Search Engine Optimization – following the rules

February 6, 2013 9:33 pm Published by admin

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Search Engine Marketing in Real Estate is beginning to be considered a ‘must-have’.  With the NAR reports consistently reporting numbers in around 90% of new buyers looking online for real estate, we know that if you are not there, you are missing out.   But our clients often ask us what the science is behind SEO.  There are new ‘rules’ that must be followed in order to stay off the radar of things like Google Penguin and Panda and many companies make the mistake of trying to find away around the rules.

The truth behind SEO as with everything else in life, is that there are no short cuts.  Google is getting better at ranking sites based on their REAL quality and REAL relevancy.   There are of course tricks of the trade and ways to optimize your site in the most effecient way, but truth be told if you want to be found, be worth finding.

So what is Panda?  According to Google’s official blog post when Panda launched,

This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

And what is Penguin? Again according to Google,

Sites affected by this change might not be easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise, but the common thread is that these sites are doing much more than white hat SEO; we believe they are engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings.