2
Jun
Search Engine Optimisation laid open for Estate Agents
Today Resource
Techniques has decided to grill the Resource Techniques SEO
Consultant Luke Stanley. Asking him several questions on SEO, just
to try to help Estate Agents get a better understanding of the
background to SEO for Estate Agents.
What is SEO? – “Search Engine
Optimisation” and how does this affect Estate
Agents?
Search Engine Optimisation is the process of
improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search
engines via "natural" or un-paid.
Or in similar words it is the process of getting your website to
the top of Google and keeping it there.
And it doesn’t just affect Estate Agents websites, it affects every website
on the internet. The point of SEO is to enable users to actually
see your website instead of it being lost in search engine. Being
at the top of Google is crucial if you want to get a lot of
traffic.
How often does Google visit an Estate Agent
website?
This obviously depends on how often the website is being
updated. Google could visit your website every day or once a month
or once a year.
We have no control over this, but we can dangle bait to get
Google to come back to your websites more frequently. It’s
all down to Estate Agents websites regularly changing their
content, uploading new feature properties and anything else that
changes your website. This makes Google need to come back to see
what changes you’ve made.
What can Estate Agents do to make sure that their Estate
Agent website performs as well as it can within
Google?
Well there are several things you can do to improve your ranking
on Google, having regularly changing content usually done via a
local news feed, uploading new feature properties every week, link
building in general, making videos and creating a social networking
account. All this will hugely benefit your Estate Agent website
ranking.
What’s the most common mistake is made through
SEO?
Probably one of the most common mistakes in SEO is duplicate
content. This is done all the time with people just copying content
off Wikipedia or other sources off the Internet. Google can pick up
on this very easily and see that the content has been used on
another website and you will be penalised for this.
Keyword stuffing is another mistake that is done quite common.
This can be easily done as people think that you have to repeat the
keyword as much as possible for Google to be able to see it and
they end up using the keyword as every other word. This obviously
isn’t user friendly at all and Google is smart enough to pick
out what keywords relate to your website. You only have to use the
keywords 4%-7% of the total amount of the content on the
webpage.
Another common mistake is people thinking Meta tags are still a
factor in Google’s ranking. Meta tags haven’t been used
for ranking in Google in years due to users abusing the system when
it was first introduced.
What’s the thing that most annoys you about
SEO for Estate Agents?
Probably the time it takes to see your results. With most things
if you make a change you can immediately see the results and tell
if it’s worked or not. With SEO it can take weeks or even
months to start seeing improvements in ranking.
Does Estate Agent SEO have anything to do with social
networking?
At the moment it carries very little weight in terms of SEO but
as I see it, in the near future Social Networking will start to
play quite a big factor in SEO. Google takes into account whatever
is relevant, popular and user friendly. At the minute nothing is
more popular then social networking and with Google starting to
make deals with Twitter we will definitely start seeing a
connection between SEO and Social Networks. And in some ways we
already have with real-time search...
By James Coyne
eMarketing and Social Media Consultant
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