Keywords are one of the most important factors for your site, whether you're doing a redesign or starting from scratch. People find your website through search engines, and they use search terms (or keywords) to do their searches. So you need to have relevant keywords that will enhance your
searchability while not being too complex. It's a delicate balance, and I'm going to tell you how I do it.
If you're a
CyberSunshine client, you really don't need to worry about the technical stuff since we'll do that for you. So the first thing you need to do is figure out what your target market is. I'm going to use one of our clients as an example, because I've been working on her keywords a lot lately and it's fresh in my brain. Her target market is Naples Real Estate. She also sells luxury properties in Naples, but since luxury properties aren't a hot commodity right now, and people just aren't searching for that, we made the Luxury part a secondary keyword. Anyway, her old keywords focused mainly on her name. That's usually not the best idea. This particular agent had her name and several versions of it as her main keywords, and all her domain names consisted of some form of her name. Now, I'm not saying your name shouldn't be a keyword. Actually I think it should be. As a real estate agent, you brand and market yourself based around your name, so it's very possible that people are going to search for you by name sometimes (and if they do, you have an excellent marketing campaign going for you! The client I'm using as an example certainly does).
What I do first is establish what your main keyword should be. The best way to figure this out is to pretend you're searching for properties. So, I'm looking for a property in Naples, Florida. What am I going to search for? Well, most people tend to search for simpler terms, and then narrow them down if they don't get the results they want. With our client, I decided we should use Naples Real Estate as her main keyword phrase. I figure that if I'm going to be searching for Naples real estate, that's exactly what I'm going to type on Google.com. Now, Naples Real Estate is a great search term, but it is also being used by most agents in Naples. So I need to find additional keyword phrases. One of those is her name. She happens to have a name that is easily misspelled, so we also decided to use the misspellings of her name as keywords. Then, of course, since she told me she wants to emphasize that she sells luxury properties, we added Naples Luxury Real Estate. And just to focus on some of her primary markets, we added some other phrases, like Pelican Bay Naples Real Estate and so on.
Most of the time when people do searches, they will do several searches before actually finding what they want. So if a person starts with Naples Real Estate they're going to find a lot of information. They'll browse through whatever appeals to them and then do another search, like Pelican Bay Naples Real Estate (after they decide they want to learn more about Pelican Bay). So if they didn't find your site on the first round, they have another shot at finding you on round 2 (or 3 or 4 and so on). That's why you want to have an assortment of keywords. Plus, the more narrowed down the keywords are, the more likely you are to be in a less targeted market. So there's less competition for top placement on a search.
The most important thing to remember is to make sure that you're using keywords that are actually relevant to your site! We all know of someone, somewhere, who is using irrelevant keywords and getting high rankings for them. So what? If you're not actually selling properties in the South of France, then why do you need to market yourself for that area? Think about it logically. If I were actually searching for properties in France, and in my first page of search results I get a site for properties in Baltimore, Maryland, not only am I going to not click on it, I am also going to be pretty annoyed at that site. So if I do ever happen to be in the Baltimore, Maryland, market, guess which real estate website I'm going to avoid? Not only that, but Google is not stupid. Yes, the sites get crawled by automated spiders, not real people, but those spiders are clever. You can only get away with tricking Google for so long, and once you get caught, you'll regret the false marketing you're doing with your site. Google can and will ban your site, and then when people do a Google search, you won't come up in the results at all. It can take a very long time to recover your website from something like that. And since Google is the largest and most popular search engine out there, I'd recommend playing by their rules.
Now for the purpose of these keywords in relation to the building of your site. We do need keywords before we can finish your site and launch it. The reason for that it that we place them strategically all over the place in the back end of your website. Every image, every page, and every link has to be named, and we use your keywords in as many places as we can so we "embed" the keywords into your site. In addition, you'll need to provide content for your home page. That content should have your main keyword several times. But don't overdo it; people don't like to read sentences like, "Your Naples Real Estate Luxury specialist in Naples, Florida is here to help you with all your Naples Real Estate needs!" That's obviously an attempt at using keywords, and people don't like to feel like they're being sucked into a site with tons of keywords and little relevant information.
Good luck with your keywords, and if you need any help, don't hesitate to ask!
Labels: Custom Websites, CyberSunshine, Real Estate SEO for Beginners
