Real Estate SEO gets more complicated as the Natural Search results gets more crowded:
You may have missed it, but a few months back Google promised to start mixing their various other search results into their regular search. They call it....Drum Roll.........Universal Search.
Real Estate Video and You Tube, Blogs, News, Images, Local, and Google Base=Google Natural/Organic search results......
Here are the results from Comscore:
Out of 1.2 billion queries surveyed, 220 million (17 percent) contained a Universal search results. 87 million people searched during the measured period, and 58 percent saw a natural search placement. Within the Universal results, individual placements broke out this way:
Video 38% News 34% Images 19% Multiple placements 15% Maps/Stocks/Weather 10%
I have thought this a very sketchy path for Google to take sense it is very tough to "score" images and video without tags. And anyone who has been on YouTube has ended up on a Video that was tagged one thing, and played something else.
Thus, when these "mistakenly identified" videos and images show up under say Memphis Homes, the Video could be found for Memphis Belle the movie.
Much of the normal relevancy methods employed by Google (mostly linking), is simply not available in these "alternative" media engines.
However "Game On" and you can bet they will find a way to figure it out. So the SEO game has gotten a bit more crowded as you had better figure out how to get into these other engines.
Searching for homes online favors agents and big real estate companies. I look forward to the day when the internet will fully empower folks to sell for themselves.
Ron D.
Cedar Rapids, IA
http://www.3504random.com
Posted by: Ron D | April 10, 2008 at 09:28 PM
I don't completely think the consumer will totally benefit from Universal search. Many people will get annoyed and simply start using another search engine.
Posted by: Atlanta real estate | April 12, 2008 at 01:31 PM