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Don’t Forget to Optimize Your Real Estate Blog

By
Education & Training with Thneed, LLC

 

If you are using a Wordpress blog, there are a number of steps that you can take to better optimize it for search engines.  In fact, for those of you who host your own real estate blog using the wordpress scripts, these optimization steps can be very easy and yield great results.  For those of you who are familiar with these techniques, I apologize for re-presenting the basics, but I have found that many real estate bloggers have not taken these step in their own blogs.  With that in mind, here is and introduction wordpress blog SEO 101.

Step 1.  Under your settings / permalinks tab, be sure to change the URL structure to “custom structure” and include only the string /%postname%/ in the text box.  This essentially makes the extended URL of your post the title of the post.  If you include keywords in your posts, they end up in the actual URL.  For example, in posting on the topic of prenatal vitamin (my wife’s blog) and using the post title Prenatal Vitamins,  the blog URL becomes http://www.bloomennutrition.org/prenatal-vitamins  which is about as keyword targeted as you can get with sub-directories.

Step 2.  Under your settings / general tab, update the Blog address and Wordpress Address  URL to include the www as opposed to the straight http://webaddress.com

Step 3.  Find the wordpress AutoSocialPoster plugin.  This tool allows you to automatically post a link to your new blog entries to many of your online bookmaking accounts.  The plugin is not free, but is well worth the money.  However, please be sure to check that it is compatible with the version of Wordpress that you are using.

Step 4.  For the next step, increase the number of sites that announce / ping your new entries when you add a new post.  Go to the settings / writing tab.  At the bottom there is a text box with the URL  http://rpc.pingomatic.com/.  In this area add any other pinging services that you can find.  A good list, and a great pinging tool, can be found at pingler.com.

Hopefully for those of you who are actively blogging, this post provides a little help.  Separately, to provide an update on our Agents Online lead system for realtors project, the site pops up as number eleven on Google for the Agents Online term and number four for the same term in quotations.  The real time SEO demonstration is progressing.

Kathy Knight
Intracoastal Realty Corp - Wilmington, NC
BROKER, ABR, CRS, GRI, SFR, SRES

Informative blog on the mechanics of SEO

Jun 02, 2009 06:47 AM
Andrew Mooers | 207.532.6573
MOOERS REALTY - Houlton, ME
Northern Maine Real Estate-Aroostook County Broker

With "postname" in your settings/permalink tab, there are some that argue about the maneuver. I agree seeing the key words in the title helps the spiders but...this is what wordpress codex says...

Using only %postname%

If you use postname as the only element in your permalinks to create a structure such as example.com/post-title, the rewrite rules may make it impossible to access pages such as your stylesheet (which has a similar format) or the /wp-admin/ folder [is this true in WordPress 2.0+ versions?]. It's best to include some numeric data (e.g. the post ID or date) in the permalink to prevent this from happening. Additionally, WordPress v1.2.x requires the use of a date structure in order for some features, such as the calendar, to function properly. /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ is always a good start.

Jun 02, 2009 07:50 AM
Matthew Naumann
Exit Realty Charleston Group - Goose Creek, SC
Goose Creek, SC Real Estate Agent

Great information.  I will look into pingler and optimizing the blog urls.

Thanks for sharing,

Matt

Jun 03, 2009 09:22 AM