It probably took quite some time for you to build your business to the size that it is today. You started with obtaining your own real estate license, learned the ropes and became a successful agent.

You then took the next logical step and studied for your broker’s license. Once you passed the test, you looked for your own office space, bid your old broker a fond farewell and set out to make your own mark in the world of real estate brokers.

Now you’ve got a thriving practice with agents that work under your supervision, an IT department and an advertising team. You’ve shown what you can do on land and now you want to venture forth into the Internet world of real estate marketing.

You have the advantages of a large staff and a sizeable budget, so getting your name well known to Internet users should be a piece of cake, right? Guess again. There is a lot of work that needs to be done and because of the size of your agency; it may not be as simple as you think.

The larger your company is the more work you will need to put into it because you probably have a much more complex website. This could include pages for specific departments, and individual pages for multiple sales agents. It may also include general property searches, property searches by listing agents, property searches by price, etc.

The good news is, because of your substantial size, you probably have a lot of people working for you that can implement what’s needed for your Search Engine Optimization.

The bad news is you have a lot of people working for you that can implement what’s needed for your Search Engine Optimization. Confused? Let me explain.

If you own a large real estate brokerage, you probably have multiple sales agents that work for you. You may also have an IT team that is well versed in today’s technology and can easily implement what’s needed to bring your web site to the attention of those who are in need of your services.

However, the old adage that too many cooks spoil the broth is also in play here. Between your advertising team, IT team, and sales associates, each with their own ideas on how things should be done, the results can end up in a cluster of confusion and power struggles on everyone’s part.

Not to worry though. By employing steps to get everyone on the same page, and working as a collective unit, you will be able to use SEO to the fullest and reap the rewards for both you and your agents.

1) Be Prepared for a Long Road

Don’t expect to implement these changes over night. Depending on how complex your web site is and how many agents you have working with you will depend on the amount of effort needed on everyone’s part.

Even if you do manage to corral all of your employees, come up with a plan and implement it is timely manner, the wheels of the search engine turn slowly, so it could take up to three months for the spiders to take note of all of your changes and rank your page more highly.

Patience and perseverance are going to be key factors in the effective utilization of SEO. They are just as important as understanding the SEO concepts and employing them, maybe even more so. It’s time to roll up your sleeves and get to work.

2) Get Organized

The first step is to get things organized in all of the company’s departments. If you do not require regular reports on what each division is doing, now is the time to start.

Review each of the reports from the various departments and consider ways that each unit can do things to support the others. For example, your advertising team should come up with graphics that are minimal in size but are visually captivating and can easily be placed on your web page by your IT team.

Don’t forget to add HTML coding to your graphics so that they are seen by the search engine spiders. You want your web page to contain a lot of information without being confusing and here these two divisions can work together.

The same applies to your sales staff. Have your advertising team work with each person to come up with the best photos to place on the ad. Full length photos can take up a lot of space and few people who visit the web page will have an interest in what the salesperson is wearing.

They may, however, make judgments based on the sales person’s facial expression, so a simple head shot will allow your agents to be easily identified and also free up space to put more compelling information about that agent such as their individual areas of expertise.

3) Setting Up an Optimization Team

One of the bonuses of having a large company is that you are not alone in your efforts to become the number one real estate brokerage in your area. One of the biggest problems with some business owners is the need to do everything themselves.

This can end up costing the company a valuable resource: you. In order to be even more successful, you need to be able to confidently delegate work to individuals you know you can trust to get the job done. This will free up your time to come up with more ways to utilize SEO and further the success of your company.

Set up an optimization team by calling together all of the department heads and going over your companies goals. Have each manager assume the duties of coming up with ways for their individual departments to meet those goals and then have regular meetings to make sure that their ideas are workable and will complement what the other departments are doing.

Call for regular brainstorming meetings. Offer your staff incentives like bonuses for the best idea of the month or other ways that will further optimize your website.

Listen carefully to them because they are the ones that are on the front lines everyday, battling it out in the trenches with the competition that wants to lure your business away.

Because of that they may have ideas that you may not have ever thought of and you can use them to boost your ranking and conversions.

Including all of the divisions of your agency has another bonus attached to it. It makes them all feel that they are apart of a team. This will help them to work even harder for and with each other since the success of one department will mean the success of them all.

Each time you successfully achieve a new goal, let your team know that they are a fundamental part of that success. That their involvement is what helped the company to reach that goal.

Have a party or take everyone out to dinner. Showing appreciation will do even more to keep them working that much harder for their own as well as the company’s overall success.

4) Educate Yourself and Your Team

As a Real Estate Broker you probably know just about all there is to know about real estate in your area, and now that you’ve learned about meta tags, links, spiders and robots, its time to make sure that your employees understand these terms as well.

By understanding them, they will better be able to come up with ideas that coincide with these terms and further your company’s SEO goals.

When it comes to the mundane details of running a real estate practice, you are no doubt already well versed in how each department runs.

You keep up do date on all the new laws and make sure that your agents are also so informed. The same applied to your advertising and PR divisions. Each knew what it was that you wanted to accomplish and would work to make sure that that goal was achieved.

Prior to your decision to employ SEO to get your website noticed, each department would work independently to carry out their specific duties.

Now that you’ve decided to use SEO techniques, it’s time to call all of your departments together and do some cross training. Everyone has to be on the same page and by understanding the fundamental duties of each division, it will be easier to for everyone to come together and present ideas that are harmonious to each other.

A good example of this would be your IT department’s probable lack of knowledge about what it is your advertising department does and how it relates to them on an SEO level.

Typically the tech personnel are responsible to keep the server’s running and making sure that everyone’s computer remains operable.

