Google’s Top 4 Search Engine Changes & Why Every Real Estate Agent Should Care

In 2012, online real estate marketing promises to be more challenging than ever before for real estate agents and brokers. This is largely due to the sheer number of competitors that have been, or are finally becoming Internet savvy in their marketing efforts. While being an expert on search engines isn’t attractive to many people, developing an overall strategy to win search engine placement on the web is now critical and should be a cornerstone in promoting your personal or professional brand and generating a steady source of ongoing leads. Organic search engine placement is a powerful way to gain dominance over your competitors in the single largest area where your customers are initiating the process on which home to buy or sell and deciding which agent to hire.

Understanding the basic principles behind how search engines work TODAY can take you a long way in your online marketing efforts, primarily because you won’t be chasing trends that have already been debunked or devalued. People who work in the search engine optimization industry basically have a place in business, because search engine algorithms change frequently and have a direct impact on how your web pages rank for money making keywords. Being proactive and making changes in how you optimize, design and create content around a web page in alignment with algorithm changes can really make a difference between transactions and no transactions.

In the past year, Google has made some changes that have a far reaching impact on search. Let’s take a look at some of the most critical of these and go over some of the steps you can take to make the most of new opportunities and changes that can be made to mitigate negative results.

April 11, 2011 – Global release of site quality algorithm known as “Panda.” If you haven’t heard about this, you really need to read on. This algorithm change was meant to weed out the overabundance of low quality, low content web pages in Google’s index and a ton of sites took a big hit on this, even those whose webmasters perceived their content to be high quality and high value for the public.