SEO traditionally is a method whereby marketers manipulate their websites in order to gain favourable rankings in the search engines. Long ago this would be done by reverse engineering the top pages in the SERPS for a given keyword. On sites like Infoseek, Go and Altavista many SEOs would make their pages match each engine. This set about the birth of cloaking or what was to be known as Black Hat SEO. This practice has been frowned upon by most engines over the years. That is the practice of showing the engine one page look, while showing the human something else usually prettier.
Eventually hi bred search engines like Direct Hit came along and they would rank a page by how long your stayed on the page before returning back to the engine.
As it became easier and easier to manipulate the engines. It was obvious that new methods needed to be developed to determine the relevancy of a page to a keyword query.
Enter Inktomi and Google. The former looked at the number of links coming to a page or ink popularity.Google uses the relative value of the link, which comes from the value of the page, which comes from the links to that page. And so on and so on.
Realtors and SEO
Realtors for ever have been at the forefront of the Internet technologuies and thus SEO for real estate. Many have learned that good SEO aslo includes good conversion strategies that takes into consideration the end goal. That is more clients.
How SEO
SEO is basically making the search engine know what your page is about on purpose. Thus there are certain elements on the page that can help with rankings. The title tag, the h1 headers, as well as good code all go hand in hand in creating a strong search engine friendly page. But even with this, the on page is only about 30% of the marketing.
The rest of your muscle will come from the links on your own site to the page, and the links from other sites to that page. With Google it is even part of their original Page Rank algo developed at Stanford. Many other engines have made their own version of the linking formula.
Linking for Realtor Websites is something crucial if a site is to have any success.