Top 5 SEO website design tips for estate agents

Estate agents that are purely concerned with website design will fall at the first hurdle. Think of it this way, if no one is there to see it, what's the point in having it? In website design, you have to be passionate about the way it looks AND the way it performs in search engines. This is known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Without it, only users that know your web address will know where to go. Resource techniques has complied the top 5 SEO tips for estate agents below.

1). Content is King

This is undeniable when talking about SEO. Google is looking for relevant current content in the web sites that they index. This can include text, images, videos, animations, applications, blogs, social networking etc. Providing local or national property news is ideal for estate agents. When writing content, think about the wording as search engines scan for this.

2). Keywords

When scanning your website, Google will look for repeated keywords. Website designers will thoroughly check the density of keywords so that the website's SEO is optimised, but there is debate on what percentage that keywords should be used. Ideally a website design should be looking towards a 2% - 3% of repeated keywords. For estate agents, 'Estate agents in' and the local area is a particular favourite of the public as it follows a logical thought process.

3). Meta Tags

This is an invisible code that is embedded within your website. Meta tags are used by search engines to summarise the website. There are two main Meta tags that play an important role in SEO; description and keywords. The description Meta tag is a summary of the main text and the keywords Meta tag are the keywords that search engines at. Previously these have been abused by people using black hat SEO techniques, so now endlessly repeating keywords will flag your website as 'spam'.

4). Links

Simple rule for links: The more links you have pointing to your website, the better for SEO. This indicates a sense of popularity and is looked upon with great affection by search engines. The best links are from websites that have similar content to your own i.e. estate agents linking to other estate agents. Ideally you would want links to the most relevant pages on your website and not all to your homepage. One exception to this is having a website that is considered to be 'bad' pointing to your website, will count against your SEO.

5). Site Map

Search engines love an organised website design. A website that has sporadic page placement and erratic links will make the user experience very difficult and this will affect your SEO. The simplest way for estate agents to erase this problem is to draw out the website design and then draw lines between pages to show the links. To optimise SEO, ensure that every page can link to every other page.

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