Watch a video about the importance of the long tail at this link.

All of us want to rank high in the search engine results pages (SERPS) for big keyword phrases.  However, REALTORS will limit their keyword reach to a handful of obvious phrases, i.e. "Los Angeles Real Estate, Minneapolis homes" etc.  Why rank for only a handful of keyword phrases when you can rank for hundreds or thousands of terms that people will really use to find your site?

My own Minneapolis real estate site at http://RealEstateTwinCities.NET ranks at or near the top of page one of Google for a large number of major real estate keywords, i.e:

• Minneapolis MN homes
• Minneapolis MN real estate
• Twin  Cities townhomes
• Twin Cities real estate
• Minnesota lakeshore foreclosures

Most real estate websites are designed for the sole purpose of attracting only the REALTORS who will buy the sites; they do little to garner favor with search engines. If the search engines won't find those sites, potential customers won't either! Put your site on a platform used by Fortune 500 companies.

Do you think Fortune 500 companies use template and frame sites that are used by most real estate website development companies? Not very likely!  They know that template sites are loaded with clunky code and are very difficult to optimize for search engine performance.

Matt Cutts is the head of the Webspam Department at Google. The Webspam Department is responsible for ensuring that only quality sites rank well in Google search engine results.