The Long and Short of It – Tails in Search Engine Optimization

Our article a week or so ago made it clear that paying attention to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a critical component of any successful real estate website strategy.  Realtors read and study SEO, try to do their best to understand how to appeal to the search engines, and then try to use what they learn to get better search engine positions. One of the phrases we see a lot is “long tail” in relation to search queries.  Of course, there’s the opposite as well, “short tail.”

So, do we have a better shot at a good position and visits to our site because more than 30 million people are using the phrase “real estate?”  Nope.  It’s just too broad a term for our example Colorado Springs, CO real estate agent, to try and optimize for that phrase to attract local website visitors.  And, the competition for the term is fierce.  The site will be many pages deep in the search results, and even visitors that might come from this search are highly unlikely to be looking for a home in Colorado Springs.

With less competition for long tail phrases, should this agent be optimizing pages for the single long term phrase “Colorado springs real estate for sale?”  Nope again.  It’s not that she needs to concentrate on this or any other single long tail phrase, but that creating content that uses a great many words and phrases relevant to real estate in the Colorado Springs area will begin to enjoy traffic from people using longer tail keyword searches.  Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool gives us pages of examples for this Colorado Springs site, but we’ll just look at a few here:

Choosing one long tail phrase, perhaps the “Colorado springs condominiums” phrase, and optimizing the site’s home page for that one would be a good decision.  There’s good search volume, and the competition will be much less for that phrase, giving the site a much better shot at high position on the first page for that phrase.  You’re getting the picture.  Then throw in every neighborhood and subdivision’s name with ending phrases like “real estate”, “homes for sale”, “waterfront”, “short sale” and others, and you can see that there are thousands of long tail combinations that people will use to search for real estate in your area.

RealtySoft.com begins by constructing websites to be search engine friendly.  Using SEO-friendly URL linking structures, it’s easier for the engines to index the site content. RealtySoft’s integrated IDX solution also adds hundreds of “Relevant” listing pages to your website. But, not stopping there, XML sitemaps are created that lead the search engine robots through the site to make sure all of the words and content are indexed.  RealtySoft’s syndication of listings is also helpful in getting links back to the site, an important ranking criteria for Google search.

For more information please contact us today RealtySoft.com