Real Estate SEO

Posts Tagged ‘Wordpress’

One of the best ways to get ahead of the content challenge is to find ways to use your time efficiently. Blog when you have the time. But who has the time?

I’m at Jiffy Lube right now. This means I’m sitting in a waiting room and I have some time to hop on my Blackberry 8830 and search for a way to blog. 1 google search and I found this app which allows me to link my blackberry up to WordPress, which is the system behind this blog.

Here’s a link to the app, click here using your blackberry and the device should begin to download for you.

http://blackberry.wordpress.org/install

There are also wordpress apps for the iphone and probably apps for most smart phones. Just do some searching and ye shall find.

So, in less time than it took to get the oil in my car changed, I’ve installed the Blackberry wordpress app and written a blog post. Just think of all the places where you could find yourself with a few minutes to spare which you could dedicate to you seo campaign.

Content!
As a real estate agent, you’re not alone if you are struggling to find the time to blog. Your real estate seo compaign depends on fresh content. We’ve been chanting the battle cry for years: content is king! Content takes time. This app will give you some time to write it!

You may have wondered what you can do to optimize your WordPress blog for real estate seo…

If you are using WordPress for either your entire web presence or as a blog which is part of your larger website you will still want to make sure that it is fully optimized. Even if you already have an optimized website you still need to optimize my blog. Yes you do. What if you have the overall blog optimized, do you still need to optimize each page/post? Yes you do.

A great simple solution in WordPress that makes all of this much easier for you is the “All in one SEO pack” which you can install with one click through the “Plugins” section.

All In One SEO Pack

10 steps to optimizing your blog

1. Custom Permalinks: Permalinks, essentially your URLs, are now a basic part of WordPress that you can easily edit. Based on what your title is, your permalink will appear as such. My recommendation is to try to keep it short when possible and to have your keywords as they relate to your post included.

2. Meta Titles: Your meta Title, or Page title as it’s also referred to, is another essential part. It’s what ends up being the text in the blue bar of your search browser and also the text that is the first line of your site in the search results. You want to make sure that it is clear and relevant to your post otherwise you may turn readers away without knowing it.

3. Meta Description: You meta description is another part that appears in search results as text below your page title that is in essence descriptive information about what your site holds in store. You are limited by 160 characters so be sure to be precise, informative and whenever possible don’t copy text directly from your content.

4. Titles and Subtitles: Aka Headers; H1 and H2 etc. An H1 Header is your primary header. Within WordPress your post title will always be your H1 header. This further helps shows your readers and search engines what you’ve written about. Headers also help establish a hierarchy of your content. Typically your H1 title will be the largest and increase in size from there on. Makes sense right…You can easily format the type of header you want by choosing a different “class” or within the code source/HTML enclosing your text within <h2> … </h2>.

5. Content which includes your Real Estate SEO terms: I did not place this list within order of importance but more so order of flow from the top of a page to the bottom. If I had ordered it by importance “content” would probably have been first. Your content is extremely important because it sets you apart from all others (aka your competition). Your content should reflect your business, your services, goals etc. What you have to write about is precisely why people come to read your blog over and over again…you will establish loyal readers.

Once you’ve determined the focus of your blog, obviously something to do with “real estate” then you should stick to that. While you should have fun with it, please remember that you should incorporate your keywords in a natural way whenever possible. Incorporate news about neighborhoods in which you do business, your local involvement, featured properties, opinion pieces etc. People like to hear what you have to say and they certainly like knowing that they are getting the inside scoop from you (a trusted source) first.

6. Links: We have talked about getting inbound links for your real estate site before but this is about links within your blog. Including links like I have throughout this post, from a certain topic to a related topic/post within your blog or website is an important part of any site structure. You should also link out to other trusted sources/sites. This shows your readers and search engines that you get your information from trusted sources and share your information with those sources.

7. Images and ALT Tags: Really this should read “images must have ‘alt tags’”. Images are an important and rather engaging part of your blog post. Whether you include one or multiple images it’s a good practice to include unique images to help break things up visually. Since search engine robots (that crawl your site regularly in search of new or updated content) can’t see images, they need to have a “clue” of sorts…and that’s where “alt tags” (sometimes referred to as alt attributes or alt text) come into play. As you add new images WordPress will give you the option to optimize your “alternative text”…make use of that option and name your images according to what they are and not something like picture 1 and picture 2 etc.

8. Category Names: Categories are used to arrange more than one article into a common label. Similar to tags, they help organize content, both are used to label or name articles and arrange them. A good practice is to include broad keywords as part of your categories.

9. Tags: Tags are descriptions that will associate an article to various topics. Typically one-word descriptions of the most important aspects of the article with the most prominent keywords or commonly recognizable words are used. It is the tags attributed to a post that lets visitors search your site and then find relevant posts.

10. Call to action – pose a question: Similar to a sales pitch you want to have some kind of call to action in your articles. I recommend not using a “sales” approach where you try to sell your services by saying something like “if you need a realtor then contact xyz” because your content should be empowering enough so that readers will want to know more and either come back or contact you to learn more about how you can help them. You can’t twist someone’s arm and you should not beat them over the head with information. Instead you should close your posts by asking engaging questions. Remind your readers that you value their input and engagement.
Are you employing any of these strategies on your blog (even if it’s not WordPress)? What other kinds of things would you suggest to optimize that I may not have listed here?

Related Articles:

• Top reasons why you should have your own blog
• Top 10 sites to submit your blog
• Answers to common Real Estate blogging questions
• How long should my blog post be?

Some of you are using WordPress to run your blog. We use wordpress quite a lot around here for our own blogging and for our clients. In fact, you’re reading a Worpress blog right now. I wanted to share with you some of my favorite plugins for WordPress and tell you how they will help your Real Estate SEO. You can find these buy searching on the WordPress.org site.

SEO All in One Pack – This package makes having good title and meta tags easy. Also, it comes with some great configuration features. It’s quite flexible. So, you’ll have free reign in the back end. For good real estate seo, or seo on any site, the very most basic thing you can do is optimize your titles, descriptions, and, if you want, keyword tags. Google pays little attention to the keywords tag, but most SEO professionals still use the tag, for good measure.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin rocks! When you install, it automatically creates and updates your XML sitemap. Then it takes over updating the xml sitemap for you and does so every time the site updates. When it updates the sitemap, it also resubmits to Google, MSN, and Yahoo. You can’t ask for much more than that. Keeping your XML sitemap updated will help the search engines find the pages that you post faster and ensure that more of your pages get indexed. This is critical for good SEO. If you put up a post and the spiders don’t notice, well, it’s not helping your real estate website rank better. This plugin will help.

Sociable – Sociable adds social bookmarking links to the pages of your site. Take a look at the bottom of any post on this blog and you’ll see a bunch of icons for sites like Stumble, digg, and redit. The more people who bookmark your site using these tools, the more inbound links you’ll have and the better your SEO will be. Lot so us use these sites simple to mark where we’ve been on the web and share with others what we like or don’t like. It’s a pretty good idea, if you’re shooting for superior Real Estate SEO, to make sure that every page of your site includes ready access to these sites.

I’d love to hear more about which plugins you are using to achieve better Real Estate SEO? The WordPress community has created about 3600 plugins. I don’t claim to be an expert on each of them. Please let us know if you have some favorites? Thanks.