Two quick IMC tips for maximizing your real estate blogging and neighborhood news efforts. Follow these tips and you will please both your real estate website visitors and the search engines.

1. Provide 2 to 3 internal links in your blog entries and real estate news articles. An internal link is one that connects back to a page on your real estate website. Typical pages to link to are the Contact Us, guestbook, bio page and homepage. These links tell the search engines that the pages you link to are popular and the website visitor has a better ability to contact and get to know you.

Remember to hyperlink phrases that relate to the page you are linking to, not just a “Click here” place in a sentence. For instance, to link to the home page or a guestbook page, use the “your city real estate” words in a sentence as the anchor point. This tells the search engine what you are linking to. This is versus a link to “homepage” which is too generic to convey any information to the search engine as to why your website visitor is following the link.

2. Use pictures in your entries. Yes, you can upload graphic images, usually JPEGs, with your blog entries and real estate articles. Check with your real estate website developer as to the best size. You will probably need to edit the graphic in Photoshop or a freeware like GIMP to size the graphic, but once you know how it is a fairly simple process. Having a dozen or so graphics that you can readily upload to your real estate website adds both “eye candy” for your website visitor. Added benefit: the image is given a title, which is another area to prominently place keywords or phrases.