The search engines tend to be extraordinarily democratic (small d). They don't care how big you are, how many years you've been in business, or who your daddy is. If you build a site that has a legitimate reason to rank #1 for the broad term "real estate", then you are sitting on a gold mine.

       The problem is that, the more popular the search term, the more sites that are already competing hard for it. Some terms, like "real estate" and "travel" are already so well covered and competitive that expecting to rank well for them is just a fantasy.

       But when you combine your local market terms with a real estate term, you may well find that there is still very little existing competition. "New York condominiums" will have fewer active competitors than "New York real estate", and "Park Avenue condos" will have even fewer still. Being thorough and focused has its advantages.

       With that in mind, we first need to define the true realm of our business, with respect to the search terms that might apply to it, and then prioritize it. Once we do that, then we can build the content on our site that will focus on the search traffic that we want to attract.

       Real Searches, or Fantasy Searches?

       It's easy to imagine that people might search for particular terms, but quite often, we find that they do not. So it would be nice to see what people REALLY DO search for, in order to make informed judgments.

       We can do that with "keyword research" tools. These are online tools that allow us to put in baseline words and terms (like "real estate") and it will tell us how many people searched for that term on a particular search engine over some specific timeframe. A good tool will also "suggest" other related terms that we might overlook.

       Shown below are a few of these keyword research tools. Each has it's own advantages and disadvantages. Some are free and some are by subscription. Overall, they are invaluable. They help us focus our efforts on what people really search for.

· Google Adwords Keyword Tool
· Keyword Discovery
· SEO Book Keyword Tool
· Wordtracker
· YAHOO! Keyword Selector Tool

       We should not get caught up in the actual numbers that these tools present to us. The number of searches is only a relative indicator of strength for that term, over a specific period of time, for a particular search engine. Just realize that a term that is searched 10,000 times is ten times more potent than one that is searched only 1000 times, and so forth.

       At the same time, the more specific the term, the more focused the person doing that search. Someone searching for "Park Avenue Condos" (while there may only be a few of them) is someone that is truly searching for "Park Avenue Condos". So the quality of the lead can increase, even as the traffic volume decreases.

       In the real estate business, we all know that it's about lead quality. One client from a low traffic term can make for a very nice commission check, especially for a Park Avenue condo! So what if you don't rank in the top 1000 for "real estate". Forget about it. Focus on what is right for YOU.

       You have to keep all of this in mind, as we proceed. It is a matter of positioning yourself where the competition is not already established, as well as competing hard where they are.

       Your Keyword Matrix

       In most meaningful real estate searches, you have a locality name, combined with a real estate term. Examples are "Park Avenue condo", "Westchester single family home", "Harlem walk-up", etc.

       For the localities, you have state names, county names, city names, metro names, neighborhoods, towns, regions, subdivisions, streets, and even specific developments and buildings. All of these could be relevant to your market.

       For real estate terms, we have "real estate" (always the biggie), "homes for sale", "listings", "buy a house", "houses", "condo", "townhouse", "apartment", "land", "property", "unit", "walk-up", "brownstone", "vacation home", "camp", etc. There are many more, and some apply to one region and not to others. Think about your market. By combining all the possible real estate terms with all the possible localities, you can come up with a matrix of thousands of terms. That's OK. We'll trim it, or at least prioritize it later. We can't attack all of them, and some of them, like subdivision names, could all be combined into a single page of content on your site, in order to save some time.

       Use a spreadsheet like Excel to build this matrix, putting locality terms in one column, and the real estate terms in the one next to it, and then start to copy/paste the various sections to make your complete matrix.

       Your matrix might look like this, only much larger:

New York condo
New York townhouse
New York penthouse
New York rental
Manhattan condo
Manhattan townhouse
Manhattan penthouse
Manhattan rental
Mid-town condo
Mid-town townhouse
Mid-town penthouse
Mid-town rental
Midtown condo
Midtown townhouse
Midtown penthouse
Midtown rental

       Note the two variants of Mid-town and Midtown. Keep these types of variations in mind.

       Now use the keyword research tool to get relative indicators of strength for a sampling of the terms that apply to your business. You'll see trends emerge.

       You can also perform some of these searches yourself, and see what kind of competitors pop up in the results. Highly competitive terms will have several pages of highly optimized pages in the results.

       On less competitive terms, you'll see that the quality of the results dissipates quickly. The search term will not be in "sequence". Instead, the words will be scattered around the pages, and the pages will not be focused on the term. That's ripe territory, since it implies that other sites are not optimizing for that term!

       Priorities Matter

       From this large matrix, you will start to set priorities. Use a score of 1 to 9, in a third column of your spreadsheet, to rank terms you like and don't like, with 1 being the top priority terms.

       Score your matrix, and then sort it by priority. You will now see very clearly the search terms that matter most to YOUR business.

       You may want to use refine your priority list 1.1, 1.2, etc, to further refine your matrix priorities, as we must start with a single item, and work on them one at a time.

       Ideally, a top priority keyword term has the following attributes:

· It is highly relevant to your business

· It enjoys some regular search traffic

· It is not very competitive, in terms of other sites optimizing for it

       Those are the kinds of terms that can provide rewards quickly, and you might stay under your competitor's radar screen for a long time!

       The better you do at setting your priorities, the more benefit you will get from this work, sooner. Making these decisions carefully is worth the effort.

       Now that you are armed with a focused keyword list, we're ready to attack!