Starting today I am stepping up to the Real Estate Tomato Challenge:  write 31 blogs in 31 days.

So far, so good.

What, you ask, is Real Estate Tomato? Okay, Jim Cronin, noble Tomato founder, here come your props.  Real Estate Tomato is the web design and hosting company, real estate school, and internet community to which I belong.  Yep, I’m a ‘mater.  The Tomato helped me design this site, host it, and provides me with consultation and technical services.  I’ll put a link to it at the bottom of this blog, but for now, stay right where you are.  With me, capiche?

What, you continue, do I win if I actually write 31 blogs in 31 days?  Braggin’ rights, that’s for sure, and a month of free web site hosting on the “Vine.”  Yay.

But there’s a bigger prize at stake.  SEO.  Search engine optimization.  If I do this right, the Tomato Gurus predict that my site will climb up through the rankings to reach, perhaps, to the supreme heights, the Holy Grail, the first page of a Google search for real estate in my service area.

What, you now inquire with sincere interest, do you have to do to climb to that rarified altitude?

• Write every day
• Write consistently about the topic promised by my site:  real estate (avoiding the off-topic stuff I into which I so often drift)
• Write benefit-rich, attention-grabbing headlines
• Include the important keywords in the headlines, and in the body of the blog, using natural, organic language (no keyword stuffing).  And just what are those important keywords?  They are the words that a customer would use when searching online for real estate in my geographic area:  real estate, homes for sale, California, Lake of the Pines, Auburn, Grass Valley, Nevada City, Sierra foothills, Nevada County, Placer County, affordable, rural, country, market, real estate market, Bob Jenkins, CJ Jenkins, Christine Jenkins and all of the long-tailed keywords I can reasonably expect customers might type into their browsers.

By the way, notice how I just worked all of those keywords into this blog?

That’s enough for this first day.  Thirty to go.

Oh yes, here’s the link to Real Estate Tomato I promised, an outbound link, delived to the Tomato, free of charge.

See you tomorrow.