Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Beating the big Real Estate sites at SEO for geographic keywords

One thing I've noticed in trying to optimize my folks site for search engine results, its that there's a whole lot of competition out there when you search on a city and state along with other Real Estate terms. This is true even for towns near where I grew up with vey small populations and limited Real Estate opportunities. It seemes that some of the big players apparently utilize some "post office mailing address" type databases, and generate pages such that they appear to be your Real Estate solution in your loacl town for everything, even though they've never been there. One trick I've found is to focus on geographic terms that may not be available in such a database. When searching on area lake real estate, many of these players drop off, although there are some others that step up to the plate. In my case things like "Irish Hills", which is a geographic area, but the mailing addresses there appear to be local towns in the surrounding areas. Trying to get ranked for searches on county names can also be difficult, but townships appear a little less competitive as search terms. Of course, the trade off is that folks from further away that want to look in your area may only know villages, cities, and counties, so the battle goes on. Getting your site address included on other sites is still important, and having lots of good content too. Also, I found that when you can get links to your site posted, put descriptive words inside the link.

So Hillsdale County Michigan Lake Properties is a good bit of text to hyperlink in my case.

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