I had a few questions regarding writing for the web. For example, lets say you are putting together some community profiles on your website. I understand that you always want to write to the benefit of your readers, but is there any other elements that go into this? For example do you research keywords on the community beforehand and try to use those keywords to get a certain density etc, etc....

Any help would be appreciated, or if you can point me to another page where this has been covered that would be great as well.

Thank you.

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Hi BarryC,
My own short answer would be that yes, you should do some keyword research to figure out which main keywords your page(s) will target.

I usually default right away to "[area] real estate" as the main keyword for the community pages, putting it into the main heading and peppering the body content with it (2-4 times depending on how much copy there is).

Then I ascertain a secondary keyword (default is "[area] homes") and create a secondary heading for it. This can be difficult when the page says nothing about homes, so try to make sure you talk about architectural styles of the homes in the area (looking at the listings in the area helps with this), or anything else that justifies the "homes" heading.

I generally don't worry about whether the body content keywords are under the relevant heading, as long as it makes sense for readers. In other words, my "homes" keywords might appear under the main ("real estate") heading.

An important thing to remember when writing these pages is that you should make an effort to actually talk about real estate in the area - most Realtors' community pages end up being visitor's guides, with no real info about their profession. (We often conclude that a client doesn't actually know anything about real estate, when we ask for their perspective on their market and they send us verbiage copied directly from the chamber of commerce's "Welcome to our beautiful city" page.) Writing specifically about real estate is most useful/relevant for your users, and it also helps you to organically include keywords related to your industry.

Hope that helps you some!

Gerry,

Thanks for the response. Do you have an example of a page that is done right regarding an area profile or master-planned community page?

Thank you.

Barry

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Scottsdale Foreclosures
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Sure, how about this page we wrote for one of my favourite clients?:
Alabaster AL Real Estate
(Note: We didn't write all of John's area pages, in case you find an error somewhere. )

Whoa, I didn't even realize he went live Just a quick note on this page gerry, http://www.themejiagroup.com/alabaster-real-estate.php the search the MLS link really should go to the "Alabaster" results as opposed to just the main search page, not sure if he has time left with you guys or whether it is something we should pass on for him to do.

Also, does this site have snippets installed do you know? I would be nice to put some listings below your content to provide some image support on the page.

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Yeah, er, thanks - the writing team signed off on him about six weeks ago, but those are good ideas, obviously.

I just met with programming and it turns out they've made all that functionality now - so I just sent John an email with your recommendations.

Hi seogerry:

I just tried the keyword research tool you referred to at http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

Just for fun, I tried "MA real estate"

I got a long list, which included these seemingly-improbable searches:

estate ma newton real
estate ma real westport
estate fall ma real river

The last one really gets me: The town name is "Fall River", and I can't believe people are searching for "estate fall ma real river"!

Doesn't it matter what order people place keywords in a search? In other words, doesn't "fall river ma real estate" give different results than "real estate fall river"?

And does it matter, when writing text, if the keywords are in a particular order? Does it matter if I write "Search for real estate in Fall River, MA" or "If you're searching in MA for Fall River real estate..."?

Well, search engines like google have a nice way of searching.

Say you have something like 'Fall River Real Estate'.

If you go to google, and put in Fall River Real Estate, it will show you things with Fall, River, Real, Estate, and combinations of them all (though the top hits will have all 4).

If you put "Fall River Real Estate" with the quotes, it looks for an exact match.

If you put "Fall River" +"Real Estate" it will try to find pages that have Fall River as a phrase, and Real Estate as a phrase.

So in short, they could give some of the same results.

(I believe that's how it works, I read about it a long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away.

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Hi Brandon:

Thanks for the info. I was aware of the quoted search feature in Google, and I use it all the time.

What threw me was that the keyword tool that was referred to listed those keywords in that order. I had the impression that it was the way people were really searching, which didn't make sense.

For somebody to type in fall river real estate makes sense to me. But I can't believe that many people type estate fall real river!

Maybe that's just the way the tool reports the results, but I thought that the order of keywords in text on the page was important...

I'm pretty sure it's just the way the tool does it - alphabetically.
As for the order being important, I'm sure it's a great tie-breaker. We've always been content if we can write "real estate in Smithville" on our pages, considering it pretty much equal to "Smithville real estate".