Optimizing your website for search engines is expensive and time consuming. It's a project that's never really finished, because there are always new players coming into the Toronto real estate game and changing it up, and the search engines themselves are always tweaking their algorithms, making your previous work for naught. And yet businesses continue to devote resources to search engine optimization. Why? Because of the increase in client traffic it nets them. Here's how it works.

The most basic thing to remember is that people are lazy. They want to find what they're looking for quickly with a minimum of effort. They do not want to have to change their search term three times to find an agent that sells Forest Hill homes for sale. They will not scroll through three or four pages of search results and choose the one at the end. They will click on the first one almost every time. So if your site is not the first one in the list, you're getting a small fraction of the client traffic that is out there.

Depending on the statistics you look at, as much as 80% of searchers will click on the very first entry in the search engine results. Therefore making the effort to ensure that site is yours can net you a huge increase in traffic. Suddenly the house for sale in Mississauga you're trying to sell is getting 160 hits an hour instead of 10, all because you've moved up from number four result to number one result. It's worth all kinds of effort to see a difference like that.

In fact, if you were looking at television advertising, moving from a midday slot to a superbowl slot wouldn't even get you the same percentage increase in exposure, and superbowl slots cost millions of dollars that a Mississauga real estate agent like you just doesn't have. Therefore search engine optimization offers the best return on investment to a business. Spending a few hundred dollars to hire an SEO firm or a programmer to spruce up your site can net you thousands in increased revenues.

Then, there's the added bonus that the success or failure of your search engine optimization efforts can be tracked. You can find out exactly how many people are clicking through to see your High Park houses for sale and where they're coming from, so you know whether to put more or less effort into increasing your standings on the results page for different search terms.