As we all know, blogging takes time and effort – especially blogging for your business as a search marketing tool.  What some of you may not know or remember is that you can spin your wheels creating just any old content.  A blog post should be created with a few best practice techniques in mind so that your articles pack a punch and have the best chance to resonate out there with the search engines.  The following video on blogging optimization is twenty minutes long and provides a  review of four simple things you can do to optimize your posts for search.  You’ll find a review about:

• Using specific blog post titles
• Using links and photos effectively and tagging them properly
• Creating categories
• Creating useful tags

One reminder: While these tips will help you out in the search engines it is always important to remember the value proposition delivered by your blog post!  If your post is found by the search engine but does not resonate well with your readers, you are back to square one.  Some simple tips to help deliver value and provide post “stickiness”:

• Make sure the post is formatted well and is easy to read (use bullets, paragraph breaks, and keep them fairly short)
• Try to offer your reader something of value – education, tips, valued links, free tools, helpful downloads, interesting news, good reviews – make these things easy to find and/or download
• Use photos to break up the text and peak visual interest
• Offer links to related posts offering additional tools/tips of value

With a good combination of best blogging practices and valuable information, your business blog can be a highly valuable search marketing tool!

Blogging Optimization Techniques Video

Do you need help creating or optimizing a business blog? How about connecting your blog to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter?  We can help! Take a look at Kinetic Knowledge business blogging products and services or contact us today.

Rebuilding The Google Index

According to Google, its’ spiders constantly crawl the world wide web in order to rebuild its’ index of web pages, topics, key words and key phrases. Why? Google intends to rebuild its index not only with more content, but the most timely information on every subject imaginable! What’s new in Denver CO real estate & community news matters to Google! 

It’s important because many people put up a static real estate website or an inactive blog only to wonder later, “why don’t I have better search engine optimization?” In this day and age search engines demand much much more, so the question should really be “am I current enough to interest Google?” And humans, for that matter!!

In a competitive world for traffic and leads, key word & phrase search engine relevance is NO static exercise. So long as you have well built site technology and you’re updating your presence with current coverage of your farm area you’ve got as good a chance as anyone to turn up high in consumer searches.

Being Current Is Good For Google … And Will Be Good For You!

Some refer to the constant motion as ‘the Google Dance’, but the fact is new information is always being crawled, consumed and organized by thousands of servers. Sites will raise their chances for being crawled deeper and more often [more topic, key word and key phrase indexing] by changing their content frequently. Google’s spider is capable of comparing previous crawls to the current one at light speed. If it identifies that new content is added frequently, it will revisit your site or blogsite more often. Think of it like, your web presence is being judged on each visit.

It would be highly inefficient for Google to crawl you often if you’re not producing new information. There is only so much crawl bandwidth and Google needs to satisfy its’ searchers in order to retain their search loyalty. In order to satisfy searchers, they must have the most timely and accurate information possible.

Note: due to the Google dance and constant reevaluation there’s no guarantee your key words and key phrases will hold the same position tomorrow they did today; however, being current sure gives you a much more competitive chance! 

Back in August we presented some data on what real estate agents are blogging. While it may or may not have been useful, a few people were quick to ask what others were seeing the most response too.

Based on some questions we sent out and also some direct conversations, it’s clear the number 3 most blogged subject on that list ‘community events’ should be number 1!  According to those we spoke, community events is consistently the most successful for generating traffic & activity, if not leads and new client business.

Community coverage is a broad stroke, but if it’s happening locally it’s likely there are a lot of local or locally interested people searching it… and they the folks that buy and sell homes?

Here are some of the experiences folks shared:

“Community events seem to generate more interest than anything from the general public. Certain events here get googled repeatedly and my postings on those events show up in the search results.”  James Selig Galveston TX Real Estate

“They want local knowledge, of neighborhoods, particular condos, lifestyle, schools, medicine – everything you wanted to know about an area but didn’t know who to ask. They want process knowledge – how do things work in your area/ in today’s market, etc. Photos probably bring the most immediate comments, but it’s the above content that brings the buyers and sellers when they’re ready. I continue to be amazed at how much people have read of my blog content when they finally contact me. ” Sharon Simms St Petersburg FL & Costa Rica Real Estate

