At this point, you must know how important keywords are for your real estate blog.  Strategic use of relevant keywords in your title tag, post titles, domain, permalinks and content are one of the main on-page factors Google and other search engine use to index your real estate blog.  Therefore, it is important to know what keywords will be most effective in driving traffic to your site.  So, how do you determine which keywords will be most effective and searched for your particular real estate business? 

Step 1: Determine your top 3-5 keywords

Determining your prime keywords should be relatively simple.  Just think like a user- when someone is searching for your website or real estate blog what terms would they be looking for?  Let's take the case of Miamism.com, Rick and Ines Garcia generally sell "real estate" and "homes" in "Miami Shores."  They are more liely to sell a "condo" on "Miami Beach." So, logically, they should select keywords like "Miami Shores Homes," "Miami Shores Real Estate," and "Miami Beach Condos."

The rules of thumb for selecting keywords are:

1.       Think about what you sell most in each of your top farm areas, so if you sell more lots, condos, estates, townhomes etc in one particular area, focus on coupling that property type with that farm area

2.       Always use plurals where possible, so instead of "Miami Beach Condo," use "Miami Beach Condos." Google is smart enough to return the plurals when users search for the singular form, so you hit two birds with one stone by always using the plural form of a keyword

Read also: Getting the most out of your meta tags

Step 2: Research how often those keywords are searched for and what other similar searches you should target

Tool: KeywordDiscovery. This tool is terrific!  It shows you how many times your keyword is searched for on the Major search engines.  This will give you an idea of how valuable placing for those keywords can be.  It can also help you research new variations of keywords to target.  There are a couple of other online tools I recommend using, but this is my favorite in terms of ease of use and functionality.

Step 3: Find out where your real estate blog currently ranks for your top 3-5 keywords

See exactly where you rank for your targeted keywords in Google, Yahoo and MSN by using this keyword research tool from RelAdvance.  WARNING: this tool takes forever to run as it is actually searching for your placement on multiple Google data centers, however, it is worth the wait.  I also recommend performing an actual search in Google after you get your results to verify the results.

For example: Rick and Ines Garcia's prime keyword is "Miami Shores Real Estate" for which they place #5 and #6 in Google, behind only Yahoo Real Estate and Harmon Homes... not bad, huh?

Read also: Where does your site rank in the SERPs?

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