Increasing Exposure and Visibility
on a congested Internet
Listings are marketing assets. In the past, a listing has given the listing agent the opportunity to place sign in front of a home and brand him or herself in that local neighborhood. The Internet is providing the same opportunity for real estate agents to brand themselves online through their listings.
Major industry store fronts and the wave of new store fronts and vertical search engines are providing the newest and most effective way to brand yourself through your listings. Currently, it is also the most cost effective way to advertise as most of these site will publish listing content for free.
Vertical Search, blogging systems that facilitate tagging, and microformats are all providing ways for consumers to find more content, more easily. It is becoming more important to publish better content that not only gets consumed, but can be found. By publishing content better, what do we mean?
When you publish listings to your own website, do they exist on their own unique URL or do they exist in an iframe. Search engines can not generally view content in an iframe. If you conduct local real estate searches you will find sites like Homegain, RealEstate.com because they have figured out this very simple fact a very long time ago. You will not find Remax, C21 or Coldwell Banker, because they have not focused on publishing search engine friendly content.
When you publish a listing, do you write detailed content, meta information and page titles that not only describe the listing, but use keywords that consumers use in serch? The document must accurately describe the content.
When you publish photos of your listing, are you embedding meta content so the images can be indexed by search engine image search?
If you have a extraodinary listing, does your listing content, the photos, slide shows and video make people want to talk about it and share it? With blogging, more people are having discussions online. Are they talking about you and your content?
Are your listings syndicatable?
Publish content properly is becoming increasingly important for online visibility. Real estate companies will need to ensure they are using tools that facilitate easy publishing and syndication.
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