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Free SEO Advice - Blogging 101 - Real Estate Keywords

By
Real Estate Agent with Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty

Free SEO LogoHere's a keyword phrase that should be used multiple times in every post you write:

Real Estate

Along with "real estate" you need to include a location if you are writing about real estate you are trying to sell or buyers you are trying to attract. Otherwise your post will be lost in the 86,000,000 items that turn up under a search for "real estate" in Google. A search for something as simple as "Real Estate San Francisco" is down to only 242,000 pages. Updating that to "Real Estate San Francisco Mission District" get us down to just 7 results for that exact string of words.

A string is just words in sequence.
An exact string is words put together into a phrase or "string".

The central idea for your writing should be to have "exact strings of words" that represent what someone might type into their search engine. For the search above here are some variations:

String                                                                                 Number of Google Results

"San Francisco Mission District Real Estate"         8 pages  (221,000 without the quotation mark search)

"Mission District Real Estate San Francisco"         4 pages

"Real Estate in San Francisco Mission District"     2 pages

Most people today don't search using quotation markets to look for specific phrases, but it is increasingly common as searchers try to get more acccurate results. Your job as a keyword-focused writer is to think about a real estate searcher as you are writing your copy. Try to use the words that are most likely to be put into the search bar in Google. Those words that you are choosing because you think they are the most common search terms are called "keywords".

For the search I am talking about here, using all three variations on the San Francisco Mission District makes sense. You would also drop in references to home, house, single family residence, condo, apartment, etc. that help keep your writing interesting and let you vary your keyword combinations. Here's a completed sentence that might start a post about a new listing:

San Francisco Mission District real estate today is driven by young people looking for homes for sale in the trendy neighborhoods of the Mission District in San Francisco.

I got Mission District and San Francisco both in there twice. I got a "homes for sale" and added some descriptive text about trendy and young people.  That's a good keyword-driven sentence that you can adapt to your own use for your own area.

 

 

 

Jeff Craig
Hang Me Up Photos - Jamestown, NC
Greensboro Area Real Estate Photography

Thanks for the info.  Anything that helps SEO is worthwhile.

Nov 24, 2009 01:38 AM
Dave Roberts
Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty - Healdsburg, CA

One of the hardest parts about SEO is working within the limits of a corporate site. I see that you're a Coldwell Banker affiliate, so you know what I'm talking about. You have a very nice company site, but you don't have full control over it. That's what makes your AR blog such a great tool to extend your reach beyond the corporate site. Let me know when your personal site goes live and I'll be happy to do some free SEO consulting for you.

Nov 24, 2009 01:56 AM
Janie Coffey
First Coast Sotheby’s International Realty - Ponte Vedra, FL
Uniting Extraordinary Homes w/ Extraordinary Lives

thanks Dave!  What, would you suggest, is the length for a blog post for SEO and YEO?

Nov 25, 2009 12:00 AM
Dave Roberts
Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty - Healdsburg, CA

Janie - SEO oriented posts can be quite short. A tight focus on keyword density with only a few hundred words can work very powerfully. That's not likely to be enough for a good YEO experience. I suppose if you write tight prose you could do something powerful with your "You Engaging Others" content. If I wasn't aiming for short, powerful SEO, I would probably be in the 500 word range.

Nov 25, 2009 01:12 AM
Rich Cederberg
eXp Realty - Albuquerque, NM
eXp Realty Agent Albuquerque

Personally I never post w/o knowing what my keywords are going to be before I start writing. I wonder sometimes when I look at the number of agents who blog here for awhile then disappear if they understood some of these SEO basics.

 

Nov 29, 2009 04:44 PM
Scott Hoen
Carson City, NV
Carson City Clerk Recorder / Public Administrator

one of these days, everyone will learn how to perform a more relevant search with quoatation marks.  Good tip to keep getting it out there and for everyone to understand.

Nov 29, 2009 05:20 PM
Dave Roberts
Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty - Healdsburg, CA

Rich- sometimes I know what I'm going to write about, but often that first idea ends up on the scrapheap and a new story gets created. It's a mystery to me, but a lot of times what I start with ends up somewhere else. I think your focus on planning the keywords in advance is excellent advice. Thanks.

Scott- Searching is still an artform not everyone is good at.  Thanks for your feedback.

Nov 29, 2009 06:04 PM