If you are blogging to attract real estate leads, which many of us are, you know the value of having your content found on the internet. I have been working for some time to get the word out about the Real Estate Lead Generation Software provided through RedX and have learned a great deal about search engine optimization in the process. What I have learned is that if you want to successfully drive leads to your blog, the actual post is only the first step. The steps following your post will truly determine your level of success in attracting traffic and subsequent real estate leads to your blog.
Steps To Attract Real Estate Leads Through Your Blog
Let’s face it. Any time you spend creating a blog is an investment in marketing. However, your return on investment is determined primarily through how many people read your blog and visit your site. Fundamentally, the best way to get your blog read is if it shows up on a search engine. Therefore, getting a high ranking for a given search term is imperative. So what are the steps necessary to search engine optimize your blog post?
Before you even begin writing your post, you should determine what keyword phrase you are targeting. If you have a topic in mind, spend a few minutes on google to see how competitive the phrase you are focusing on will be. To see the level of competition, look next to the search box for the search results information. For example, the competitive information for the term “attract real estate leads” is “Results 1 - 10 of about 4,230,000 for attract real estate leads. (0.55 seconds)” Because this article is competing with over four million other entries, it is unlikely to rank high on the search term “attract real estate leads.” Therefore, optimizing it for that term may be relatively futile and I should probably optimize this post to a less competitive phrase such as “listing leads for realtors”, or even “GRAR” which only has one million competitors.
After you have chosen your search phrase, write your post to include that phrase one to three percent of the time. Be sure to include the phrase as part of your header tags <h1> as well as your subhead <h2>. Back to our example, the phrase Attract Real Estate Leads is in the <h2> tag of this article.
Now Start Your Real Estate Search Engine Optimization
Here is what I do to promote these posts as well as the RedX discount page.
* Ping your entry using a pinging tool to multiple sites. I use pingler.com
* Use an article rewriting tool to create multiple unique versions of your article. Unique versions are needed so that each syndicated site that posts your article is counted as a unique back link to your real estate blog. I now use Magic Article Rewriter as my tool of choice.
* Submit your unique article to as many article directories as possible. I use two tools concurrently for this. The first is UniqueArticleWizard, the second is Magic Article Submitter. Both tools allow you to syndicate your article across the web over time which gradually increases your links and your search engine rank. Their actual sales pages are pretty cheezy, but the tools work great.
* Bookmark the post to StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicous, and the rest of the bookmarking sites. If you are using a Wordpress, Orlywire has an interesting tool that allows you to automatically bookmark your post to your accounts.
* If you haven’t submitted your RSS feed to the multiple feed readers, then now is the time to do so.
* Update the post on your facebook, MySpace, ActiveRain and Broker Agent Social pages.
All of the above sounds like a lot of work, and it does take about an hour to complete all of the steps. However, where you may attract one or two real estate leads from the post alone, you can now expects a few hundred more people to find you from your search engine optimization activities.
