In search of Google Pearls of Wisdom: Is there a Perfect Solution to SEO for Realtors (or anyone for that matter)?

By admin • August 14th, 2007

Day in and day out I hear Realtors talk about the chase for Google’s reward.  There are many ways to pontificate about success in this realm, but my favorite is by far simple philosophy.  Yes, Google measures every website based on an algorithm with over 200 heuristics… to that I say ‘so what’, it doesn’t have to be rocket science.  In fact you can improve your favor with Google with a few simple ‘Aha’ moments…

Let’s think very simply about what Google’s credo must be.  They have said time and time again, we are in the business of advertising.  They are great at it, why fix what ain’t broke – right?  There is no reason for them to jump into the business of real estate or anything else for that matter. 

For them to make money from their advertising model their search interface must be the best at what it does – or no one would click through on all those Adwords (PPC) campaigns.  Think about this for only a second – what makes Google the best at what they do?  The answer is simple, they are excellent at predicting human behavior, they strive to provide the best recommendations to the millions of questions entered into their search query on a daily basis.  Every day they strive to get their machines to think like a human.  And guess what, they are pretty darn good at it!  So here’s the fundamental question, why are you all trying to think like machines?  The answer to finding favor with Google is to be yourself.  Think about what you would want to see when you encounter your own website or blog.  Think about how you can provide the most valuable resource for your target audience.

Let’s take it one step further… what does your audience want?  Well answers of course!  But they also want good, timely, fresh, and relevant answers to their questions.  Pending the query, typically the most relevant answer to something will be the newest data that happens to be a match.  Google knows this as well, it’s one of the reasons that content freshness is such an important factor in their algorithm.  It’s also why real time technologies such as blogging tend to trump static websites that haven’t changed for years.

Google themselves make this crystal clear.  In their Quality Guidelines (contained within the Google Webmaster Guidelines – an interesting read btw, definitely worth it), they simply state,
 
"Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?"

"Would i do this if search engines didn’t exist?"  Hands down, that says it all.  If all you cared about was providing a good, timely, user-friendly resource for your target audience – what would it look like?  A simple user interface, links to only those things you consider valuable, educational in nature, the most current content?  There’s one thing that is clear… it sure wouldn’t contain any tricks or gimmicks.

Lesson learned… listen to your audience.  What do they want?  How can you strive to give them the best online resource in your marketplace, how can you make them feel comfortable about using it?  Should you ‘force’ them to sign a form to access valuable data… I’ll bet you can guess what I’d say!

Sure, there are things that you can do to be a better online citizen (see Design and Content Guidelines), but be reasonable.  Take them in stride and keep your eye on the bigger picture!

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