Writing and posting web content is a vital skill for web owners and marketers who want to get their website noticed. Why would you, as a web marketer, want to get noticed? Here are a few good reasons:

• Increase your real estate web sales and revenue

• Improve branding

• Increase contact lists and customer base

• Become a recognized expert in your real estate community

These are just a few of the benefits of a successful content marketing campaign. And with the results of a content marketing study performed by Technorati, it is no wonder that more businesses will be expanding their content marketing efforts in 2010 and beyond.
71% of businesses say their blogging efforts have increased their visibility within their industry.
56% of respondents said that their blog has helped established a leadership position in their industry.
And 6 in 10 businesses plan to expand their efforts and increase spending on content marketing in 2010.
With so much to gain for your content marketing efforts, here are six tips that can help improve your content marketing success.

1. Create a Plan
It is useless to simply post articles or other web content without a sound plan. Develop a content marketing plan that you will use for your web marketing efforts.

2. Write Sticky Headlines
Your headline or title is probably the most important part of your content. If you can convince a web user to read the rest of your article or other content based on an interesting headline, you are 90% successful.

3. Research Hot Keywords
What is happening right now? Write content that is a hot topic for web users. Look to places like Google News, or even research trending topics on Twitter, to get the most used keywords you can use in your next post.

4. Write for Story
Your web content should be rich in keywords, but also be written in a style that captures a reader’s attention. Use story techniques like character development, conflict, and dramatic conclusion to get readers engaged with your content.

5. Make it Worthwhile to the Reader
The reader will ask him or herself, “so what?” Give the reader a benefit for reading your content. Can you provide new ways to style hair? Save money shopping for clothing? Easy home improvement tips? Let the reader take a nugget of valuable knowledge away.

6. Be Consistent
Writing a great article or blog post is a great start in your SEO content marketing efforts. However, you must continue to provide great content again and again. Don’t stop with one or two good articles. Keep the flow going and be consistent in your content posting efforts

• Encourage more incoming links to your website

• Increase traffic from other relevant websites

• Help build awareness and a strong reputation for your business

• Make your website practical and useful for readers

• Improve your efforts to better visibility for target keyword phrases

If you want to create successful online articles that will result in effective marketing for your real estate business, you must:

• Create the most useful and compelling content for your website – Before you even think about writing articles and marketing them to other websites you need to worry about your own website. After you have written effective real estate articles, make them visible on your website in a number of areas. You can post them on your blog, but you should also post them throughout other pages on your website.

• Bring readers page to your main webpage through links – Provide links in the article that will allow readers to click back to the main webpage or to the proper page as they relate to the article. Whether you put your links within the body of the article or at the end of the article, the result will be the same: your readers will be guided to the correct area of your website. Don’t ever assume your readers will go where you want them to; instead, bring them there with just a click of a link.

• Encourage your readers to share your articles – Adding social sharing buttons on your articles to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter will allow your readers to share them with others, thereby improving your ranking and spreading the word about your real estate business. Social media is, without a doubt, the easiest way to get others to spread the word about your real estate business, so take advantage of this new form of media and use it to your advantage!

• Find relevant information for your articles by performing keyword searches through the major search engines – If you want to know what people are talking about, perform a few relevant keyword searches. Then you can simply write about the topics you find. This not only helps you create the most pertinent information for your website, but it also may help you by sending readers to your site when they search using the same keywords. It is important, however, to use the articles you find as inspiration only. In other words, never, ever plagiarize, as it immediately ruins your credibility.

• Hire a good writer if you don’t have the time – If you don’t have the time to write quality articles, or if you don’t feel as if you could produce quality content, you may want to hire this service out. A good writer who is skilled in the real estate field is almost always worth the money.

Take a Look at your Blog Articles

If you have a site with an extensive blog, the easiest way to begin pulling the most useful content is to look back and observe the traffic count and comment numbers on your blog articles. Pull this content and add to it, creating a more in-depth article. Once you have done this, you can distribute this useful content to article directories and how-to websites to achieve even more exposure.

Once you’ve done this, you can also pull your longer-length articles you have distributed to directories in the past and rework them. You can cut them down and make them into smaller blog posts and create a helpful newsletter.

