David Barr's Sarasota and Venice Real Estate Blog

If you're thinking of selling your Sarasota or Venice real estate, take advantage of the tools I provide for you to stay abreast of the latest sales in your neighborhood. Get just sold real estate updates from the MLS by email.   Click here to sign up. You can also get a more detailed market report for your neighborhood or condo which provides statistics, distressed sales, and recent sales.   Click here to get your report. Please contact me if you have any questions or want to get your Sarasota and Venice property listed for sale today.

My real estate website, davidbarrhomes.com, has been a popular destination for buyers and sellers of Sarasota real estate for over 10 years.  Unfortunately, because of this I get frequent calls from SEO sales people telling me I could be doing better with Google search results.  They say my site should appear in organic search (the unpaid links) more frequently on the first page of results. One of these recent calls, combined with an equally recent Google consultation, really distilled the issues facing individual real estate agents trying to promote their websites. Devoting resources to SEO is a mistake, in my humble opinion.  Google has recently implemented a lot of changes on how it ranks sites (search for "Google Panda update"), and a lot of SEO tactics are no longer effective.  Google's changes favor sites with original content (like davidbarrhomes.com) that provide the information being searched for. The first page results on Google for real estate in an...