“Chicago Real Estate” is a popular search term for potential home buyers and Realtors in the Chicago and International market. Ranking high on search engines with such a popular search term as Chicago is a tough task but in the recent months, this search criteria has paid off for Rubloff Residential Properties. After being on their new site for only two months, they have seen a very positive and noticeable improvement in their search engine rankings and analytics, showing success with the general Internet user.

 

Rubloff’s success story – within less than one month of going live on their new website, there were 18 page one results on Google for Rubloff Residential Properties when ‘Chicago Real Estate’ was searched.

What did we do different? How did we improve ranking for such a competitive phrase? Keyword prominence was one of the key strategies implemented before going live on the new site, producing great results for www.rubloff.com.

 

Keyword prominence in the scope of search engine optimization (SEO) is the strategic placement of keywords in the HTML source code. In terms of SEO, the first keywords to be discovered on a web page tend to pull more weight and need focus and planning in order to be the most fruitful search engine results. 

 

While generating content for Rubloff we kept prominence in mind as a mechanism to help SEO results. For the user, this helps a new visitor understand the main idea behind the site and what may be gained during the visit. Prominence is not only the content users see on the site, but it also pertains to the keyword location within the code - coming directly from the title and initial header tags in the code (e.g. H1, H2, and so on).

 

Everything that can be discovered within the initial 100 lines of code (0.1 kloc) will have increased weight for the spider as it crawls any page. This initial discovery will influence the depth on which the crawler parses. Better keyword prominence for user output while engineered to work with the code-base will have a positive impact on the page depth viewed, number of pages parsed, and overall quality of the parse and cache the crawler generates for the search engine.

 

Search Engine Optimization is often overlooked and underestimated when it comes to website strategy and this goes to show how important it really is - Rubloff has seen great gains from their new ranking status. Keep in mind that there are many key components to improving your SEO and it takes a strong game-plan in order to see results like these, not just one tactic. Let’s face it, I could talk all day about SEO strategies, but we can’t give all our secrets away!