Archive for SEO
Examples of Hyper-Local Real Estate Blog Success
There’s a great post on Active Rain written by Donna Harris from Austin Texas. Donna does a great job of illustrating how her blogs are ranking well for long-tail search terms. As you may know, long-tail search terms are those search phrases that are related to your website’s main search terms, but are not as popular.
For example, in Austin, the main real estate related search phrase is probably something like “Austin homes for sale”. But, Donna is having success by focusing her blog posts on less popular search phrases that relate to communities or area names around the Austin area.
Make Your Post Titles Count!
It’s worth a trip to Donna’s blog to read her post for another reason. Her post includes links to several of her blog posts that contributed to her great ranks on long tail keyword phrases. Take a good look at how her post titles are written.
For example, one title is “Real Estate Hill Country Austin TX Homes Are Selling!” I know that many real estate bloggers might have written a title like “Local Homes Are Selling!”. That title might attract readers, but you’ll be hard-pressed to get readers to find that post! Using keyword phrases in post titles has a big impact on the ability of the post to rank.
It’s always a challenge to write titles that attract both search engines and readers. Another way to write the title could be “Hill Country Real Estate: Austin TX Homes are Selling!” As Donna mentioned in her post, her new approach may seem a bit more “robotic”. But, given the progress she’s made so far, I’m sure she’ll continue to find ways to satisfy both her readers and the search engines!
From time to time I run across another useful Google tool that I didn’t know existed. This time I saw a new tool in an Active Rain post by Rita Burke who markets Denver Luxury Homes.
Take a few minutes to read that post. Rita did a bang up job with illustrations on how to find and use the Wonder Wheel.
What does the Wonder Wheel do, you ask? It provides a visual “wheel” diagram showing search phrases that Google recognizes as related to a search you’ve just performed.
It could be very handy in identifying those “long tail” search phrases that you’d like to encourage the search engines to rank your site for. Once identified, you can use those phrases for optimizing blog posts, secondary pages on your website, and a host of other things!
7 Tips to Make Your Blog SEO-Friendly
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A client recently asked how he could use his blog to pump up his website’s SEO. Blogs can have a very positive impact on your website’s SEO if you plan carefully.
7 Tips to Make Your Blog SEO-Friendly
1. Blog Frequently - Blog as often as you can.
2. Optimize Your Blog - Use On-Page Optimization for your blog pages. On your blog, you can put keyword phrases in your blog’s title, post titles, post content, category names, tag names and the ALT text of photos or images that you use in your posts.
3. Maintain a Focus – You can blog about anything you want. But, especially when you’re first starting up a blog, make the majority of your posts about real estate and your keywords. That focus will help the search engines understand the theme of your blog.
Too often you’ll see blogs with a wide range of categories, none of which contain any discernable keyword phrases. If you were marketing in Atlanta, for example, your categories should include things like Atlanta Real Estate, Recent Atlanta Homes for Sale, Atlanta Real Estate Market Updates, etc.
4. Link to Your Website – Use your blog as a way to get quality incoming links to the pages of your website. This is a great way to get deep links to the interior pages of your site. You can write about a variety of topics and link to your community pages, MLS search page, market condition page, etc. and it would make perfect sense within the post. Use good anchor text in your links to get the most from them.
5. Link to Outside Resources – You don’t want to put too many outgoing links in your posts, but 2 or 3 links to quality outside websites that can be helpful to your readers is a good idea. You may get a link in return, and the search engines will notice your choice of outgoing links, too.
6. Submit Your Blog to Blog Directories – One way to jump start your blog is to submit it to blog directories to help the search engines find it. Just do a search for real estate blog directory, and you’ll find quite a number of directories that focus on real estate blogs.
7. Advertise Your Posts – Set your blog up to “ping” Update Services. If you’re not familiar with pinging or Update Services, take a look at this explanation on the Wordpress site.
Typically, you can also increase the traffic to your blog by being active on other blogs. If you read and leave comments on other related blogs, that may bring visitors on that blog to yours. And, if you leave comments, very often other blog masters will return the favor.
I was talking to an agent the other day who mentioned that many of the websites we customize for clients look very similar. And, that’s true - there are key elements that any website needs to have in order to be effective.
One of these elements relates to good internal linking. All of the home pages on sites that we customize have “graphic buttons” on the home page to quickly direct visitors to key pages on the site, for example. While these buttons aren’t text links that have effective *anchor text, the buttons do have keyword phrases as ALT tags, which the search engines read.
We also make sure that the home page introduces the visitor to the website. We want visitors to know what information and tools are available to them on the website. So, we add content that briefly describes pages of interest that are in addition those represented by the buttons.
Internet surfers in general don’t read every word on a website, but they will scan a page. Therefore, we make sure that the link colors on the site have a good contrast from the background color and the color of the text. And, we make sure that links are underlined, but only the links. Underlining for emphasis on a website only serves to confuse the visitor.
That may sound silly, but there are many designers who think that underscored links in a contrasting color are ugly. These designers try to hide links as much as possible so as not to conflict with the design. We think that’s silly. The links are there for a reason. If they are easily identifiable, a visitor scanning down the page will be much more likely to click on one.
But, there’s another good reason to have links on your home page to other internal pages. For one thing, you may realistically drive more traffic to your interior pages if visitors find links easily. The other consideration is the search engines. If you use good anchor text* on your home page when you’re linking to internal pages, those links give the search engines a good idea about the content of the page they’re about to visit.
So, while you want to concentrate on getting good incoming links to your website, don’t forget the importance of good internal linking. Giving visitors and the search engines as many ways as possible to get to your web pages is a good thing!
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*Anchor Text – The words that are used as the link to another website or web page. Good anchor text includes keyword phrases.
Jim Gilbert, who markets Austin Real Estate, is the first person to ask a question. Thanks, Jim! Hopefully this will be the first of many.
Here’s The Question:
“When I began posting neighborhood web pages, I did one for the basic information, another for the homes for sale IDX listings. I now want to combine the 2 pages. What is the best way to do this with minimal SEO issues from not having the second page on my site? ”
Here’s the Answer
Jim, I took a look at your website. You are currently framing the IDX listings into your web pages. In that situation, the search engines aren’t reading the IDX information.
If you want to combine the pages, put the IDX listings on the page that originally had the community overview, and delete the page that originally contained only the IDX listings.
The original content pages are the ones that a search engine would have been paying attention to. Adding the IDX listings to the original content page won’t have a positive impact on the page’s SEO, but it won’t have a negative impact either, so you should be all set.
Leave a comment if you need clarification!
