Getting the Most Out of Website Content

Now that we've established that content is king in terms of good search engine optimization for your website, it's important to know how to use content to your advantage. Anyone can write a few paragraphs on your local real estate market or about a particular condo building in your neighborhood, but to do so in a way that will benefit your page and website ranking is another story altogether.

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Each blog post or web page you write should follow some very basic guidelines; and in following these guidelines, you can dramatically increase the chance of more page views and a higher ranking among Google, Yahoo!, and various other search engines available internet users.

1)      Choose a keyword or phrase in which you're trying to achieve a high ranking. For example, if you're writing content for a web page detailing the John Hancock building, your keyword phrase may be 'the John Hancock condos in Chicago or '175 East Delaware Place condos for sale.'

2)      If possible, include your keyword or keyword phrase in the URL, Page Title, Heading 1, Page Description, and Image Alt Attribute.

3)      Incorporate broad keyword usage throughout the body of your content. Going back to #1, if my keyword phrase is 'John Hancock Condos in Chicago,' a good rule of thumb is to try and incorporate this phrase 2-4 times throughout the page.

4)      Follow appropriate keyword density. Although certain S.E.O. experts vary in opinion, you should generally strive for a keyword density of between 3 and 5 percent. And in case you aren't sure, keyword density refers to the percentage of times a keyword or keyword phrase is used among your page content. So, if you have a total of 100 words and you used your main keyword 4 times, you would have a keyword density of 4 percent.

5)      Write the preferred minimum amount of content. Search engines want to see machine-readable pages that give visitors adequate information on what they're searching. In general, a sufficient quantity of content for a web page or blog post is 300 characters, or around 50 words in most cases.

So the next time you're writing content for your website, take the extra time to do it right. While you may not achieve the best ranking right away, using the proper methods while writing quality content will most definitely benefit your real estate website long-term.

Joe Heath is a graduate of Indiana University and also holds a Graduate Certificate in Real Estate Development from Drexel University. After working in the market research sector and authoring published Market Snapshots for Hanley Wood Market Intelligence, Joe now works as a Web Marketing Specialist and is a managing partner at  Real Estate Web Creation, LLC.