“I’ve found that neighborhood specific content has been very good for seller leads. I think sellers Google their neighborhood to see what comes up and we need to be there!”  John Michael Poltrock Murphy NC Real Estate

“The pumpkin patch post generates the most traffic every year.” – Kathy Toth Ann Arbor MI Real Estate

“Two blog topics stand out: A blog about the change in our State property tax law generated the most comments. My blog explained the new law and asked buyers to beware and informed. I received several responses from angry buyers who shared their stories of having bought and they were informed of the new law by their agents and they were very angry about it. The writers wanted me to print their complaints and comments and they were long, detailed and emotional. The respondents who were angry about the new tax law were NOT informed about it by their agents. The clients were ambushed and angry. A [second] blog about our annual Memorial Day Community Service brought several responses from servicemen. I published the entire speech of the guest speaker who was a Medal of Honor Winner. The speaker quoted in his speech the number of total servicemen killed in the Beirut barracks bombing correctly, but according to the respondent, the speaker quoted the incorrect number of sailors that were killed that day and the respondent respectfully corrected the number. The respondent was a member of the Beirut mission veterans’ group. I have no idea where this respondent lives and he may not live anywhere near Hilton Head Island where the ceremony occurred.”  Richard Kadesch Hilton Head Island SC Real Estate

Related Posts:

Survey: What Are The Top Subjects Real Estate Agents Blog?

What’s Going On Locally Has Everything to Do With Your Real Estate Brand!

Are You Getting The Targeted Real Estate Traffic You’re After?

Business Bloggers, You need to consider yourselves a source of [modern day] Trade Media!

‘Google Insights’ Supports Better Real Estate Business Blogging Results

Let’s say you’re a real estate agent selling property in Grand Lake OK and you’re looking to capture as much search traffic as possible with your blog. There are many things you’ll eventually need to understand, but none more than the identification of the most relevant key words & phrases. Starting there is sound strategy!

The first question you might ask yourself is, “If home buyers were looking for property, homes or real estate in Grand Lake  how *exactly* would they search?”  You could certainly use logic based upon ‘in the field business experience’, but that would be short of *exact*… and anything less risks your valuable time, effort and money. A better course, and best real estate blogging practices for that matter, might be to look for facts surrounding Grand Lake OK search activity.

Google Insights Search: Grand Lake OK

A great place to start is Google Insights where, rather than guessing, you can identify a lot about what people are looking for in Grand Lake OK. Ultimately, successful search visibility amongst the most qualified buyers and sellers requires targeting the right real estate topics with your real estate business blog.

Google Insights is a powerful tool, requiring some investment of time to truly tap its potential, for finding a depth of insight into where, what & when people search.

Let’s simply start by looking at top level insight into what people interested in Grand Lake OK have been searching. For starters, by solely searching Grand Lake OK without 1) comparing other terms or 2) the use of geographic limits or 3) andy date range … we find that the lion’s share of that search traffic is looking into Grand Lake OK Travel, Local & Recreation.

One might conclude that many of the people searching consider this to be a resort area; however there’s more immediate insight front & center, including that the traffic is all US based. Understanding that international buyers are probably not a target, one could use the geographic filters offered to see where in the US interest is based. Doing so shows that interest is coming from KS, MO, AR & TX based searches. And what could that tell us about future geographically based posts we could write for potential KS, MO, AR & TX second home buyers?

Going further, target key words & phrases is where we get the most useful information and Google Insights delivers both the top search terms and also the fastest rising search terms:

Top Grand Lake OK Search Terms

The key words & phrases are here and they should be cross referenced with business goals in order to determine which might be best emphasized in future real estate business blogging.  Some additional observations might include that Grove OK, Resort, Rentals, Casino & Cabins are sought after, and that they should be looked into as potential target topics.

 Rising Grand Lake OK Search Terms

Some additional observations here might include that Monkey Island & the Marina in addition to Grove OK, Resort, Rentals, Casino & Cabins are becoming sought after. Clearly, they should also be paid some attention in terms of their value as target topics.

Comparing Search Terms

The above identifies Grove OK as a related area of interest, so it is certainly useful to search it versus Grand Lake for further insight. Low and behold, Grove OK is actually generating more searching…  making it an important key phrase to dive into for further insight.

