Search Engine Optimisation laid open for Estate Agents

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Search Engine Optimisation laid open for Estate Agents

SEO chat with Resource TechniquesToday 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
eMarketing and Social Media Consultant