In order to win the highest placement of your web site on search engines, it is very important to have as many pages developed as you can that will reside on your site. One big mistake that people do all the time is use links to other sites that they assume will give their site content and therefore recognition from the search engine gods. Links can be useful tools for visitors but do very little to get great recognition.
Since Starboard Commercial introduced its news and research section, traffic to this section has increased over 20 percent per year. However, overall traffic to Starboard's site has increased over 60 percent during the same period.
Although not as many visitors are viewing this section as the rest of the site, the section’s size on the site has given search engines more notice of the importance of the site to determine its placement on search engine results.
What stories should go into your news and research section? I personally write three different types of articles for our sites. First, a true real estate storyline. Second, technology tools that would be interesting to not only real estate oriented people, but the public at large. And third, political type stories touching local as well as national topics. All three story lines create a general topic mix that gives search engines pause to determine where to post our sites. Our sites show up on technological and political related topic searches as often as real estate oriented searches. The ultimate goal is to give your site broad exposure.
How can you fill story lines if you do not have writers available within your firm? One good way is ask your clients to write stories. Attorneys, architects, furniture vendors and telecommunication vendors all would love to provide story content for free advertising. Another way is to capture new stories that you find interesting and call the author and ask permission to publish these articles on your site. I have received a number of interesting articles that I have in turn reprinted on our site.
Monthly graphs and interpretations of graphs showing current vacancy and absorption are always valuable information that will attract interest. Expanding this graph to include state and national trends would again give you broader exposure with search engines. Completed deal announcements and Case studies can also be interesting articles.
Another important tool is to create email lists of local editors of newspapers, web oriented real estate sites and larger national publications that you can send these stories to, with links to the other stories in your news and research section. An important trick is to indicate in the cover sheet of the email that they can use all or part of these stories for their own use without consent by you. My articles have been quoted in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal and I did not even know that it had happened until after the fact. I have secured at least five deals over the last year from clients that initially contacted me because of these “at large” stories.
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Peter
Rosenthal and Steven Newhauser are agents 
