Real Estate: A Great Analogy for Search Engine Optimization

Most folks have an understanding of the basic concepts of value in the Real Estate industry. Many people will own a house or condo at some time in their lifetime. Even if a person never ends up owning a house, they more than likely have considered buying property at some point. There are very few purchases like home buying, and real estate is offer the most analyzed.

Subsequently, most people have a good grasp of the factors that influence the true value of a property: 1. The foundation 2. The Structure 3. Location

Foundation: Most folks understand that a house is built from the foundation up. If the foundation isn't solid, everything else can be compromised. The same is true of your SEO initiative, see: Austin SEO. A solid foundation is crucial to long-term success. And in SEO, keyword research is your foundation. Everything you do must be built upon it. Without an analysis of customer search behavior and the competitive landscape of the industry, an SEO program will lack the insight needed to get off the ground. Just like a house with a weak foundation.

Structure: While a foundation consists of building blocks of a solid residential structure, its only a fraction of the entire house. How many residents will eventually come to live upon this foundation? The fundamental value of a home's foundation is that it provides a permanent base for the structure that will eventually rest upon it . In the end, the quality of the construction is just as important as the foundation when assessing property value. As in the fairy tale story of the three little pigs, a house made of straw holds no real value.

As we continue our analogy of SEO and real estate, your company website is the online version of a house, and Google is the both the appraiser and city code inspector. As such, Google and the other major search engines, will assess a wide range of checks on your website to determine its value, quality and relevance. Similar to the real estate market, layout and architecture are important components in the calculation of property value. The same is true for level of materials used in construction. From an SEO perspective, material components include things like:

1. Web site code: Clean and well structured code is necessary to enable Google's spiders to access every nook of your online property.

2. Web site content: The old adage that content is king is as relevant as ever. And with the appropriate foundation work (keyword research), your content can be crafted to deliver maximum SEO impact via body content and other on-page elements (page titles, headings, anchor text etc). For example, if you have a page on your site related to web design Austin, the content and wording on the page should be related to this phrase.

Location, Location, Location: The final variable of the property value equation is the address. External factors will always influence the value of a property. Even luxury properties fail to realize optimal value if they are located in low value neighborhoods. Off-property factors such as crime activity and demographics contribute significantly to real estate valuation.

Links of association also play a critical role in the search engine's ranking for a web asset. For a search engine optimization specialist, inbound links from high quality web sites will improve your company's value in the ranking calculation. Every day, almost in real-time, the major search engines gather and assess the links to each website. This is the primary way search engine's like Google will determine relevance of an Internet user's search phrase to the content on your website. If your site is associated with the Internet's version of bad neighborhoods like link farms, you can't expect search engines to give you anything more that a temporarily higher ranking.

In competitive markets, top Google rankings do not happen by accident. Want to prove to Google that your website should be ranked first? Make sure your link building efforts are focused quality over quantity.


Aaron Kaiser is the Business Development Director for Web Design Austin SEO, an Austin web design firm that provides search engine optimization, web development and design services in the Austin metro area and throughout Texas.