Marketing Your Blog – Part Deux

As a follow-up to Drew’s marketing your blog post, I thought I’d re-cap of some of the main points that I touched on during Wednesday’s Marketing Your Blog panel at Inman Real Estate Connect.

Moderator Joel Burslem kicked off the discussion with the question “how do real estate bloggers compete with major online real estate sites in SEO?”

My best answer is that you probably shouldn’t try to compete head-to-head with the major sites that have invested heavily in SEO, but rather focus on writing quality content that they likely don’t have (or don’t have enough of) – hyper-local content. While all the big players are trying to go deeper and deeper on a local level, you can truly differentiate yourself to both your readers and the search engines by writing deep local content. You are more knowledgeable about your neighborhood, subdivision, street, or house than any large real estate site. Use your hyper-local knowledge as a strategic competitive advantage to both rank in search engines, and perhaps more importantly, provide quality information to people who are searching for it (and for brokers and agents, potentially convert them into clients by showcasing your local knowledge).

What are some examples of hyper-local content that you can blog about? How about what is the neighborhood like from the perspective of someone who lives/works there? What are the best stores, restaurants, schools, parks, babysitters, etc? What’s going on in your hyper-local market, what trends are you seeing? What real estate topics are your friends asking about or discussing at your dinner parties? Agents/brokers: be transparent, tell it like you see it, and establish yourself as the local expert by providing rich, quality information on the topics that people are interested in.

On the tactical SEO front, here are some tips and answers to questions from the audience.

Page Titles – These should be unique to each page on your site and should be descriptive of the content on each respective page. This is a major search engine ranking factor so try to include descriptive keywords when possible (but make sure it’s readable). It’s often good practice to use your blog post title as your page title. Try to limit your page titles to 67 characters as Google truncates anything longer.

Meta Descriptions – These should also be unique to every page, and while not a major search engine ranking factor, your meta description should be descriptive of the content on the page. This is what users see when looking at your listing on a search engine results page after entering their search query, so it should be written with enticing and descriptive copy to encourage click-through into your site. Try to limit your page titles to 155 characters as Google truncates anything longer.

Header Tags – The <h1> header tag is also a strong search engine ranking factor and should be the title of your blog post. There should only be one <h1> header per page, any sub headings should be <h2>, <h3>, or <h4> tags depending on how many sub-headers you have on the page.

Keyword Repetition – If you’re trying to get a page to rank for a specific term or phrase, you should include that term/phrase in the page title, the meta description, the <h1> header, and approximately 4-5 times throughout the text on your post.

Internal Linking – It’s important to build links from external sites, but linking internally can help boost your rankings in search engines as well (and you generally have more control over this than you do over getting other sites to link to you). One way to achieve this is to include links to other recent or related articles on every blog post that you write. There are also tag cloud plugins that help surface other articles and create more internal links within your site. Whenever possible, remember to use link anchor text that contains the keyword/phrase that you are trying to rank for on the page that the link is pointing to.

And perhaps most importantly, remember that content that is good for humans is also generally good for search engines (remember, humans are the ones typing in the searches). Whenever there is a question of usability versus SEO, I always suggest erring on the side of the user.

Additional Resources:

• Here’s a link to the seomoz beginner’s guide to search engine optimization that I mentioned during the panel. I highly recommend their site as a terrific SEO resource, and anyone serious about learning more about SEO should read their guide.

• Someone in the audience asked the question, “what’s the best blog platform for SEO?” Fortunately someone has done at least a high-level comparison of the major platforms and posted their findings here: best blog platform for SEO.