The running joke in just about every major city is that there are more real estate agents than there are houses. It may be a gross exaggeration, but the fact remains that if you want your real estate career to work, you need to attract paying clients. In the past, realtors did this by putting their faces on billboards, on the sides of buses, and on city benches as well as filling the newspapers with their listings. But times have changed. People with iPods on and cell phones in their faces don't notice bus benches. People with computers and e-readers don't subscribe to newspapers. So how do you attract clients? SEO.

If you're a Mississauga real estate agent who is not familiar with SEO, you're already at a disadvantage, because the vast majority of your competitors certainly are. They've already got their own websites and are using SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, to drive traffic to it, increasing their exposure and netting them more clients than bus ads and newspaper listings can. Look around on the internet and you'll see: there are hundreds of real estate websites out there. To get yours noticed in this ocean, you'll need help.

SEO gives you that help by improving your ranking on search engine results. The vast majority of people who are looking for real estate services in Toronto will do so online before they turn to newspapers or start looking at buses. Their first step is always to enter what they're looking for into a search engine like Google or Bing, because it's the quickest and easiest way to find what they want. Their laziness doesn't end there, either, because statistics show they will only click on the first two or three results. If your site is not one of them, you might as well not exist.

So how does SEO increase your returns? By increasing your site's attractiveness to the search engines. All search engines have specific things that they're looking for, and by putting these things in your website you increase your chances of coming in first. The most important of these things are keywords. If, for example, someone was looking for someone selling London homes for sale, and you had those words on your website several times, the engine would see you as a likely match.

Though basic SEO can be accomplished by an average real estate agent like you if you know a bit about computers and are willing to devote a lot of time and patience to trial and error, the best SEO is done by special firms who know what they're doing. Sutton Realty will have hired one, so if you want to compete you should to. Their fees may seem steep, but compared to your advertising budget for billboards and buses, it's a drop in the bucket, and it will have much more noticeable results.