We’d like to provide some more insight into your SEO needs for your website. At the Tenant File Property Management Software, we realize how busy you are collecting rent, maintaining your rentals, and providing information for your owners. However, you just cannot ignore the importance of keeping your website visible through SEO. But SEO has changed, and you need to be aware of that.

In the ‘old days’ , a large part of SEO meant optimizing your website through keywords place on your site, paying someone to create links to the site, and submitting articles to directories or article sites with links to your home page. If you are still focusing on those techniques, you are probably hurting your Google rankings. Through the Panda and later Penguin algorithm changes, Google has increasingly focused on ‘quality’ and how you are providing a service to the visitors to your site. So ‘selling’ a service has taken a back seat to ‘providing’ a service, and the difference is not as subtle as you may think.  Here are some examples:

• Google does really care much anymore about the number of links you have coming to your site. It cares about the ‘quality’ of those links. Are you involved in your community? If so, get links from local newspaper websites. Do you have links on real estate sites such as industry associations or property management groups? And don’t direct all of those links to your home page. You need to have other webpages (or landing pages)  focused on the topic that is pointing to it from other pages.
• In the past you could write an article about your business, fill it with your keywords and publish it to article sites. Now, you must provide content that is good enough for others to want to share it. So your content must not be full of keywords, but should look ‘natural’ and be of value to the reader. They should want to share it via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, and other social sites. Google is looking at the number of shares as a part of their evaluation of your importance, or authority, as they call it.

If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. If some is searching for your services, the experts at Google and Bing want to rank those sites that are providing real answers in their field of expertise, not just a company that has hired an SEO company to write content that is just a bunch of words with keywords added. That approach will only serve to make the Internet a more robust provider of real value, and not just reward the business with the more money for SEO. You know your business better than anyone, so take more of a personal involvement in the content you create, interact with industry groups, and write about your involvement in your local community.