They may also be responsible for updating your website, removing agents who have left your employ and adding the new additions. This would include bios, pictures and other information that is pertinent to that agent. They would also remove old listings and replace them with the new ones that your agents bring in.

What they might not be aware of is the importance of HTML coding and metatag descriptions. They may not understand how important having keywords embedded in invisible text is.

Why? Because before they had no need to know about it. You gave them the information you wanted inputted and they followed your instructions, unaware of the importance of how that information was inputted.

Make sure that your IT staff understands the basics of text, links and content. Make sure that they are aware of the importance of using HTML coding to convert graphics.

They probably already understand what HTML coding is but make sure that they understand how important it is to place this coding on each and every page that your site contains.

They may be quite proud of the flash animated graphic displays on your site that make it visually stunning and attractive but they may not realize that the search engine spiders are unable to see it.

If the spiders don’t see it then neither will those people who are searching under the keywords on your page. It’s better to have more text and less animation, so that the spiders will be better able to catalog and index your pages and increase the pages search engine rankings.

Your copywriters and advertising staff also need to understand the effective use of keywords and how they need to be distributed throughout the content on your sites pages. They need to understand the need for articles, blogs and newsletters and how to effectively get viewer’s to your site to leave their email addresses for follow-up.

Your agents also need to know about and understand these types of content. If they have individual pages on your site, they can use them to start their own blogs, articles and newsletters.

More sales for them means more money for your company and since each of their pages contributes to your site, those pages need to be written in such a way that the search engine spiders will recognize them.

This is why its important to bring your sales staff and your IT team together and make sure that each department understands not only why things are being done in a certain way but how to combine those things to make your SEO more effective.

5) Set SEO Goals for Short and Long Term

Earlier we discussed setting up goals you hope to achieve with your SEO plans. Now its time to break them down a bit further into two categories, long term goals and short term goals.

When implementing search engine optimization, while you might feel pressured to get all of the balls rolling at once that could end up in a recipe for disaster.

In order to effectively use SEO, you have to do so in a step by step manner. This way everything will get done in an effective way. Trying to rush could cause you to skip important steps or to take shortcuts in an attempt to realize your goals faster.

Instead, take your time and do it right the first time so you will avoid having to lose time valuable time correcting your mistakes and walking the same path over and over again. There’s an old adage that tailors use; measure twice, cut once. The same principle holds true for SEO.

a) Short Term Goals

Your short term goals should include:

• A careful analysis of your existing website.
• Determining what content doesn’t have HTML coding so it can be added.
• Removing old links that are no longer active or conducive to realizing your goals.
• Removing “fluff” content and adding informative ones.
• Making sure that you have auto responders for your opt-in content.
• A way to track conversions of your viewers into actual clients.
• A way to separately track your online conversions from your offline ones.
• Adding or updating navigation tools to make it easy for your viewers to find their way around your website.
• Determining the best time to schedule regular meetings so that they will be convenient for everyone.
• Appointing a person from each department that will be in charge of that particular division’s SEO.
• Deciding on an incentive plan that will motivate your staff to concentrate on their SEO’s efforts.
• Making sure your IT department has a full understanding of what their responsibilities are so that the content added will be not only user focused but spider friendly.
• Topics that can be used for articles, blogs and newsletters.
• Keywords that will be used in the above content to add relevance to your site.
• Appointing a specific person to be in charge of tracking what the competition is doing, (there’s enough competition out there that this may become a full time job).
• Scheduling a regularly appointed time for yourself to review all of the reports and make notes about how you feel each division can be improved the next month.
• Scheduling a time to meet with the individual department heads including the regular manager and the person in charge of that department’s SEO if different, to go over the reports and any notes that you have made.
• Establishing a data base of email addresses to market to, including all of the ones that your individual agents obtain from their pages.
• Establishing how you plan to divide the leads evenly among your agents.
• Determining how much of your agencies business you want to come from online conversions.

b) Long Term Goals

Now that you’ve written out the short term goals that you want to implement, its time to diagram your long term ones.

Your long term goals should include:

• A steady increase in the percentage of your online conversions.
• Increasing techniques to further target both your local and out of state audiences.
• Finding new ways to continue to effectively handle the steady increase of clientele that your website brings.
• Making sure that acquiring online conversions does not interfere with acquiring your offline ones.

6) Map Out Your Progress

Mapping out your progress is going to be essential to keeping your SEO campaign running smoothly. It’s the best way to be able to analyze what is working for you and what isn’t. The way to do this is by tracking the success of your various SEO techniques

If you haven’t added a hit counter to your website, make sure you do so posthaste so that you will be able to correctly record your percentage of online conversion.

Pay close attention to your opt-in content to see which ones garner the most email addresses. This will help you to determine what should be kept and what should be removed.

You should also pay attention to what’s happening with the individual pages of your agents. See which agents are the most successful in acquiring email address and conversions. This way you can share their techniques with the agents who have not had the same success.

There’s a lot of competition between agents and they might not be that willing to share their precious techniques, but it’s your agency and since this is a team effort, everyone needs to be required to make positive contributions.

There’s plenty of real estate business to go around and since your SEO techniques is bringing in so much of it, then no one should have qualms about sharing the wealth.

I know I’ve said it before but I will say it again now and probably again later on in this book. Search engine optimization is a continuous process. You will constantly have to track what’s on your existing site and update, remove and make changes to the content that it contains.

You will have to continuously change your keywords and phrases and make sure that they are relevant to the content. Tracking the progress of your SEO techniques will make it easier for you to know what to add, remove and change on your site to make sure that it stays effective on a permanent basis.