Does your website jump off?

| Web design

Does your website jump off?

 

Of the many estate agency websites that are reviewed here at Resource Techniques, we find that a surprising number of Estate Agents websites jump off from their property search function onto another software provider (i.e. their in-house agency software provider).

Now you may ask why this would be a problem for your online campaign, but there are several benefits of hosting your own properties.

The benefits of hosting your own properties:

Hosting your properties can benefit your website in many ways:

  • SEO benefit – It gives your website a significant Search Engine Optimisation advantage. Hosting your own properties allows your website to have a dedicated page to each property. This allows you to included keywords that will help your entire website and also help you rank within Google for more longtail keywords.
  • Hosting properties shows Google, that your website is relevant to the user. Why would a user want to visit an Estate Agency website without any properties on it?
  • Social benefit – hosting your own properties allows users to ‘tweet’ and ‘like’ a page/property on your website. This will not only be considered as a ranking factor by Google, but will also draw more traffic to your website from Social Networking sites.

The disadvantages of not hosting your own properties:

  • You’re not actively promoting your own website, linking off to your property host software is promoting their software rather than your own website.
  • I-frames are a function that the software hosting your properties can use to make it appear that you host your own properties. The properties do show up on your website but the content isn’t considered as part of your website by search engines.
    The content may be crawled by Google but no page rank will be passed through any of the properties pages.

Estate Agents your website should have been hosting its own properties years ago. Check that your website is hosting its own properties, and if it doesn’t, demand it!

By Luke Stanley
SEO Consultant