Create a Newsletter

Newsletters are an interesting niche to bring to your real estate website, and can be easily made using topics you’ve already explored elsewhere. Don’t forget to issue a press release about your new newsletter, and email your customer base to inform them of it, as well. And, by all means, find a few good guest writers to contribute content.

Find Solid Web Pages

It is important to remember that all the fantastic, interesting, eye-catching copy in the world won’t do you any good if it’s sitting on a low-traffic web page. In other words, your link-embedded real estate content will only be useful (i.e., make you money) if it is present on solid websites.

If you are experiencing difficulty finding good sites, you may want to go to a content hub, such as an article directory or industry news sites, and make a list of the real estate content you have written. Then, using a tool like Article Checker, see who is hosting the original article and offer your real estate content to those same sources.

In fact, if you want to guarantee high search engine positioning, you have to make quality content on the top of your list of things to do.

The bottom line is that if you want to make it big among search engine rankings, you must consider the quality of your real estate content.

What Does Quality Content Mean?

If you want to ensure quality search engine rankings you must consider your content. This means your content must be unique and well-written. Simply put, you can’t put out less-than-quality or unoriginal content and expect good rankings. Take your time and produce content that you know your audience will want to read.

As yourself what your audience wants and needs to know and then determine whether you are able to provide this information to your readers, or whether this writing task is best left to a professional writer.

Take the time to consider your content and don’t overlook this important step.

Don’t Forget your Keywords

In addition to your quality content, make sure you have fully researched your keywords. If you have a list of keywords in place you can better begin writing your content to reflect the keywords.

Finally, your quality content, in addition to featuring your keywords, will be compelling and will not only educate your reader, but also provide them with the information needed to get your business and the services you offer across to them. In other words, once you have captured your reader’s attention you will want to sell yourself.

Find out what information your audience is searching for, and try to provide them with an answer or solution to a problem or question.  Keep your information updated regularly and become a source of quality content for individuals interested in real estate and you will be a leader in your local real estate market.

Your online marketing efforts for your real estate business should include a strategy to provide updated content on your website. But while posting a few articles each week with researched keywords may help bring in search traffic, the content is what keeps them coming back and ultimately becoming clients.

Make it Informative – Your online content should contain information that is informative to readers. Tell them something they don’t know. Post articles showing statistics from a recent study. Perhaps you could write a follow-up or opinion article on a recent news topic.

Solve Problems – Your content should help visitors and readers solve problems. Write “How To” articles that give sound advice. Perhaps a step-by-step process for getting a home ready for showing to buyers. Or tips on finding the right selling agent.

Provide “Pillar” Content – Part of attracting visitors and gaining new contacts is providing specific, high-quality content that is consider “pillar” content in the online marketing industry. Pillar content is something such as a helpful article or e-book that attracts more and more visitors. You might write an article on the top 100 websites for real estate searches, or write an informative e-book in downloadable PDF format that you can give visitors if they comply with a simple email contact request. Pillar content is what you can use to advertise and promote your website, and if done well, can bring in even more traffic through viral sharing and outside linking.

Gets Noticed by Search Engines – Your content should contain specific keywords and content that get noticed by search engines. Find out what your intended client is reading and researching on the internet. Then use those keywords and topics to write fresh and timely content that gets noticed by search engines who provide your website link to their customers.

Online marketing, like any marketing, takes trial and error. But having a sound strategy in place with your own website content gives you a step up in getting your site noticed.

One of the best ways of having your link bait distributed is through social media network. You must post your attractive content in as many social media networks and directories as possible. The idea here is to create a buzz about your content and to prompt people to share with others your unique content. This process is also known as seeding. You must try to reach to social news sites that are voted upon by the users. If your content gets a large number of votes, then it will elicit the interest of others too. You will be able to see your content in the first page of the news site when it becomes one of the most voted news item. It has been proved that news items in the front pages of the news sites get the most clicks. Your link bait will be viewed by hundreds of visitors and a certain percentage of visitors will click your website link and visit your website. Some of the popular sites where you can submit your news include but not limited to Digg, Reddit, Mixx, etc.

Yet another social media site that is becoming increasingly popular is Twitter. However, you can expect others to link to you only when you have some worthwhile stuff that others can link.