Bottom line, ‘Google Insights’ supports better use of key terms and phrases. Spend some time and you’re guaranteed to improve your overall insight into what search activity amongst qualified home buyers is how future real estate business blogging can bring you more success!

Are you writing up local news & events?

If you’re not writing locally, you should be! Regardless of whether or not traditional local media covers the local events, it’s likely going to be minimal coverage yet coveted home buyers & sellers will be searching them.

You’re a local brand!

You’re an expert on local community! So why not be the enthusiastic local provider a searching home buyer or seller finds when searching anything going on locally?

For ideas beyond what you already know, see or hear keep an eye on local sources of information like community websites. Maybe the Town, the Chamber of Commerce or the County site’s run event calendars. Maybe they run useful blogs? Why NOT elaborate on what the local newspaper, TV, magazines and these sites are running? And remember, just because they run it first doesn’t mean you won’t add valuable local knowledge.

If you participate on local boards & committees, write up what’s being said or voted on,

“I recently attended a school board meeting and wrote up a summary of a very tense issue [Carmel River School Boundary] in the blog. I was quoted in both local papers (I made a comment about the real estate markets impact on enrollment—the topic of the meeting) and by having the blog post up before the next morning I was one of the first pages hit when folks searched for the issue. Obviously I was indexed immediately for the post, which is how they were able to find me. I also forwarded the blog entry to the school board to make sure I had my facts right. I think they appreciated that, and ended up referring other folks to the entry.”  Malone Hodges Carmel CA Realtor

Real Estate Bloggers Using Local News to Their Business Advantage:

• Grovefest coming to Grand Lake June 18-21, 2009 - No. 1 Google
• Are You Up For A Little Monkey Bizness In Western Springs IL?
• Bank Opening Another Location in Baton Rouge LA
• Visit Vail, Co. this Weekend – Vail Events and Real Estate Hot Properties
• Santa Barbara Jesusita Fire is dissapating

Are you blogging for a target market?

A Thursday morning reminder for many [and a wake up call for others], but a discipline the real estate professional must use when blogging is to define a target market with regionally modified content. You simply can’t target a market that is searching locally unless you’re defining it for search engines in your coverage.

It does you little good to write up real estate industry & community oriented content unless you relate it back to local! That is unless you wish to attract all the people that will NOT buy. Never to suggest all non regional posts are worthless because some folks might find and link to OR recommend you, but focus on the most wins possible by repeatedly defining the target market!

Example: Immediate Search Optimization/ Search Visibility

Here’s an example achieved with a discipline for consistent and regionally specific content production:

Post Title: Estate-quality In-town Living In The Hinsdale Central High School District

Post Date: June 10th, 2009

Current Date/ Time: June 11th, 2009 10:30AM

Related Local Searches:

• estate hinsdale central high school district – No. 1 / 32,600 Results
• estate hinsdale high school district – No. 1 / 76,500
• hinsdale high school district estate – No. 1 / 77,000 
• home hinsdale central high school district – No. 3 / 77,600
• hinsdale high school district home – No. 9 / 143,000 
• hinsdale il home near high school – No. 3 / 122,000
• hinsdale il high school home – No. 1 / 914,000
• hinsdale il home – No. 2 / 2,550,000

Result: Virtually immediate search visibility for a long tail of potential local real estate searches = cost effective SEO!

The value in traffic analytics is enormous! 

This post may not do that enormity justice, but let’s take a quick stab at why you will definitely benefit from analyzing your traffic.

Here’s a list of the things I like to watch closely month over month:

• Bounce rate [the percentage of people that leave after one page view]
• Total page views
• Avg page views per day
• Avg page views per visitor [we're @ 5 nowadays, which is pretty good]
• Total unique new visitors
• Avg unique new visitors per day
• Return visitors
• Avg return visitors per day
• Referral websites [who's bring traffic to us]
• Most popular pages [anything popular we can expand on]
• Searches that bring us traffic

Benefits accruing directly from the analysis of our traffic includes:

Our bounce rate was above 70%, which means virtually everyone that found us was leaving. With a focus on sharing information and the development of trust, clearly we had to improve. We did some looking around, came up with some ideas we liked and decided to redesign. We chose a more democratic presentation of front and center content than solely blog posts. As you can see above, bouncing went down from 70+% to between 7 and 9%. Simultaneously, page views per visitor have increased 150%.

