Real Estate Website Content With an SEO Focus

Website content is the building block of any search engine optimization campaign. A successful real estate SEO program starts with keyword-rich content built around certain key phrases. And in this new SEO video, I'll explain what that means and how to incorporate the concept into your real estate website content.



Adding new content to your website is one of the easier ways to increase your web traffic, with all other things being equal. I also find that many real estate agents have too narrow a focus with their web content, which can reduce your overall success with SEO and traffic generation. This video explains (A) the importance of website content development strategy and (B) how to achieve it on your own website.

If you find this video helpful, be sure to check out the new SEO videos section of our website. I'm currently in the process of filming additional training videos, so I should have some more online later this week or early next.

Here's what to take away from this video and blog post. If you just "shovel" real estate content onto your website without even considering the type of information your audience wants, you are limiting your SEO success. However, when you take a more strategic approach to real estate content development, you'll enjoy more web traffic and a more successful website in general.

Related articles:

• 21 Content Ideas for Your Real Estate Blog
• Web Content Writing Made Easy, Seriously
  

Real Estate Marketing Strategies for the New Economy

There's no doubt that 2009 will be an interesting year for the real estate industry. The economy is still on shaky ground, buyers are having a hard time getting financing, and foreclosures continue at record numbers across the United States.

The question is, how do you plan to adjust your real estate marketing strategy to reflect this new economy we are facing? And beyond that, how will you adjust your business as a whole?

These are tough questions, but they are questions you must start asking yourself. I've spoken to a few agents already who are making some serious changes to their real estate marketing strategies in order to survive and thrive in 2009. It's beyond the scope and possibility of this blog to offer specific advice on marketing strategy -- that's something you must develop for yourself. But I can tell you this.

In the near future, those real estate agents who take an educational approach to their marketing are going to get the biggest share of business in their market areas. It's not enough anymore to say: "I'm an agent in your area and I can help you. Give me a call." Actually, that was never a good marketing strategy, but it's even weaker in the new economy. Home buyers and sellers have more questions today than ever before. So if you want to sustain your real estate marketing program in that kind of environment, you have to adjust the strategies you use.

For example, home buyers today have a lot of questions about financing -- more so than in the past. They have heard about people making mortgage mistakes and getting foreclosed on. And they know it's harder to get approved for a mortgage loan these days. So the best real estate marketing strategies are those that address these burning questions.

Where Marketing Strategy Meets Education

There are plenty of ways to take an educational approach to your real estate marketing program. Here are a few off the top of my head.

• Put on a home buyer seminar in your city. Give it a modern angle and theme, such as "Buying a Home in the New Economy." Promote it like crazy, and try to get your local news to cover it (the economy is a hot topic for them too). Attract enough people to your educational seminar, and you'll get some clients out of it.
• You could even take a "virtual" approach to the seminar marketing strategy above by using a service like WebEx MeetMeNow
  
• Another strategy you can use: Create a buyer's guide to the new economy (an e-book available on your website). Explain the importance of good credit, choosing the right kind of mortgage, etc. Position it properly from a value standpoint, and people will email you for a free copy.

These are just a few ideas off the top of my head. You get the idea, and the idea is that you can get more business in a troubled economy by educating potential clients about it. It's the kind of real estate marketing strategy that can help you survive -- and perhaps even in thrive -- in a down market.

Your Blog Marketing Plan - 5 Key Steps

Article Summary: Your blog marketing campaign will deliver the best results if you plan for success right from the start. Here's how to go about it the right way.

If you have not yet joined the business blogging world, but you are eager to do so, this blog marketing plan will help you navigate the long road ahead of you. In fact, it might even help you shorten that road by focusing your energy on the proven techniques for success.

So without further ado, here's how to take your blog marketing program from zero to popular in 60 days or less:

The Path to Blog Marketing Success

This tutorial assumes that you are truly starting at ground zero (hence the title). In other words, it assumes you do not currently have a blog or know very much about them. If that's truly the case, start right here with step 1. If you've already been blogging for a while, and you simply want some tips for blog marketing success, feel free to skip ahead.

Step 1 -- Launch Your Blog (Of Course)

Some people love to argue over which blogging program is best, and for what reasons. Let me spare you a journey into this opinionated abyss by saying this. What you use to power your marketing blog is not nearly as important as the quality of information you publish through the blog. Your readers will not care what program you are using, as long as the blog is easy to navigate and read, and worth reading in the first place.

