Personally guest blogging, and article marketing seem to be the best ways to rise in the ranks, but really how much link juice or authority are you getting by writing a blog posting on a tech site, and then throwing in Texas Real Estate on the end of the article. It might be good for a small positive nudge, but having the keyword phrase in the title, once in the content, and the link directly off the keyword phrase that is embedded in the article seems to be getting the best results for my website.

The beauty of outranking the seven pack is that even if you do bit-twiddle your way on to the yellow pages version of Google, you now have suspenders, and a belt to help keep you on the front page. If one day your places’ listing disappears because of a competitor nudging you out of the way for that keyword phrase, then you will reappear up on the top of the page under organics. There are rare times when I have seen the organic and places listing for my company on the same page for a keyword, but it does happen occasionally.

People tend to meander over Google Places for ranking more than organics, because there is less work involved, and lets face it who wants to write fifty-seven four hundred word articles about California Real Estate. In the end both are very necessary for the base purpose of the website, and that is of course to generate leads for our agents to pursue, so we can all make lots of money buying and selling homes, and commercial interests.

Outsourcing this work may be a viable alternative for some, but even though you can afford having others write for you, it will never be as good as what you can write. This is due to the fact that you have the knowledge, and expertise about what you are selling to the public, plus your passion for the business will come through in whatever you write about when it comes to real estate

Keywords can be a single word, or a short phrase that would be searched frequently on search engines like Google.  Before you ever begin your real estate article or blog post consider what your topic will be.  Broad keywords such as “real estate” are not narrow enough in scope to set your article apart.  But you can focus a topic on a more specific keyword such as “real estate calculator” that would more likely appear in a search list.

Keywords benefit your real estate website when they benefit your readers. Whether your readers come from a search engine result, or a link from a social networking site, or even a return visitor, they will read what catches their eye and interests them.  In that case, then, it is important to choose real estate keywords and topics that will keep your traffic coming back.

To determine a good keyword for your real estate website consider a few and run them through a keyword analyzing tool such as Google AdWords, or SEOTools.  Many sites like these can be used for free, but others you must pay a subscription fee.  If you want to write a lot of content and drive traffic to your real estate website the small fee may be worth the cost.

With the help of these tools you review the results of how often a keyword is searched, and receive suggestions for alternate keywords for your real estate topic.

When you have the right keywords for your real estate article or blog post, you will have the right focus and strategy to make the most and best use of that posting.

For your real estate website to succeed, it is important to know what keywords work best for the topics and content that you provide.  Do you specialize in real estate listing?  Do you offer help for home shoppers?  Do you cater more toward agents or investors? 

Search for and look at other real estate websites that are similar to yours.  Do you notice any particular words or phrases used frequently throughout the site?  Jot those down. 

You can also use web tools that provide you with suggestions on keywords and phrases.  Tools like Wordtracker and Google AdWords are great references. Simply type in a few often-searched keywords and they will provide you with a list of hundreds of alternate suggestions that relate to those keywords.

Often these types of keyword services require a fee, but the small fee can be well worth the price for finding the right keywords, which in turn generate large amounts of search traffic to your real estate website.  Google AdWords is one of the free keyword analyzing tools that is easy to use.  You can simply type in a keyword or phrase and, voila!  Your result is a list of alternate words and phrases with numbers of the average search volume, as well as advertiser competition for that keyword.

You can also use similar websites to generate keyword ideas.  Simply choose the “website content” option on Google AdWords, enter the website address, and you get a return of keywords most used on the site and lists of related keywords. 

Once you begin to really know what your clientele is searching for you will be able to create SEO content that really stands out as it will be infused with appropriate keywords.  Happy keyword hunting!

Keyword research is a critical aspect of your search engine optimization campaign. It’s a must that you target the proper keywords, so that the search engines and most importantly your customers find you.

So where should the keywords be placed? Here are a few places to insert your content:

page titles – page file names – image alt tags – sites navigation – description meta tags – blog – header