Positive Real Estate Professionals

Hopefully the title made you smile, that was its intention. It is also a title loaded with high placement keywords. Now before I am accused of keyword stuffing, which is a definite no-no, all of those keywords are actually what this post is about! In a competitive industry like real estate it is important to take advantage of all the tools that are available to you. This means not only having a website and/or blogsite that looks good and is easy for visitors to navigate but having a site that is optimized to return high in search engine results. You can have the most beautiful site in the world but if nobody visits, it is like having a Picasso hanging in a closet.

So how can you determine if your site is loved by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines? One of the best ways to evaluate how loved your site is by the search engines is by determining a general idea of how often your site is indexed. When your site is indexed it means that the search engine spiders have crawled your site and cataloged what they have found there. Everything from text to media can be indexed. This indexing is how search engines return results when you (or anyone) perform a search on the internet. An easy way to determine how often your site is indexed is to take advantage of the alert system that many search engines offer, i.e. Google Alerts. When your site has been crawled and new information has been indexed you receive an alert via email notifying you of what has been found. Another way to get an approximation of how frequently your site is being indexed is to perform periodic searches for your specific new information after you have posted it; search for what you have posted. Once your information has been indexed it should return in search engine results. Indexing algorithms are proprietary so it is impossible to determine an exact frequency. For example, The Arkansas REALTOR® wrote a post entitled The Three Rs Every Realtor Needs to Embrace, and it was indexed very quickly. See the following screenshot using the periodic search method talked about above.

You want to be indexed as frequently as possible as this helps you to return high in searches. The old mantra that content is king can be specifically tied to indexing. The more frequently you add original or syndicated material to your site, the more often your site will be indexed. If content is king, then the queen has got to be your keywords. Keywords are what the spiders will literally ‘key on’ when determining what the new information on your site is about and how it should be indexed. Unlike your meta keywords, which give an indication of what your overall site is about, the keywords in your articles or posts are more specific. So when you are writing your articles be conscious of sprinkling keywords throughout your post that you believe visitors will use in their searches. This does NOT mean stuffing your posts full of keywords while sacrificing the clarity and integrity of your post. Keyword stuffing is penalized by most search engines. While opinions on keyword frequency vary, many SEO enthusiasts agree that keywords should compose no more than 9-10% of your total word count. As this figure is only an estimate, there really is no need to use some mathmatical formula to make sure you fall within these parameters. You should be able to use your common sense to know if you are stuffing your posts.

Positive Real Estate Professionals as a network is being indexed mutiple times throughout the day. This means our members’ articles are being indexed very fast and very frequently. How quickly and how frequently are you being indexed?