With that in mind, I recommend that you use either Blogger or WordPress to power your marketing blog.

• Blogger (owned by Google) is easier to get started with. It's an external publishing tool, meaning you will go to Blogger.com to log in to the control panel. Once logged in, however, you can adjust the settings to that the blog is published onto your own website. This Internet marketing blog is an example of what I'm talking about. I use Blogger to power this blog, and I have it set up to publish the content onto a sub-domain of my website (see website URL above).
• WordPress has more bells and whistles, but it's harder to get started with if you want to publish your marketing blog on your own web domain. Unlike Blogger, WordPress is a self-contained publishing system, which means you will need to download all of the program files and upload them onto your web domain.

Here's the good news. You can experiment with both of these blogging programs to see which one you like best, before installing anything onto your own domain. Go to WordPress.com and Blogger.com to set up a free blog on their hosting domains. Then you can play around with the features to see which publishing platform you prefer.

Step 2 -- Create a Content Plan

Long before you get to the outward aspects of a blog marketing program, you need to look inward and figure out what you should be writing about. What are your blogging goals? What do you hope to accomplish with your business blog? Who is your intended audience, and what information do they seek? These questions will help you identify the most important topics for your blog.

It's also a good idea to do some keyword research to see what kinds of relevant phrases people are searching through Google, Yahoo and other search engines. This is an important step for any blog marketing program, because it will partly determine the kind of search engine visibility and traffic you get. I recommend making a list of the top 50 phrases people are searching -- phrases that are directly related to your products, services and business goals. Put them into a spreadsheet for easy management.

Now that you've done some soul searching and some keyword research, you can start listing the topics you plan to blog about. It's not a rigid plan you have to slavishly follow. It's just a helpful document to give you guidance as you sit down to create a new blog post.

Step 3 -- Start Publishing Great Content

Before you start marketing your blog to the world, you should spend some time developing your content. Fortunately, blogging programs make this easy for you. If you can type an email, you can publish content through a blog. It has the same level of simplicity, so there's no reason you can't publish new information once a day, or every other day.

This is where your blog content plan comes into play. Refer to that document often for blogging ideas, and don't be afraid to deviate from your plan and write what comes to mind. Sometimes the best blog entries are the ones you never saw coming -- those ideas that just "flash" out of nowhere. So embrace them when they come.

Here's what you should take away from this step. There's no point in launching a blog marketing campaign until you have plenty of great content. In other words, you need to have a business blog worth visiting before you go out in search of visitors.

Step 4 -- Announce the Blog Through Relevant Channels

If you've been working hard on your content for several weeks, and you feel your blog is a valuable resource that people will like, you should start promoting it through relevant channels. Find other websites related to the topic you're blogging about, and email them about your blog. Explain why their readers / visitors would find your blog useful. Some of them will ignore you -- that's just a fact of life. But others will be happy to recommend your blog, especially if you've worked hard to make it a valuable resource.

While we are talking about resources, let me stress the importance of this. Your blog marketing plan will be far more successful if you strive to create the kind of blog that provides real value to readers. The best business bloggers realize that it's all about the audience, and giving them what they want. So they do exactly that -- they create content that helps their readers achieve a certain goal.

Step 5 -- Start Networking With Others

Blogging is part of the new "social" Internet experience. As a result, most business bloggers are eager and willing to connect with others online. By reaching out to other blog publishers, you can develop the kind of mutual relationship that benefits all parties involved. In the process, you can benefit from more search engine visibility, more traffic to your blog, and a greater degree of interaction and participation.

Web Content Writing Made Easy

Did you know that writing web content is one of the easiest things you can do to improve your search engine visibility and traffic levels over time? It's true. Sure, link building has a lot to do with search engine rankings. But you cannot even begin to rank well for a certain phrase until you have web content built around that phrase.

So in this blog tutorial, I'm going to talk about web content writing, and how you can take the mystery out of the process.

Web Writing Tips

Think of all the things you'll be able to do with some basic web writing skills and the confidence to use those skills: You can publish press releases online to drive traffic to key sections of your website. You can create new web content to make your site more valuable to readers. You can start a blog and publish new information on a daily basis (a great way to attract new clients). You can create informational articles and publish them all over the Internet with links back to your site -- more traffic and rankings!

