90 Day Challenge – Day 4 – Embracing your Inner Geek – Understanding Google and Other Search Engine Stuff

So what does this have to do with real estate?  Consumers are turning to search engines like Google to look for everything, real estate is no exception.  Understanding how Google works is the first step to grasping internet marketing for real estate.

As the video mentioned, what made the Google experience different from other search engines was the concept that ideas and information on the internet are related and that relationship in the internet world is demonstrated by links.  The relevance of any website can be judged or ranked by how it links or relates to other sites.  Here are a few new geeky terms for today’s vocabulary lesson ( all from Wikipedia) :

• Backlinks (or back-links (UK)) are incoming links to a website or web page. In the search engine optimization (SEO) world, the number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (though other measures, such as PageRank, are likely to be more important). Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a webpage may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page.

• Search Engine Optimization is the process of editing and organizing the content on a webpage or across a website to increase its potential relevance to specific keywords on specific search engines and importantly ensuring that external links to the site are correctly titled and in abundance. This is done with the aim of achieving a higher organic search  listing and thus increasing the volume of targeted traffic from search engines.

• Page Rank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.

Now that you have added Backlinks, SEO and Page Rank to your inner geek vocabulary, let’s look at a tool that will show how your website might be doing.

Meet Website Grader.  Go to the website and enter any website you want – yours if you dare – and get your site scored.  There may be things on the report that you don’t understand but with your new found geek skills, you will get the overall idea.  As an example, you can find the report for ewm.com here.

Homework assignment: Put your new skills to good use.  Google yourself – see what comes up.  I have been told that in today’s job market you need to have 2-3 pages of google results for yourself to get a job!  How many entries are there for your name that are you and not that other person with your same name?

Grade your website – how did you do?  If you are not happy with your scores – stay tuned to the 90 Day Challenge.