Current and prospective customers alike sometimes ask whether or not Market Leader’s lead generation websites are optimized for search engines.  While the short answer is yes, there is a longer explanation that involves optimizing each site’s code, content and community, an ongoing effort supported by us and our customers.

Yes, you read that correctly.  Our customers play a valuable role toward optimizing their Market Leader sites for search engines.  How do we collaborate on this effort?

First, we start by building each Growth Leader, Team Leader and RealtyGenerator site on a code base that is friendly to the Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines.  This includes using targeted keyword terms and phrases in each site’s title/meta/H1 tags – stuff the crawlers look for and use when indexing pages.

While search-friendly code makes our sites accessible to crawlers, it’s content that Google, Yahoo and Bing ultimately seek to organize and then present in the form of search results.  Each agent and broker site we launch includes an IDX listing feed, offering search engines a regular and fresh flow of unique, localized content to crawl.

By customizing the content on their site, customers play an active role in search optimization.  Regular updating and editing of certain pages will help create the fresh and unique text crawlers favor.  Each Vision site has tools for agents and broker to regularly customize and personalize their sites.

Finally, there is the community aspect to search engine optimization.  This includes link building, social media, and viral marketing, all of which is designed to create links back to your Market Leader site.  The more links, the better.  Whether blogging about real estate or commenting on related posts, our customers have an opportunity to promote their sites, generating “link juice” for SEO.

Is there more Market Leader can be doing in this space to better optimize our sites for search engines?  Absolutely.

Are we committed to doing this on an ongoing basis, both internally and with our customers?  You bet!

I look forward to sharing more SEO efforts underway as well as our future plans in upcoming posts.

Thad Westhusing is Vice President of Product and Network Development at Market Leader.  In this role, Thad oversees all of Market Leader’s online services for real estate professionals, including site design and development.