Chapter 1: Find the right keywords…
Sunday, July 26th, 2009 Blog, Real Estate, SEO by adminChapter 1: Find the right keywords and evaluate the competition
To find the right keywords, you’ll need to decide what kind of site you are running. Every site has a different focus; some are community sites and some are personal sites. A site that presents information intended to promote the city and surrounding area is a community site. For a community site with an emphasis on real estate, the best keywords will be set up with the town or city name followed by the words “real estate”. For instance, a community site in Orlando would feature the keywords “Orlando real estate”.
A personal site is one where you promote yourself, not a city or area. Keywords should be formatted with the name of your city followed by the words “real estate agent” or “realtor”. Using Orlando as an example city, you would have the keywords “Orlando real estate agent” or “Orlando realtor”. This makes your site look professional and helps local clients find you fast!
As you choose the keywords you want to use, keep in mind that the less competition a keyword has, the higher your site can climb in search rankings. To find out which keywords are the least competitive, go to Google.com and type in the keyword you want to use.
Let’s look at “Orlando realtor” and “Orlando real estate agent” and see which one turns up fewer hits. Searching “Orlando realtor” brings us 319,000 hits. When we search “Orlando real estate agent”, we get 423,000 hits. The best choice for a less competitive keyword would be “Orlando realtor”.
There are at least three good reasons to choose “Orlando realtor”. For one, it is shorter. The word “realtor” is also more commonly used than “real estate agent”. The third reason is the one we’ve already emphasized: there is far less competition when we use “realtor” instead of “real estate agent”.
When you are ready to analyze your competition, you can find nearly all the necessary tools online. We’ll look at them later; for now, find your competition. To do this, use this tool to find out where you rank in search engine results.
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-search/
This tool is easy to use. Just type your chosen keywords into the box. In our example, we would use “Orlando realtor”.
When using this tool, keep in mind that it will only display the first 100 results. If your site is nowhere to be seen within the results, think of the sites that show up as your competition.
Once you’ve determined which sites are competing with yours, it will be time to examine the sites right above yours in the search results. It is important to find out what makes their site different in terms of SEO.