One of the barriers to building a home staging business is getting found by homeowners and agents in your area at the precise time that they need your services. That’s why having an internet presence, and coming up higher in Google and other search engine rankings, are so critical.
I just watched a free video featuring top SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts explaining some of the best ways to help your website get found. This is a complex subject that I’ve taken a 60 hour course in, but this video certainly hits some of the highlights. For example:
- When “spiders/bots” scour the Internet looking for websites, they travel through links. That’s why it’s critical to have links within your site and to have outside sites link to yours. You get this automatically as a member of the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers.
- “High value” links are one of the best ways to boost your search engine ranking. That’s why when you have a profile page on the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers, I provide you with a link to your own site (if you have one). This alone will significantly boost your site’s ranking because Google and the other search engines already know that StagingDiva.com is a high-traffic site about home staging. In other words, a link from my site is a “high value” link!
- Avoid javascript, flash and HTML forms as search engines can’t read them, and your site will be “doomed to failure,” they advise. The Staging Diva site uses none of these for this very reason. “Flash” websites and those that use “Javascript” look great to the human eye, but they’re invisible to search engines. So, if you’re using some kind of template program to build your own site, make sure it doesn’t use these before buying!
- Write the site so visitors want to come back. StagingDiva.com has fresh content almost daily, plus lots of how-to information and tips. This keeps visitors coming back. More traffic means more search engine ranking!
Learn more about how to join the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers.
You can watch the SEO video here. Don’t get scared off by the technical terms they use!
Debra Gould, The Staging Diva
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging
Discover the ONLY Home Staging Business Training Program taught by a seasoned entrepreneur who has successfully grown her own home staging business (not as a side-line to selling real estate) — The Staging Diva Training Program.
With an MBA in marketing and hundreds of home staging clients, internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould, The Staging Diva, is uniquely qualified to train others how to start and grow a profitable home staging business.
[tags]home staging, home stager, search engine optimization, SEO for home stagers, home staging business, Debra Gould, Staging Diva[/tags]
Stacy Goade says
Debra,
Because of all the website and SEO information you continue to provide to your cadre of home stagers I am better informed about setting up a website, know what kinds of questions to ask my website designer, and am able to stay up to date on SEO and site management. All of these are important because of the value of internet marketing, and because of the time and money investment we put into creating our web presence. The video link you include in this posting gives us access to reliable experts in the SEO world that support your advice to us and provide us additional topics to research. In a separate posting you mentioned how important it is for us to be confident about our home staging abilities and business. I think that having a professional website that gets better and better over time only adds to our professionalism and leads others to be confident in our business and expertise.
Debra Gould says
Thanks Stacy, glad I could help! I agree with you that having a professional web presence adds to your professionalism and credibility.