Keywords and #Hashtags

www.DennisDavisPhotography.com

Search engines and social networking sites use keywords and #hashtags. Hashtags are keywords with the # pound sign in front of them, with no space between the symbol and the first letter of the word. Letter case is not important. When creating a website, blog article or posting a photo, it is keywords or hashtags that help other people know what kind of subject matter to expect.

I am currently researching and writing a blog about my niece’s real estate business in Eagle River, Alaska to promote her company website http://www.eagleriverhomes.com. So I was wondering which keywords to use to promote the site, as I needed to name my blog something good for SEO with the most important keywords in the name of the blog. I went to the Google Keyword Tool, and entered the words

www.DennisDavisPhotography.com

• Alaska Real Estate
• Buy Real Estate
• Sell Real Estate
• Realtor
• Buy house
• Buy home
• Sell house
• Sell home
• Eagle River Homes
• Eagle River Property
• Anchorage home
• Alaska Property

All of these are possible keywords to use in the title of the blog, as captions on the pictures of a website or blog, or as hashtags under a post, picture or blog article written like #Alaska #eagleriverhomes #anchoragehomes

However, I learned from the Google Keyword tool that the words homes and property get more than twice the traffic as the words real estate or realtor. Alaska homes gets more searches than Anchorage homes and Eagle River Homes written #EagleRiverHomes will bring more traffic on Google plus than without the # sign.

www.DennisDavisPhotography.com

So after a trip to Google Keyword Tool, I decided a good name for a blog promoting http://www.eagleriverhomes.com is Buying and Selling Alaska Homes, but I am going to try to see if Alaska Homes is available first. Shorter is always better.

When promoting a local or regional business, the most important keyword is often a city name. The larger the city, the more challenging it is to rank high on a search engine for that keyword. So always use both the suburb your business is located in, as well as the larger city name. To compete on Google for the keywords “Brooklyn Mexican Restaurants” or “Queens Italian Restaurants” is easier than competing for “New York Restaurant”. Both keywords need to appear somewhere on your blog or web page, but I recommend the smaller town name in the title, as the title is most important to the search engines.

So although I have a website http://www.LosAngeles-Photo.com and I try to get on the first page of search engines for the keywords “Los Angeles Corporate Photography” or Los Angeles Food Photographer”. However, as I am in Los Angeles County but live in Long Beach, I find that “Long Beach Headshots” and “Long Beach Food Photographers” are keywords that with effort I can get on the first page with spending about 3 hours a week promoting blog articles, photos and tweets with the correct keywords or #hashtags in the post. The same success with “Los Angeles Headshots” would take 5 times the effort.

keywords: SEO, social media, social networking, keywords, Los Angeles photography, Los Angeles Headshots, Long Beach headshots, #headshots, #photography, #longbeachphotography, #blogging