Many Agents and Brokers who blog will blog about their local area.  This is very smart because it helps you gain a web presence as your local area expert.  It also increases your chances of showing up in search engines for your local area specific searches. These are great motivating factors but you also want to grab the visitors (potential homebuyers) that find your post and keep them on your blog to learn more about you. This is the first tip of a series that I will write on ways you can add value to your local blog posts.

Google Maps - Add Google maps to your posts. People love interactive maps. Go to http://maps.google.com/ and generate a map based on local area searches. For example if you are blogging about your local restaurants a good map to generate would be a map that includes local restaurants. To accomplish this do a search for restaurants in your city such as "San Luis Obispo CA restaurants". See below screen shot…

Now that you have the desired map results you can easily get a code snippet of this map to place into your post. Google makes this really easy! From the map results click the "link to this page" hyperlink and click "Customize and preview embedded map" as shown in the below screenshot.

From the customization screen you will be able to control the size of your map and will be provided with HTML code like seen below.

Paste the map HTML code into the source view of your RealTown blog post by clicking the source option located at the top left of the blog post entry editor.

That's all there is to it. This is a great way to offer visitors to your local pages an interactive map that they will appreciate.

You can read more information about this option from Google by clicking the following links.

Add customized maps to your blog or website in 3 easy steps -http://maps.google.com/help/maps/share/embed.html#utm_source=en-mapshpp-na-us-google-gmon

Sharing Maps - http://local.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=68480#share

Google Maps User Guide - http://local.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=68480