We had traffic, but no sign ups so we created the Business Bloggers’ Bible giveaway and more visible lead capture forms. Now we get tons of leads and our database keeps growing exponentially month over month.

We weren’t getting enough referral traffic from other sites so we began auto- feeding our content into various social networks. Now we see it coming in from places like Twitter, Realtown and Facebook every day.

And probably more I can’t recall… but I’m sure you get the picture.

A quick heads’ up on your web presence, blog posts, Google and what I believe is currently the case with duplicate content.

If you have content that is duplicate to other posts or pages elsewhere on the web you should edit one carefully… or you may hurt yourself in Google’s search index. Now, Google isn’t everything for everybody. Brand, trust or direct subscriptions are certainly very valuable and Google can’t give them. This post is certainly not meant to say “don’t publish similar content in different places.” On the contrary, as a marketer you should go anywhere there is an audience and advertise your business knowledge!

This is *NOT meant to be the alarmist* either, but if you’re goal is search findability do not underestimate Google. They have a giant business to protect and going against their grain may put your past and future online presence at stake.

Google has suggested they never want to police duplicate content. Rather than police or penalize for it, they’d just as soon allow their algorithm choose the best of duplicate pages for their index and throw the rest out. I won’t point to it here because the goal may not be search indexing, but I know of at least one instance where over 4,100 blogs have the same exact posts and only one of those blogs gets indexed by Google. Clearly they’re capable of eliminating duplication from their indexes. And why wouldn’t they when their business depends on 1) being the best conduit to good answers on the web and 2) to having the most satisfied loyal searchers?

Ultimately, it appears the ill effects for duplicate content identification include:

1) you waste a spider crawl of an otherwise useful page,

2) you waste any good key phrase indexing from those duplicate pages,

3) you lose potential ‘key phrase findability’ from those duplicate pages,

4) you throw out all back links to the duplicate page, otherwise favorable to your overall page rank,

5) and recently I’ve seen speculation over the belief there may be a bad behavior signal in the works.  If so, it may eventually have some kind of a trust penalty versus your overall rank.

Also worth adding, some believe Google’s filters are set to detect 50% + duplication on a page or post before dropping it. Is it 50% regardless or in exact succession? Probably succession, but who’s to say. Again, be careful when so much is at stake!

Related Posts:

1. Are there consequences for Duplicate Content?
2. What does the Google Crawl mean to your business and how will your Business Blog help?
3. The 5 Most Negative Factors Influencing Your Search Engine Page Rank

Get an Advertorial Business Blog!

Obviously with a title like Real Estate Blogging Best Practices, this series of posts centers around some of the many ways you can improve your chance for capturing qualified real estate searches with a better blogging effort. Folks it’s not the 1st time we’ve said it, but this is modern day advertising. We have looked at the development of target topics and then leveraging target topics in blog posts, but this post centers itself around the placement of links in targeted anchor text and why it is very important to your future success story. 

It’s well known that the objective of a search engine is to be the best conduit to answers it can possibly be. In fact, it is the reliability of those left hand side of a search engine results page [SERP] organic results that power the Pay Per Click Revenue Model. Generally speaking, between 8 and 13% of all searches generate a click on one of those highly visible right hand side of the page Pay Per Click ads… to the tune of billions in annual search engine revenue. What it means to you, ‘the Real Estate Blogger’, is 87- 92% of all searches targeting your local service [and needed to fuel the search engine's success story!] are available for visible advertising on the organic left hand side of the results page!!

This post is NOT meant to cover the process of building links back to ourselves from other sites, social networks and blogs. A later post in the series will cover the subject, but know that most back links or inbound links are out of your control [at least, if sustainability concerns you] and not covered here. Some of the answers [why?] are here in our post Search Engine Indexing, Rank and Content Relevance – how do you get it?

Link Terminology

Back Links
Links pointing to your blog or website from other blogs or websites.

Outbound Linking
An outbound link is demonstrated when a link is created in content that points outward to another source, preferably a supporting source. We demonstrated this in the above link [in 'anchor text'], which points to the wikipedia.org definition of anchor text.

Deep Linking
Creating a hyperlink that points to a page on another site [other than the site's home page] is often referred to as deep linking.

