The Essentials of a Good Real Estate Blog Post

Hi Robert,

No problem, happy to share.  The full article actually provides more in-depth specifics for each rule.  While these things seem obvious, sometimes the devil is in the details!

Boy, I forgot how much fun Active Rain can be!  I'm glad you guys are still tuned in to conversations about blogging!  Let me see if I can get you all a response here...

Firstly, let me apologize for not including the entire article here.  I wanted to avoid duplicating content but at the same time thought the article might be useful here.  Active Rain is a great place for me to provide education for those that are interested and get some link juice, but first and foremost I'm always concerned about getting content onto our company blogsite to drive relevance.

Karen - One of our biggest problems is always adoption (communicating the importance of targeted and constant content addition to your real estate blog), so you're right, this is mainly just a set of guidelines to help blogging Realtors stay focused.  Experienced bloggers always have their own tricks, but we find these basics are very helpful to staying centered on business goals.  My main mission is education, so I'm always all ears when it comes to tips and tricks others are using!  Examples for each point is going to get long, so I'm going to use efficiencies and create another post with the specifics!  (By the way this is one of my favorite tricks, I often turn questions asked by one person into a blog post that can benefit a larger audience).

Konnie - "leverage your blog post content" simply means to make the most of the content you choose to write about.  Search spiders do behave in some predictable ways.  One thing they tend to do is to consume content toward the top of your post first.  You always have two goals when setting any blog post free: 1.  Entice the search spider, and 2.  Get your human reader to read-on to your call to action.  Doing both is sometimes a challenge :)  When i say leverage the content, i really mean think about trying to please both of these entities.  For spiders: get some of your important targeted keywords and keyphrases (what is the goal of your blog post - are you trying to resonnate for a certain phrase in the search engine or are you targeting a specific audience?) into the first paragraph.  At the same time, let the reader know what to expect so they'll be encouraged to read-on.  Keywords and keyphrases should be added naturally.  Try to create keen sentences that are first and foremost adding value to the reader.  Stuffing keywords in just to get them there will not help you in the long run.  For specific examples, see the link above in my response to Karen!  

Thanks Ann!  To anyone interested - for educational purposes take a look at Ann's real estate blogsite, she is one of our clients that I think really does a great job!

John, Gary, Mark - thanks for reading!

Hi Karen,

I have indeed just recently re-entered the world of Active Rain!  We've been writing away for years on Real Estate Blogsites, so there is definately LOTS of stuff there (it can be overwhelming I agree).  Since I can't upload an attachment here, I'll email you a pdf of a condensed version of articles that should be helpful!

Also... search engine spiders (also referred to as bots, or robots or (in Google's case) Google Bots) are simply just machine processors (computers) that crawl all websites out there on the world wide web to help the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc) efficiently and effectively index that content.  There are millions of spiders out there working for many different companies digesting website content each and every day.  Google Phd's work very hard to create mathmatical equations that get their robots to think like humans.  The spiders are what enable search engines like Google to give you an appropriate/accurate recommendation when you perform a search query!  When you hear someone talk about SEOing a website, they are trying to do things to the site [usually with content, links and keywords] to "please" the spiders so that the website might rank high for their important local keyphrases naturally (also referred to as the organic area of the search results - anything NOT paid for, but earned).  It's a tough game, that's why we like the organic route - blogging!