Understanding Key Phrases
Posted on 11. Jun, 2009 by in SEO
You’ll often hear me talk to Realtors about the key phrases they are targeting within the search engines. Key phrases are search terms that you want to be found under, that you write your content around and ultimately, become the bread and butter of your SEO campaign. The importance of selecting your key phrases is unquestionably the most important step in the SEO process. There are several tips you should take into account when generating your key phrases, Here’s my step by step guide to finding and implementing key phrases into a real estate specific SEO campaign:
Find your niche. As you probably already know, real estate SEO is incredibly competitive, unless you have a lot of time, money and resources at your dispoal, forget the head terms. These are usually:
- city name real estate
- city name homes for sale
- city name mls
- real estate city name
Be more specific, target a town, a neighborhood or your real estate specialty. Incorporate this into the head terms and pick no more than 5 main terms or variations to target. Example:
- neighborhood name real estate guide
- town name real estate blog
- first time buyers neighborhood name
Research the competition. Keyword research can be very complex and require tools and a deep understanding of on-page SEO. The best way you can research the key phrases is to do Google searches for them, see how many websites are returned, what websites are at the top of the list then research those sites, Some tips for competition research:
- Google: site:www.competitiorsite.com – this will show you how many indexed pages the site has in Google
- Use SmartPageRank to gain valuable back link information of the competitior site, see how old the domain is, how many back links it has, alexa ranking and more.
Implement your Key Phrases. The absolute best way to impliment a key phrase into your website would be to use your main key phrase as the domain name. If this is not an option, place your keyphrases at the top of your pages in header tags <h1>,<h2> etc. Write your content around the key phrases, use the key phrases within link anchor text to other relevant content pages.
Theres much more to cover with understanding key phrases, my next article on the subject will be a lot more indepth guide to competition research and what’s needed to compete with them. Stay tuned!