phrases in them can boost your search engine ranking.

For instance, if your press release links to your website with the phrase "Mayberry real estate agent," and your release ends up on a lot of websites, then your search engine ranking for the phrase "Mayberry real estate agent" will start to climb.

6. Examine Your Website Structure

Website structure has a lot to do with search engine visibility. So whether you're building your own website, outsourcing the development, or purchasing a "ready made" website, you need to understand a few things about site structure. One of the most common structural problems I encounter (from both an SEO and a usability perspective) is the improper use of Flash.

Flash is a design program made by Macromedia and now owned by Adobe. I guarantee you've seen it used online. You know those websites that play a movie of sorts when you visit them, with a "skip intro" link somewhere down below? That's Flash.

When used carelessly, Flash can frustrate visitors and send them packing. Overuse of Flash can also reduce search engine visibility, because search engines can't decipher your Flash movies. I'm not saying "All Flash is bad." I'm just saying that many of the Flash implementations I see reduce both usability and visibility.

If you're going to use Flash (and you care about your website's visibility), contain your Flash movie within its own space, and offer plain text content in addition to the Flash movie. To see this in action, check out Adobe.com, WebTrends.com or ClickTracks.com. Adobe sells the Flash program, and even they're smart enough to avoid entire pages made of Flash.

7. Make Your Website a "Must Read"

Earlier, we talked about the importance of inbound links (from other websites to yours). When you have a website worth linking to in the first place, your link-building program will practically run itself. "Link worthy" websites come in all shapes and sizes, but they all have one thing in common. They all offer content that gets people's attention.

Aside from directories and other paid listings, few people will link to a "bare bones" website that offers nothing unique, helpful or interesting. If you start hunting for inbound links before your website has earned its place on the web, you're going to have a long, hard slog ahead of you.

The more "link worthy" your website is, the easier it will be to acquire inbound links. The more links you acquire, the higher your website will rank for key phrases. The higher your website ranks, the more people will find you online...you get the picture. It all adds up to more leads and more prospective clients!