Your online real estate marketing campaign will only succeed if your Web page content is doing at least these four things:

1. Targeting the correct key phrase for search behavior
2. Developing page content depth
3. Achieving a more ideal keyword density than the competition
4. Remaining readable and very informative to the reader

There are still two other extremely important elements to making your online real estate marketing campaign a huge success. These elements are: setting up your page content layout, and proper overall optimization of your Web page.

There are many optimization elements on a Web page that can affect your search engine placement. Let’s start by focusing on how to set up a page content layout.

Understanding online real estate marketing

Each search engine uses what is called an algorithm. For a successful search engine marketing campaign, you must understand how the search engine views your page and what it determines is important relating to your online real estate marketing. In managing hundreds of millions of web pages, algorithms are the set of rules applied to determine how each page will rank for any given search phrase. One of the known algorithms applies a principle often used by newspapers.

When you and I read a newspaper, we normally scan the headlines for stories that are relevant to our interests. We further scan the first few lines of the story, or even a paragraph to confirm that it meets our needs.

Search engine algorithms apply this principle when weighing the relevancy of each web page in its search results. When a consumer conducts a search, one of the many factors an algorithm uses in determining relevancy is the use of headlines within a web page. Without getting technical, if the key phrase you are using for your online real estate marketing is properly integrated into the headlines within your Web page, then it adds higher relevancy to your Web page, hence improving the placement received in the search engines.

Search engines operate on the idea that your Web site's key concepts will be contained within the headlines, the same way your local newspaper writes the story concepts into their headlines. You want to grab the attention of the search engine algorithm by integrating your targeted key phrase into headlines throughout your content layout.

Using headers to organize and focus your online real estate marketing campaign

The article you are now reading is a great example of how to use headlines throughout your page layout. The main key phrase of this Web page is “online real estate marketing”. If you look back, you will see that it’s well integrated into the many concept sections here. It not only improves the results in the search engines, but it also maintains focus for the visitors to your web page. When they see the phrase “online real estate marketing” included as a consistent theme throughout this page content, they will understand that this subject is important to the author and is the central idea of the page.

Another element of your online real estate marketing that models itself after newspaper principles deals with the first few paragraphs of your web page. When the key phrase is introduced earlier into the text body, it more positively affects your search engine relevancy, especially when it is applied to the opening paragraph. Be sure to randomly integrate your key phrase smoothly throughout the web page. The placement within the paragraph holds some relevance as well. Near the front of the paragraph is more important than in the middle or end. Beware! DO NOT get ridiculous by abusing the number of times you repeat your key phrase. Using SPAM techniques to further your search engine marketing campaign can result in a permanent ban. There are guidelines to the overall percentage of your content which is made up by your key phrase. Stay within those guidelines and keep your content readable and informative at all times.

How to have “headlines” in your search engine marketing without a headline

Bolding the key phrase within your Web page is another method of improving your search relevancy. Some major search engine algorithms interpret the bolded text as “headline text” and figures that information must be important to the document. It’s important not to overuse this method, but integrating the usage of this in appropriate areas is another important piece of the puzzle when targeting a key phrase such as "online real estate marketing".

Be sure to put your key phrase in the title of your web page as that is one of the most important factors to a search engine for your real estate marketing campaign. In the case of this article, we would want to place our key phrase “online real estate marketing” in a sentence that is descriptive and concise. One example could be “Online real estate marketing campaign techniques that will improve your results” This title is a little long at 15 words, but is in great shape for the more important element of keyword density. At 36.36%, this title is at the perfect density.

A wonderful example of a fully optimized site can be found at: http://www.san-diego-vacation.com

We highly suggest that you take the time to study the content layout of this Web page as well as the other pages in this site. This site utilizes every SEO method you should be considering for your search engine optimization. It’s pretty obvious that this page is targeting San Diego vacation. It is optimized specifically for the Inktomi algorithm (Yahoo.com, MSN.com, etc.). The theme is maintained throughout the site and the methods can easily be utilized in your online real estate marketing.

You will notice that even the URL of this page is optimized for the search engines. While this method has lost much of its relevance with the search engines, it still does ad value to the overall content of the website. It’s not necessary to have a URL that is written this way to achieve favorable results for your online real estate marketing campaign, but it can help if you want to use it. If you do use this, but still want to have a name people can easily remember and type into their address bar, you do have options. You can register another URL with an easy name to remember and have it “pointed” towards your website with the optimized URL. What happens is that a person who types in your new URL will be directed right to your website and they won’t even know that it’s not the actual URL of the site.

For the example site listed above, the owner has registered another URL that points to this exact same page. The URL is: http://www.AccessSanDiego.com

When the owner tells someone about the site, it is much easier to refer to it as Access San Diego than San (dash) Diego (dash) Vacation (.com). The owner even set up what is called URL cloaking so that the people who get there through this URL continue to see the www.accesssandiego.com URL at the top instead of www.san-diego-vacation.com. This really isn’t a huge deal, but can keep some people from getting confused by seeing a different URL in the address bar. The URL cloaking also does nothing to hurt your site with the search engines. When building your online real estate marketing for a search engine, don’t forget this example when picking your URL. Please feel free to bookmark this example site as an example of a completely optimized site.

If you apply these principles to your online real estate marketing campaign, you will see marked improvement in your rankings. It’s important to remember that the content and page layout are only one piece of the pie when working to fully optimize your site.

Editor's note: Optimize Your Real Estate Website -Part 11 will publish tomorrow and will cover how to gain rank with the search engines using “off the page” factors.

Published: May 20, 2004

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