Useless SEO Estate Agents shouldn’t use

 

Estate Agents who don’t fully understand search engine optimisation regularly get false trends put into their head, that they think will magically improve their Google Rankings. With SEO, practices change frequently and unless you are reading up-to-date articles or dealing with practiced SEO consultants, the information you are getting may be outdated and now irrelevant.

The best ways to keep up with the latest SEO trends is to obviously follow the leading industry blogs and also to put the practices into use. Testing out strategies is obviously the only way to be sure it works.

So in order to keep you from wasting your time on ‘out dated’ or ‘made up’ SEO tactics that won’t help your rankings, here’s a list of tactics you can remove from your SEO knowledge.�

• 1. Meta Keywords - Shockingly this one is still going around in the SEO world (including our competition). Meta keyword tags are completely useless and will have no effect what so ever on your ranking within Google.
  
  Keep in mind, Meta Description tags also won’t improve your ranking within Google, though may be used as a description on Google results page. A well writing description and title tag will lead to a better click-through rate and better visibility on Google results page.
• 2. XML Site Maps – poor site architecture is usually a key reason why your website performs badly on search engines. If your optimised pages are hidden away deep into the website, crawlers will struggle to get to it. Many people think creating an XML sitemap and submitting it to Webmaster tools will solve this problem. Think again, it may show Google these pages actually exist but being that deep in the website makes Google think these pages aren’t relevant.
• 3. Keyword Stuffed Content – this can actually have a negative effect on your SEO. This strategy hasn’t ever really been a good idea and even more so today. If you’ve stuff your content full of keyword phrases, removing some may help with your ranking.
• 4. Optimising for the wrong keywords – To clear up what “the wrong keywords” would be, keywords that don’t draw in traffic, keywords that aren’t relevant to your business and keywords that are impossible to optimise for (e.g. if you are a new Estate Agents, trying to optimise for “Estate Agents in London” just wont happen) are just a waste of time. Trying to rank for overly competitive keywords is just not going to happen. What you should try and do is figure out the phrases that people will be searching for. You should see more positive results this way.
• 5. Linking to popular websites: Links that are pointing to your website from other websites are what will help you with SEO. Linking to other websites won’t help you at all.
• 6. Redirecting an exact keyword domain to your actual website: Everyone knows Google seems to like domains that have keywords in them, but buying a keyword rich domain name and redirecting it to your business website wont actually help at all because search engines never see redirects...
• 7. Duplicate Content: its fine to republish an article someone else has already published but this won’t actually help you rank better. To help your website improve rankings instead of copying the article, just discuss them in your blog, talk about the good points and bad points of the article and make it more relevant to your website.
• 8. Trying to freshen up old content: Reposting old content, changing the date or changing a few words in an old article won’t help at all. If an article needs updating then post a new article.
• 9. Only optimising for one keyword on every page: Only optimising for a single keyword even if it brings you a lot of traffic is still such a waste on missing out on all the traffic you can be getting from other keywords. Every page doesn’t have to be dedicated to a single key phrase to rank well. Start targeting each page to its own specific set of key phrases that are relevant to what your business has to offer.

By Luke Stanley
SEO Consultant