Quick, this is a test! This is a circuit board controlling your new car's various warning systems. Suddenly you realize that the last two times you crossed through a certain construction zone, your tire pressure warning activated. You couldn't get the warning light to go off until you adjusted one or more tire pressures, even though none looked low to you at all. And, it only happens in this one location. Which component is malfunctioning? And it may be none!
Don't think this is crazy, as it's happening to me right now. I can't change my route either, so it looks like I will be stuck with this problem until construction ends, some transmitting they're doing I guess. The point is that there is NO WAY I'm going to figure this out. It's just too complicated for me, and I would have to pay a lot of money to MAYBE get someone else to figure it out for me.
SEO is the circuit board of real estate Internet marketing.
Let's admit right now that we either have to be real estate experts or SEO experts. No argument, as SEO is a moving target. Google did more than 500 minor changes to their algorithm in 2009 alone. To become and remain an SEO expert will require constant attention to your craft, massive reading, and a lot of trial and error on a daily basis. So, we're going to be real estate experts. And SEO experts are going to charge a lot of money!
Just like you'll pay a small fortune to the auto shop to troubleshoot your site's SEO and make repairs, you'll do the same with SEO gurus (that's what they say they are anyway). And, just like your car's circuit board problem, if the first fix doesn't work, you don't get a refund, just another bill to try something else. We need to break down SEO to things we can do every time we put up new web pages or blog posts, and we need to keep it as simple as possible so that it becomes second nature. Will we get the same results as a true SEO expert spending a lot of time on our site? Nope. But we will get results, and we'll not spend a fortune doing it.
We're not going into detail here about META Titles and Descriptions, as that's enough for another thorough post. We're going to talk about things you can do when you write your content, or can require from writers that you hire. I'm not claiming to be an SEO expert by a long shot, and there will be some who will say that I'm oversimplifying the problem. That may be true, but I want real estate buyers and sellers to come to my site, so I want key phrases that bring them there, and I want to use them in a way that makes it happen. And, I don't want to make a career of the SEO process.
"Hey Honey, I know we're almost late for the movie, but wouldn't it be fun to jump on the Web and do a search for Ourtown septic regulations?" NOT!
However, the person searching that phrase is someone you want to know. It's fun for real estate professionals to close deals from website leads, and some of those are going to come from people searching for exactly that ... local septic regulations. Or, they may want to know about well depths, or water quality issues. I practice in Taos, NM, a tiny town in the mountains in a high desert climate. So, these are things people search on. I just pulled key phrases that brought people to my site in the last week, and there were several searches on water and septic related key phrases.
That's a lemur tail, and it's a long one, as they use it like monkeys use theirs. And, it isn't shaped like a question mark for no reason. The question is, what is a "long tail" search, how do you use it in your website plan and content, and is this even worth thinking about? A long tail is a search with multiple words, the more words, the longer the tail and the more focused the search. As an example in my area:
- taos (way too broad)
- taos, nm (still too broad)
- taos real estate (most popular, but also most competitive)
- taos real estate regulations (great long tail, plus others below)
- taos real estate prices
- taos real estate listings
- taos real estate statistics
- taos area water wells
- taos septic regulations
- taos building permit process
RealtySoft makes it easy for you to set up your navigation and create new pages and sub-pages to guide your real estate website visitor to the information they want. And, RealtySoft's built-in SEO structure and link strategy will help you to get better position in searches. However, you can help a lot by taking advantage of RealtySoft's easy page building features. Create each one crafted around some type of information of interest to real estate buyers and sellers, and written around one or two related long tail key phrases. Here's where you use your phrase:
- in the META description and title
- in the first sentence (or at least by the second sentence) in the content/post
- one or more times in about every 150-200 words of the content, but write for the visitor not the search engine (readable)
- in the last sentence of the content/post
- most readers won't mind, and the search engines will like it, if you use the phrase in bold, italic, and in title tags (those h1, h2, h3, etc tags). The search engines note that it's been emphasized, thus must indicate it's an important part of the content in that page/post.
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