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Keyword marketing, selecting keywords for keyword promotions

Keywords are the 21st century equivalent of the Yellow Pages. They are necessary to find whatever it is that you seek online. And they are also what others will use to find you.

The real estate keywords that you choose can dictate the life or death of your property sales website. Your online marketing campaign will not succeed unless you target the right keywords.... the keywords that your potential customers, property buyers and sellers will use.

The property keywords you use on your website will determine exactly how your website will perform in search engine and directory searches made by potential visitors. This can have a huge positive or negative effect on the exposure your properties and property services receive from the global audience of the Internet.

It does not matter what the purpose of the estate agency website might be. Without traffic, you are creating a website that will never be seen by anyone other than yourself.

• If you target the wrong keywords, you may get scores of traffic but no property sales, or you may get no traffic whatsoever, because no one is looking for those words. A great website is not so great if no one finds it. Remember to research real estate keywords carefully from the consumer's viewpoint and then sit back and watch the traffic roll in!
• Selecting the correct real estate keywords can make or break your website promotion. Potential customers search the web for desired sites, and if your website doesn't have the keywords they're looking for, they'll miss you.

Determining real estate keywords is an art; it's best to work backwards. What would a real estate buyer or seller search for if they were looking for your site? You literally have to put yourself in the consumer's place and let go of your preconceived notions about what you think your property related keywords are. You should remember when writing your site that you need to use words that are not only related to your content, but are popular search words as well. This is called keyword optimisation, or choosing the most searched real estate keywords related to your content.

Spend some time listing all of the words and phrases that are related to your properties and location, your website content. Get ideas from everyone you can think of and list them all. Visit competing real estate agents sites and see what keywords they use. After this research, you are ready to develop your own keyword phrases. There are several sites designed to assist you in keyword optimisation.

Here are a few of the free ones:-

• Overture Keyword Tool: lists searches related to the keyword you provide. This took is great for expanding your list.
• Wordtracker: helps identify keywords that will help your ranking on search engines. Wordtracker also gives you other keyword combinations that you may have overlooked.
• The Keyword Tumbler: takes your existing keyword phrases and mixes it up to form new phrases and variations that you can include in your meta tags.

Testing for Searchability

Testing a site for searchability involves looking at the results of various keyword searches and analysing the results as they relate to your website. However, the process takes a long time to download each page, throw out invalid results, count the keyword instances, and note the location of your URL.

Testing META Tag Effectiveness

To test for effectiveness, perform a search for home pages with similar content using several different search engines. See which pages show up at the top of the indices. Go to those pages and note how each has utilised the keywords used in the search.

Also check the document source to see if META tags have been used for the description and keywords. Doing this on a few pages should provide some good keywords to add.

Testing Keywords

Similar to the technique above, keywords can also be tested. A developer should try individual keywords as well as word combinations on several search engines to see what types of home pages show up in the results.

This test will give you an idea whether the keywords chosen are appropriate for the topic of your home page. If certain combinations of keywords seem to target the appropriate type of pages better than others, move these keywords to the beginning of your keyword listing to improve the your page’s ranking by the search engine.

Choosing Keywords

Choosing keywords for your META tags is an art—similar to cataloging information. To use keywords to your advantage, use specific and common terms for your site. If keywords are too unusual or are too difficult to spell, searcher may not include them in the search query. Some tips:

Consider the terms the searcher would use. Make a thorough list of the keywords that best describes the information contained on the site. Give greater credibility to your keywords by frequently using keywords. As keywords are used more frequently within the site, the Relevancy Factor grows higher. Consequently, the page is given priority in the search engine listings. However do this with restraint; do not overuse keywords; overuse can affect the document’s readability. Some search engines will actually reject the keywords if they are repeated too often or spammed in the document. Some search engines only look for keywords in the body of the document.

Tips for Building Keywords List

• Use Plurals: Plurals are easier to search than singular words because search engines capture both the singular and plural forms.
  
• Vary Word Forms: Use the keywords in various forms, with hyphens and without, one word or two words, etc.
  
• Consider the Common Misspellings People Make: If you are aware of how users commonly misspell words, you can use these variant spellings in your keywords.
  
• Use Keyword Combinations: Some sites only look at the first 250 characters of a keyword list. To conserve your character count, create keyword combinations or "key terms." For example, if your site is about a 'London marketing agency', you could use "London marketing agency "as one key term, thus saving space for additional key words or terms.

Use Key Phrases

A recent study showed that users query phrases over 65% of the time. Some search engines even prefer phrases such as Ask Jeeves.