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| A Quarterly Publication of the Raleigh Regional Association of REALTORS® |
November 2008 Issue
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About Us March Dates to Remember
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What is ‘search engine optimized writing’ for
real estate? When I first started writing for the Internet I was mesmerized by the term search engine optimized (SEO) writing. I had lots of questions. What should my writing be for it to be search engine optimized? How do I make search engine optimized writing different than regular writing? How is search engine optimized writing different? What is search engine optimized writing? I researched the topic for some time and in this article I’ll share with you what I’ve learned. You’ll see that learning to write SEO writing is just like learning any other writing. You write to your audience. But when you write SEO writing, you write with a laser focus. Search engine optimized writing begins with a focus on keyword phrases. In the article you’re reading now, I’ve chosen the key word phrases search engine optimized writing, SEO and SEO writing as major keyword strings. For minor strings I’ve chosen stuffing, black hat SEO and white hat SEO. Once the key word phrases are chosen, it’s up to you, the writer, to weave them into a meaningful article. Weaving the words into a meaningful SEO article is important. It’s here that most writers trip when they begin to learn search engine optimized writing. They think that all they have to do is use the keywords as often as possible. At its extreme, this technique resulted in what has now become known as black hat SEO writing. One example of black hat SEO writing is simply filling a web page with key words. Webmasters choose matching colors for the keyword string’s text and the web page’s background color so the two would blend. This masked to human users the hundreds of keywords stuffed in the page. Search engines, however, lacking the human eye, saw only the hundreds of text objects. The logic behind this black hat SEO writing technique is that the multiple instances of the key words would trick the search engine to think the page was a high content page. It’s called keyword stuffing. The more of the SEO keyword I have, the more the search engines will notice. This SEO writing technique worked for a while. But the search engine programmers got wise to it and improved their algorithms to detect this type of SEO writing. The detection algorithms in use today pick up this technique in a hurry. If your site is found using it, the search engines will almost automatically delist your site’s index. Quite the opposite of the effect intended. White hat SEO writing, on the other hand, is written just like the article you are reading now. White hat SEO is search engine optimized writing at its best. It combines appropriate keywords and highly readable content. The content is the key. A well-written search engine optimized article does the same thing any other well-written article does. It informs and entertains. With SEO, however, there is an added characteristic of search engine optimized writing. When asked what they should know about search engine optimized writing, I tell folks to look at how they lead into their strings. When I start writing an SEO article I ask myself how many different ways will someone look for this string? Then I work to include these ideas into my search string.
Take a look back through this article and see how many different ways I framed the search engine optimized (SEO) keywords I’ve chosen to use in writing it. Notice how a lot of them would be actual queries someone would key in to a search engine. Framing your keywords is the first step to a page one search engine ranking. Getting a page one search engine ranking is highly coveted. Everybody knows that. But it’s debatable as to how much search engine optimized writing assists this pursuit. At first I thought that search engine optimized writing meant an automatic page one placement with the search engines. It doesn’t. What I found is that search engine ranking depends on multiple factors. Page content is only one. I’ve come to learn, however, that content is very high on the list of criteria. So, whenever you write, write well. If you follow that rule and focus your writing as I have here, in time you will be rewarded with search engine hits. (Aleagha is the founder
and president of RealtySoft.com, which provides REALTORS® with real estate
web design, print marketing and IDX solutions.) |
