Project Google - Part 1 Keyword Selection
Search Engine Optimization
I’ve been speaking with a few Real Living agents and brokers lately and one of the top questions I’m asked is, how do I get my website to the top of the search engines? So I thought I’d start a thread showing how I would go about getting a Real Living agent website to the top of the search engines.
I'm calling it "Project Google" and my goal is starting from scratch with Kathy’s website, which is not currently ranked on any major search engine, to get it on the first page of Google for a set of targeted keywords. I encourage everyone to follow along and try the same concepts on their website.
Search Engine Optimization
First, for those not familiar with search engine optimization (SEO), SEO is the process by which you prepare (or optimize) your website for the best search engine results. There are two primary parts to SEO. First there is “on-site” SEO and this involves optimizing your actual website and web pages for the best results and includes choosing the appropriate keywords, creating original content, keyword density, page titles, urls, headings, and meta information, essentially anything you control on your own website. The second part “off-site” SEO has to do primarily with link building, where you’re building links on other websites (off site). In a nutshell, the more links that point to your website the more popular your site becomes in the eyes of the search engines. Link building is almost an art and industry to itself and there are number of factors that play into link building such as using anchor text, a blend of quality and quantity of links (not all links are created equal), link baiting, and a natural linking pattern. Let’s start with the on-site part of SEO.
Part 1 Keyword Selection
So let’s get started. First we need to decide which set of keywords we want to be found for on the search engines. Keywords are the set of words that when entered into a search engine, you want your website to show up for. For example, if someone goes to Google and types in “Tampa real estate” and you want your website show up, your keywords would be “Tampa Real Estate”.
Now obviously every agent in Tampa wants their website to show up for “Tampa real estate”, unfortunately this is probably one the most competitive set of keywords in Tampa, which means it’s going to be one the hardest set of keywords to conquer. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done, it just means it going take a lot of time and lot of hard work.
I’m going to take a little different tact. I’m going to start with a more focused set of keywords, “Wesley Chapel Real Estate” and “Arbor Greene Tampa”. The benefit is twofold, one, these keywords are less competitive, so I should see quicker results and two it should generate more qualified traffic to my website, because if someone is typing the more specific neighborhood, they already have an idea of what they’re looking for.
To get an idea how competitive a set of keywords might be do a search on Google and you’ll see “Results 1 - 10 of about 3,580,000 for tampa real estate". That means there are over 3.5 million possible results for that search term. “Ouch!” The higher that number is, the greater the competition.
How did I come up with these terms? “Wesley Chapel Real Estate”, is probably obvious given our office is located in Wesley Chapel. “Arbor Greene Tampa”, is a little less obvious, but I’ve found that when dealing with small subdivisions, like Arbor Greene which has approximately 1,000 homes, users tend to search on the “community name + the city name”, rather than “community + real estate”. There are a number of good tools on the internet that help you research and determine the proper set of keywords to target. Check out SEO Book or the Google Keyword Tool.
When a consumer performs a search, the search engines are trying to find, and show, the most relevant website page for that set of keywords. As a result, for each set of keywords you want to target, you should create a page on your website that specifically targets that set of keywords. In Part 2, we’ll look at how to create those pages and why it’s important to focus on only one to two keywords per page.
If you are currently optimizing and have questions, additional idea or comments – please post a comment below.
Date: Monday, October, 29th 2007 @ 03:46:13 PM Views: 380
This blog entry currently has 2 comments posted.
Thomas Grimshaw
Calum - As you can see, my blogging has been sidelined lately by one thing or another. This post is great and you have inspired me to gt back on the blogging track. Thanks. Tom
Michal Rhodus
This is a great topic Calum. Thanks -- Cathy