How to Harness the Benefits of SEO

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Search engine optimization (SEO) has increased importance in the real estate industry today. By optimizing your website with SEO best practices, you are helping to improve its organic rankings on search engines like Google. If you haven’t already, it is time to invest time and resources to optimize your real estate website with SEO. With this, continue reading and discover a few helpful tips on how to harness the benefits of SEO.

Be patient

The benefits of SEO do not happen overnight. It takes time before your website appears higher on organic rankings. In many cases, it can take several months. With this, do not become discouraged if you do not see results right away. Over time, the usage of SEO practices will produce results.

Research keywords

Have you invested time and resources into keyword research? It is crucial to know what people are searching for, so you know which keywords to include on your website. There are tools available today that can help you with this.

Post new content regularly

Search engines will find your website more favorable if you are constantly putting out new articles on a regular basis. This is because every time you post new content, you include more keywords on your website.

Ensure your website is userfriendly

Your real estate website must be easy for visitors to navigate. A person of any web experience should be able to click through your website to access all of your content. If your site is challenging to use, visitors will not spend a lot of time on it, which will decrease the likelihood of them coming back to it.

HUD Foreclosures

HUD foreclosures and VA Foreclosures are some of the best homes to buy when price is part of the equation. As with most Americans, price is always a concern. If not buying the same house for less, why not buy more house for the same dollar invested? When looking for a good deal it is hard to do better than the VA or HUD foreclosures market. The simple truth is that there are just more VA and HUD homes on the market, as they represent such a large number of mortgages that are generated each year. This translates into more foreclosures just by the magnitude of difference between all others comparing to the two largest.

The two largest also being government owned and operated means that they have less time to wait to make money back on the home. The FHA is especially known for selling HUD homes for less than the average sales price in a given area. FHA foreclosures represent a fraction of HUD but they are still a significant number of homes and both should be considered.

VA (Veterans Administration) and HUD (Housing and Urban Development) have different and unique opportunities for the buyer. Both are often forgiven for the local taxes normally associated with the purchase of a home (this is on a county by county basis). Be sure to ask the local title company or escrow company to look into it for you before closing as this is often missed due to their are not used to dealing with the 2 to 3 percent of the market that VA and HUD foreclosures represent.

Foreclosure Listings Increasing

As the market settled after the mortgage meltdown foreclosure listings also settled and fewer homes were on the market with a placard reading “Bank Foreclosure” in big red lettering. This was a good thing for the entire real estate market. Having an abundance of foreclosures brings the entire market down and it makes it harder for home owners, who would like to move, to get the appropriate price for their home as a similar home down the same street was sold for substantially less and the appraiser is using the foreclosure as a comparable sale.

This is just one of the problems when there are too many foreclosure listings in any area. Another issue is the television set that sits in everyone’s living room harping about the price of homes based on the number of foreclosures and this constant barrage of negative information makes most people sit on the sidelines waiting for the market to either implode completely or to correct itself. Meanwhile while they wait, others are buying foreclosure listings and making great investments.

Whatever the reason, a market can only handle so many foreclosure listings at any given time. The more foreclosures, the lower the market gets and this is a lesson the banks that were foreclosing and selling off realized too late. The market and their investments would have been better off if there had not been a rush to divest themselves of the toxic assets made more toxic by their own actions.