Deep Internal Linking
Creating a hyperlink that points to other posts or pages within our own blog [or site] would be referred to as deep internal linking. We demonstrated this in the above link [in 'leveraging target topics in blog posts'], which points to our post tackling the subject. 

Anchor Text
The definition of Anchor Text centers around linking. An anchor text link is a visibly click-able hyperlink in words or text.

Why Link Out or Why Link In?

Search engines are constantly crawling the world wide web, websites, their pages, content and especially the links in content they find for newer and better sources of information… on every single subject there is. And remember that search engines want to rank pages, not necessarily websites, so every post you create is an opportunity to generate some findability and some traffic. Once they have identified and consumed content to their indexes, they compare and/ or rank it. Very much like with traditional journalism, where readers are often introduced to supporting sources of information, search engine bots are crawling for newer and better sources of information. Simply put, what page is the number 1 and what page is the number 1,000 source for a subject like ‘Santa Barbara Pocket Listing’ is determined by over 200 criteria… but none more than the link structure of a post or page. In this case, Distinctive Real Estate of Santa Barbara is No. 1/ 649,000 Google Indexed Pages for Santa Barbara Pocket Listing.

What is the role of Anchor Text Links?

Understanding that links are highly valued in the comparison of competitive content, discovered by search engines, leads us to the relevant use of anchor text. With the links we can build ourselves, we should always look to leverage them through words or text descriptive of accurate contextual information relating to that link’s destination. Rather than adding a link in the words ‘click here’ do it in the actual topic you target, such as ‘Santa Barbara pocket listing.’ If the Anchor Text is relevant to the page it links, two positive things may happen. The first is a search engine may begin to see your blog as a good source of content and supporting content, via generous linking. The second being, the page pointed at has heightened its’ visibility to a search engine algorithm. In other words, be a useful source of supporting information on targeted topics by pointing to them… and raise the chances that search engines will reward your blog and those pages with higher rank. *Those highly ranked posts or pages including your own body of work… or content.*

Leveraging Target Topic Keywords

So, now that you have established your target topic keywords, you need to leverage them for better blog- post search engine optimization [i.e. SEO]. For starters, using keywords you’d like to have favorable indexing for should be a priority and a discipline. Those same keywords aren’t always going to support what you need or want to blog about [timely events not centered on targets, yet important to an audience will come up], but lets assume your targets should be used more often than not.

Blog Post Titles

It is certainly believed that Google likes to see similarity in blog post titles, post permalinks and post title tags. While you must write post titles in ways that will capture a home buyers attention, they should also help a search engine spider to see what the post is about. For SEO to occur, post titles should include targeted keywords and key phrases. If the blog is well designed, blog post titles will directly influence the blog posts URL, also known as its permalink, and what you see in your browser. Simultaneously, it should influence the blog posts header tag, which you see above your browser. There are meta tagging solutions that allow for some rearrangement of post titles in URLs & Header Tags, but either way this is where a search engine spider can identify immediate emphasis.

Blog Post Text

It is well documented that when a search spider crawls into a post or a page’s content it will look for keyword or key phrase consistency and then also density. It’s good practice to reiterate keywords used in post titles high or early on in the actual post’s text. Using keywords a few times throughout a post isn’t bad practice; however, overdoing the density [i.e. keyword stuffing] in a post may be detected by filters, which are believed to be tuned for the identification of keyword stuffing or gaming. Ultimately, use common sense and keep it real – your readers want good content too!

Blog Tags & Categories

Search engines and humans view content in different ways, but the fine line you draw in the content is important to your business. For instance, adding the most important key words and phrases from a post to its tags adds emphasis for those search engines that are crawling for them. Google is an exception, believed to place little to no emphasis on these types of manually added tags; whereas, Technorati is an aggressive user of them. Categorization can help a visitor drill down or back in time to points of interest in a body of work, but it can also add useful text indicators for spiders seeking that keyword emphasis.

Stay tuned as we continue our series of Real Estate Blogging Best Practice posts centered around some of the basics useful to competitive search engine optimization. We’ll expand on many more useful disciplines in the coming weeks. And then, you’re always welcome to get in touch if you have any questions or are interested in a service that drills down on all things new and old in ‘best blogging practices.’