Link Bait Strategies

When you are using link baits, your intention is not only to make people link to you but also to make those who see your bait to click on the bait and visit your website or to vote for your news item, which will increase the popularity of the item you submit. It is not the social media sites that offer you the best links, they often come with nofollow attribute. The best links come from other internet users such as bloggers, news publishers and journalists. If the news item or the content you have submitted is of good quality, they will write about it and link to the source article.

Some of the best baits include the following:

Breaking News – this is one of the top baits. If you publish hot news, then you can ensure a vast traffic to your website. You can elicit a great interest in the social media sites as well as from the news communities. Though breaking news will attract a lot of traffic, they are not the best ones for getting back links.

Controversial Posts

By making controversial posts or by playing devils advocate you can attract a lot of attention to your posts. However, you must be very careful in creating such content to ensure that you do not get into hot waters through your posts and become unpopular through your posts.

Resourceful Posts

Resourceful posts not only get a great level of attention, they also bring in a large number of links to your website. You must make sure to create resources that are not time bound so that they will continue to bring more links to your website.

Humorous Posts

Funny posts have always been the favorite of many online users. Humorous posts have long life when compared to news items.

Ego Posts

You will be able to make popular community members to promote your content by making a mention of their names in your content in such a way to inflate their ego. You will certainly get links from the people whose egos you are boosting.

The most important aspect of link baiting is to create content that users can identify with, something that they can connect to; such content is sure to bring a great level of success in getting you the desired links for your website.

SEO success is not something that happens in one day.  It takes patience, deliberate research, and oftentimes a lot of good fortune, to make SEO work for the success of your real estate web site.  But that’s why it is important to choose a web niche and specific keywords that best pertain to your niche.

Diligence is the key factor when starting and growing a real estate web site.  Once you have decided on a niche for your real estate web presence, you need to continually work at it by updating content often, adding keyword rich content, and promoting that content frequently.

Choosing the right keywords for your real estate website content can be challenging, but when done correctly your SEO becomes better and better.  You could choose a few keywords which are highly competitive on search engines, such as “real estate listings” or “real estate prices”, and have success with those if you promote your content frequently.  When checking with Google Adwords you will find that both of those keywords have millions upon millions of returns.  Your ranking could be anywhere in the middle of all those returns.

But just think what happens if you narrow the scope of your SEO to a group of very specific keywords.  Say you choose “real estate Portland Oregon” as a keyword phrase.  Google now shows an average of just over 300,000 returns.  This offers a much better chance for your site to get noticed with diligent promotion.

Choose your keywords wisely and your SEO can be much improved.

Writing an article rich in real estate content keywords will help drive traffic to your real estate website, and enhance your visitors’ involvement in your real estate website. When your content shows up high on search results you become an expert and are chosen as one of the first clicks for a visitor.

How do I create real estate content with SEO?

It’s important to keep articles and blog posts between 300 and 500 words. Online web readers are impatient and you need to get their attention fast and get them through to the end of your important article. So keep it short.

Since you have short real estate articles and blog posts it is imperative that you determine a narrow topic for your article. Rather than a general article on shopping for real estate, you could narrow that focus to “Shopping for Homes with Your Children.”

Choose specific keywords and phrases that pertain to your topic. Include that keyword in the title when possible. Then write your real estate article and mention the keyword numerous times throughout. A good keyword density ratio is typically between 3% to 5%. That means a 500 word real estate article should have a specific keyword or words mentioned 15 to 25 times.

Great content should appear every day.  In fact, this keeps your real estate website audience tempted and checking back frequently.  But in addition to regular blog posts you need high content articles that are helpful, engaging, and those that offer extra benefit to the reader.

What are high content articles?  Here are a few standard suggestions of that that get readers and link backs:

How To

“How To” articles have been a staple of every print magazine on the newsstand.  You’ve seen the headlines, “How to Lose Weight Fast!” or something of that nature that engages a reader to buy the magazine and learn something.  Write “how to” content for your real estate website and you will find that more people actually want to learn what you know.

Lists

Articles with a special list are also very popular.  You may have seen web articles with a “Top 10 Real Estate Websites” list.  Do you want to be on that list?  Make a list of your own that readers would want to know about.  Your new traffic may rank you in the top 10 yet.

Definitions

You’ve heard of Wikipedia?  Definitions are hot on the internet.  On your real estate website create articles that go into detail about some aspect of real estate marketing, or real estate listing.  Again, readers like to learn.  Give them something to sink their teeth into.