With some basic web content writing skills, there is no limit to what you can do online. After all, content is the fundamental building block of your Internet marketing program. Search engine rankings, website traffic, lead generation, client acquisition ... none of it can happen without quality content. So let's dive right in to our lesson on web writing like a pro.

1. Put Content Over Form

Let me start by putting your mind at ease, with regard to a common fear people have about writing. When you publish information onto a business website, the content is more important than the form. In other words, you don't have to write like William Faulkner when you create web content. In fact, it's best if you don't. Sure, you have to write clearly and cleanly, without typos and major grammatical errors. But when it comes to website writing, what you say is more important than how you say it.

The best thing you can do when publishing information is to (A) select topics your audience really wants to know about, and then (B) explain those topics in clear, straightforward language. Be thorough and helpful with your writing, and you have won half the battle already.

2. Turn Off the Little Man Inside Your Head

Negativity and self-doubt are the enemies of web content writing. We all experience these things at one time or another, and when left unchecked they can block the road to success. So when you write content for your website (particularly the first draft), turn off the internal editor inside your head. Remember, you can always come back and edit the web content after you write it, and before anyone will see it. The first draft is all about getting your ideas down before they float away.

When you do this, you'll be amazed at how much easier the web content writing process is. Ideas will come to you more easily, and you'll be able to get them down without being impeded by your internal critic. Before you begin a writing project, say to yourself: "Nobody will see this until I'm ready for them to see it. I can write like mad and then come back to revise things later on."

3. Forget About the Search Engines (For Now)

Writing the first draft of web content with the search engines in mind is a recipe for bad content. Remember who your real audience is -- people! So create your content in a way that makes it useful to people first. Inform them, educate them, and help them achieve some kind of goal on your website.

When you have created the kind of web content that achieves these goals, then you can go back and make sure it's optimized for search engine visibility. You can even use my book as a guide for this secondary process. And while we're talking about SEO, let me give you a helpful tip for writing the kind of web content that performs well in the search engines.

4. Narrow Your Topics to Increase Relevance

Have you ever read a web page that tackled too many topics in one place? Instead of segmenting the topics into "digestible" parts, the author decided to lump everything onto one page. This is rarely a good strategy when writing content for the web. It's best to limit your internal web pages (those beyond the home page) to one or two topics per page. This helps you in two ways:

• First of all, it makes your content much easier to read. Instead of sifting through five things they don't care about to find the one thing they do, readers can simply navigate to their topic / page of choice. So it helps with website usability.
• Secondly, segmenting your content helps with search engine visibility. If a web page covers 12 different topics, you are essentially diluting the relevance of that page (in terms of search engine rankings). But when you have tightly focused pages that address a specific topic, you increase the relevance of the web content ... and the likelihood that it will be presented to a search engine user who is searching that topic. So it helps with visibility too.

5. Outline Before You Write

When I say you should "outline" your content when writing for the web, I'm not talking about that Roman numeral system you learned back in your high school English class. I'm talking about creating a simple outline before you write to help you stay on track when writing your web pages. I have been using this process for years, and it has helped me publish several pages of website and blog content every day! I often teach it to my consulting clients as well, and it always helps them increase their web writing efficiency.

Outlining your website content need not take a lot of time, either. If you spend more than ten minutes on the process, you're probably over-thinking it. All you need to do is jot down some notes on the topic you are addressing, the key points you will make along the way, and how you will wrap things up.

Take this tutorial on web content writing as an example. To outline this article, I started by jotting down some notes on what I wanted to accomplish: "I will write a brief tutorial to help people overcome their fear of website writing. Specifically, I will offer five tips that have helped me a lot over the years, when creating content for the web." Then I simply listed my five tips, with a brief note about each one, and presto ... I had an outline for my tutorial.

Then I followed the other advice presented above. I turned off the little editor in my head. I forgot about search engines for the time being, and I did my best to create a helpful article on the specific topic of writing for the web. And if you found this tutorial useful, then I've achieved my goal.

Hopefully, you can now see that website content is not something to dread. You don't have to be a professional writer, and you don't have to spend hours looking at a blank screen or notebook. When you break the process down like I've shown you above, you'll be writing for the web with more ease and efficiency than ever before. Good luck!