Dev Element

Creating new posts for your real estate blog may seem overwhelming at first as many of us are not born journalists. To keep your blog fresh and relevant to the search engines, you should add content to your site a minimum of three times per week. Overcome your writer's block by writing about what you know-real estate! Having a real estate blog that doesn't display real estate related content is not going to do as well as one that does. Here are some simple strategies to help you create quality content for your visitors and the search engines.

Tips to create quality posts for your real estate blog:

• Use your site's keywords in the titles for your content.

• Get creative and try to create catchy, memorable post titles to create interest and keep visitors on your site as long as possible.

• Use your site's keywords 3 to 5 times within each post

• Link to other sites on the web in your posts-cite the sources of your content and/or refer to articles on a similar subject that can be found on the web

• Link to your own posts within new posts-if you have posts on similar subjects, link them to each other

• Format your posts so that they read well. Use spacing between paragraphs to create digestible chunks of information

If you just don't know where to start or are running out of new ideas for posts, here are 30 days worth of blog post ideas to get you going:

1. About Me-Introduce yourself to the world by creating a biography for your blog. Include your experience level, education, accomplishments, affiliations, and interests. Tell visitors why they should choose you to buy or sell their home. This will sell you to potential clients so keep it professional!
2. How to Sell Your Home in a Buyer's Market-HOT topic!
3. How to Convince a Seller to Accept Your Offer
4. Why You Should Hire a Real Estate Professional to Sell Your Home
5. What to Look for When Purchasing a Foreclosure or Short Sale-HOT topic!
6. Staging Your Home for a Speedy Sale
7. Why You Should Buy A Home Now in (enter your farm area here)
8. How to Price Your Home for a Quick Sale-HOT topic!
9. What is a Conventional Mortgage?
10. What To Avoid When Remodeling Your Home
11. What is an Adjustable Rate Mortgage?
12. Why You Need A Real Estate Professional To Buy A Home
13. How To Use A CMA: For Sellers
14. How To Use A CMA: For Buyers
15. The Closing Process: For Sellers
16. The Closing Process: For Buyers
17. What is a FHA-insured mortgage?
18. What You Should Know About (enter your farm area here)-go to www.bestplaces.net for statistics and information on your farm area
19. Why You Should Be Buying Instead of Renting
20. New Homes vs. Existing Homes-Which One Is Right For You?
21. 5 Things You Can Do Now To Increase Your Home's Resale Value
22. Why Now Is The Best Time To Buy Real Estate in (enter your farm area here)
23. How Rising Foreclosure Rates Affect Your Home's Value-HOT topic!
24. How To Choose The Right Home For You
25. Negotiating with a Seller in a Buyer's Market-HOT topic!
26. Do You Qualify For A VA Mortgage?
27. How To Properly Prepare To Purchase A Home
28. How To Know How Much Home You Can Afford
29. How To Use Technology To Find Your New Home Now
30. How To Invest in (enter your farm area here) Real Estate

Remember, you have a real estate blog so you all of your content should be real estate related. Some other sources for additional post ideas are www.realtytimes.com, www.msnbc.com, and www.cnn.com. Now stop reading and start writing your way to the top of the search engines!

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Webmasters these days use a number of techniques to enhance the aesthetics and SEO of their clients sites. They realize that their clients main goal is to have a site that is appealing both to the public and the major search engines. Pleasing both types of visitors will determine the success of a website or blog. One of the tactics commonly employed by web designers to optimize a site is hidden text.

Hidden text is defined as text that is formatted to be unseen by human visitors to a site, but is able to be seen by search engine robots and spiders within the HTML of a site. Back in the 1990s, the use of hidden text was exploited by a number of webmasters. They were using hidden text to increase the keyword density of their sites and boost their positioning in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). This caused the major search engines to revise their guidelines and view hidden text, in the majority of its forms, as spamming. As you may already know, spamming is the premier reason why sites are removed from the SERPs. However, the limited and legitimate use of hidden text is not considered spam and can actually add SEO value to your site.

Here are two examples of techniques NOT to use to create hidden text:

1. Placing white text on a white background

2. Setting the font size to 0, or a negative number

Here are two examples of ACCEPTABLE techniques to use to create hidden text:

1. Using CSS to place the text off of the screen

2. Specifying an attribute of display:none

***The above techniques are referenced from SEOmoz-read the full article by clicking here

A great example of the appropriate use of hidden text can be found on Dev Element blogs. To maintain the aesthetics of our sites, we hide one line of code, the H2 tag. This tag contains the main keywords of our sites and does help to improve each blogs SEO value. In certain cases a blog owner may be contacted by Google in regards to their H2 tag. Though it may be easy to believe that the problem lies with the text being hidden, in actuality the contents of the H2 tag can be causing the trouble. This happens when a blog that has a high number of keywords in that tag and are irrelevant to the content of the site. While one option may be to remove the H2 tag completely, all a site owner would really needed to do was to reduce the number of keywords in the tag and make sure the keywords used were completely relevant to the site.

It is also important to know that the H2 tag is the ONLY text that is hidden on our sites, keeping our sites well within the guidelines of acceptable use of hidden text. So, to answer the question of to hide or not to hide? Only on a very limited basis and never for the deception of the search engines-that is the answer.

More resources on the use of hidden text:

Google, SEO and using CSS to hide text

Google Okays Hidden Text

The title tag points to the content of your SEO site. Therefore, you have to check and check again for relevance. It is the most significant element of your web page and could make or break your presence on the Net. All search engines scan titles for relevance to queries and it could be your gateway to a page that promises search engine optimization. Short and simple While visitors should be satisfied with the title and the promise it holds, the title should neither give too much nor too little. Too descriptive a title? Nah! The visitor will get bored. Too little clue to the content? The visitor will not give it a second look. Where are the leads in it? So keep it short and simple. The SEO title has specific attributes. Lets take a look.

Every page should have a unique <title> tag on it. This is what creates lead generation for your pages.

The title tag should contain the keywords and keyword phrases but not so many that it confuses the visitor as to the sites core area/s.

Title tags should vary throughout the site instead of being common to all pages. After all, your pages do not provide the same information throughout. So why should title tags remain the same? Since each page has a different set of information, their titles should also vary and reflect the focus of the page

Titles should ideally be limited to 65 characters. Long titles run the risk of being redundantly phrased and being stuffed with keywords. This also means you have to use your words and phrases carefully so that the title gives only as much as required. Let title tags draw in the visitors first rather than backlinks from other sites.