Using Keywords to Drive More Inquiries

A lot of us are missing out on a very effective and simple way to generate more inquiries for our properties. Search engines love user generated content, and since you the property owner are a user on our site you are in a great position to effectively use keywords so that your property will show up in Google search results.

Let me give you an example. When you are entering a title for your property don't just plug in your address or the name of your property. If I am a potential renter, and I am trying to find a place to stay for graduation weekend or the next big football game chances are I am not going to search for "Three Rivers Cottage" , "Condo near Main St", or "Town Home in Cherry Hills". If you use keywords like graduation, football, team mascots, university names, weddings, vineyards, etc ...... then you greatly increase the chances that somebody out there is going to find your property when searching on Google. Below are two examples in our Charlottesville market where property owners have included relevant keywords in their title and in their short description and it has landed them 1st page results on Google.

In this first example the property owner included the keyword phrase "Graduation Weekend" and as you can see they are the third URL in the list when someone searches for "places to stay uva graduation 2010". Click the following link to see this vacation rental.
http://uva.collegeweekends.com/more_details.aspx?prop_id=268&ref=browse

An even better example is this property that shows up #1! for the search "uva football house rental" because she put UVA football in her title. Click the following link to see this game day rental http://uva.collegeweekends.com/more_details.aspx?prop_id=748&ref=browse

You will notice that these people still used a traditional title but just took advantage of the extra space by entering relevant keywords. You can also do this in your short and long descriptions as well as in the user profile that we blogged about last week.

If you have any questions about this or want some help from us for some good keyword suggestions in your market please comment on this blog post.