ImoMarket has grown popular for two main reasons:

- We have created innovative services with real added value.
- We have learned how to explain to Search Engines what we were doing.

By sharing this experience with our clients, visitors and partners we aim at increasing the quality of our content, tie a valuable network of links and grow faster.

ImoMarket

Let's fix the basics:

1. Search engines want to provide relevant results, close to what human intelligence would classify as "good web sites".

The business model of most current search engines is based on gathering a large mass of users by providing the best possible results to queries.
They earn money by selling extra services to their huge customer base, such as: paid advertising, mailing services, web hosting, etc.

Therefore, a search engine will always want to provide very good results, in order to keep or increase its number of users. If it fails to do that, this will result into massive migration of users to the close competitors. (See: Search Engine History)

2. "Good, valuable websites" end up on top positions, in the long run.

This is a consequence of point 1. and of the current technologies used by top search engines.
At this time, about 80% of the results provided by Google reflect a degree of relevance that corresponds to a similar classification made by human intelligence.
The remaining 20% is reserved to periodically dumping new entrants into the top, for "trial periods".

Conclusion: If after a honest, impartial competitive analysis you still are convinced that your website is at least as good as those of your first 10 competitors, you will certainly get into the top 10 results relevant to your category, in the long run.
However, it is entirely up to you to shorten or lengthen this period, by making your site more "search engine friendly", or on the contrary...

3. Rome has not been built over night.

Even though the Internet is a fast moving environment, building a valuable project requires time, skills and effort, and search engines know that.
If you work on a greenfield project and you don't already own a portfolio of relevant projects that you could get backlinks from, don't expect to get into top rankings before at least 6 months, up to one year.

Far from being discouraging, this statement should be an incentive to use this "dead time" for improving your web site and find innovative services for your future visitors.

4. Links - Do your best and let the world do the rest.

Many webmasters get contaminated by a serious disease called "Backlink Obsession".
The importance of backlinks has been overrated to such an extent that many site owners refuse to recommend you, even if your project is remarkable, unless you link back to them.
Simply ignore them. They are stupid and not worth wasting your time. Moreover, backlinks from sites built on such principles will not help you a lot.
Since under these circumstances it becomes increasingly difficult to get backlinks even to most relevant projects, search engines have developed mechanisms able to analyze backlinks and their real value with respect to your site.

It is literally more interesting to get a real recommendation from a relevant PageRank 3 website (possibly humanly edited) than 50 backlinks from PageRank 2 "Link Exchange Directories" and other "link farms".

As backlinks fall out of your control, you should focus on building a nice network of outgoing links from your site, recommending the best sources in your interest area, without necessarily expecting them to link back to you.
It is important that you recommend a site because it is good, not because it ranks 1'st or 2'nd in Google.
By doing that, you confirm to search engines the relevance of the sites you recommend and your reward will come under the form of a better indexation for yourself.
When others will have understood the process, they will spontaneously recommend your site, if your content is good.

Example: In the menu "Romanian Real Estate Developments", apart from our own search module, we also recommend the best sources for this topic and here is the result in english and the result in romanian.

Worth thinking of it, right?

5. Hardware & Google Analytics.

Hardware means the physical or the virtual server your site runs on.
Google Analytics is a piece of code from Google, that you can insert in your site and which allows you monitoring and analyzing the traffic to, inside and from your web site.

Hardware is important because most search engines are able to detect the availability, speed and other technical parameters of your site.
If a code like Google Analytics is introduced in your pages, this monitoring can be even more accurate.

If your site goes down for long periods of time or the speed is a lot lower than the average, you may experience a significant downgrade in the search engine indexes.

For this reason, we recommend you chose a reliable hosting provider, even if you need to pay more for its services and carefully recruit your technical staff in charge with the site maintenance.

From our own experience, we can highly recommend www.awebhosting.com and www.powervps.com for hosting services, while if you need a technical subcontractor, our choice goes to www.klsolution.com.

Search Engine Optimization for Real Estate sites:

If you are reading this page, it's probably because you own a real estate site and you would like to get tips about how to increase its visibility.

Before reading any further, please note that you should already have at least a clearly defined vision for your website.

Assuming that you are a real estate agent, this vision could be:

"Have a website to help me get more clients and increase the number of my completed transactions".

From the start, you will have noticed that what is really important to you, is the number of completed transactions, not necessarily the number of visitors you manage to get on your site.
Ultimately it's better to have 3 visitors out of which 2 buy something, than 100 visitors, all asking boring questions and only one buyer - at the end of the day.


1. Increasing the number of your completed transactions:

To do that, you have two possibilities: either you manage to get very interesting goods into your agent portfolio or you manage to attract committed buyers.

It is rather unlikely that you will always get interesting properties, for lower-than-market prices.
On the contrary, attracting committed customers, it's all in your power.

To be continued...