Website SEO: 5 starting points

With SEO for Estate Agents like anything else, it is good to focus on the thing that is going to be looked at first.

Here are couple of things that Search Engines will pick up on first and as you have control over these factors it helps to get it perfect.

The Title Tag

The title tag will be visible in three places. It will be the title on your website, at the top of the browser in any tabs that are open and as the link in the search results. This obviously makes it one of the most important tags you can use as it’s the first thing people and search engines will see. The title should relate to the content within your Estate Agent website, preferably being your main keyword.

Description Tag

This isn’t really for SEO purposes but is still very important nevertheless. Search Engines will use this for the snippet of text below your title on the Search Engines results page. This is the snippet people will read before clicking on your link.

You want to get this right as it gives you the chance to tell potential customers exactly what you do. Also if the Search Engines don’t think its good enough for the users, they can pick out text from the website instead. This may not be what you want.

Having Keywords in your URL

This isn’t necessarily a must but it does carry a bit of weight in terms of SEO.

Heading tags

The title tag is the most important tag but the heading tags are definitely a close second. Think of them like the headlines in a newspaper. The main headline would be the H1 tag (E.g. Estate Agents in Exeter) and then having a few sub-headings which will be the H2 – H6 tags.

The H tags show Search Engines what headings are more important. H1 will be the most important and H6 will be the least.

Write your content naturally

This is the key thing most people slip up on as people simply don’t understand how to write content for a website. There is two ways people mess this up. The first being stuffing the content full of keywords, making it very difficult to read and it just looks awful too. The second being not putting in any keywords at all, making it impossible for the search engines to see what you are optimising for.

Stuffing your content with keywords will just get you penalised which will make you rank badly. Not putting any keywords in will simply not make you show up on Google where you want.

To resolve these problems write for humans first and then search engines after (if at all) by tweaking the content and adding in keywords (although if you are write naturally you should already have keywords in your content).

Write naturally and let the Search Engines figure it out as they are usually smart enough to get it right.

By Luke Stanley
SEO Consultant