Website Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) focuses on helping Google and the other search engines to find your estate agent website.

On Site Search Engine Optimisation

We can help you to optimise the following key areas of your website . . .

Keyword selection

We recommend that you spend time researching which keywords and phrases you intend to use for each page. Google provides a great tool to assist in the selection of keywords, with information as to the likely amount of traffic and competition. We can help with the deployment of keywords and advise on keyword prominence, proximity and density. We can also offer advice on the pitfalls of keyword cramming and how to avoid penalties from Google.

Page Title

The most important 1 line summary of a page and essential to get right for the following reasons . . .

• The title carries the highest weighting in the Google algorithm.
• The title is the clickable link in the Search results and directory listings.
• The title appears in the top bar of internet browser windows.

The page title should be unique for each page on a website and be about 65 characters in length.

Meta Description

The Meta Description is used to provide a brief synopsis of the page, building on the information from the Title. This description also appears in the search results below the page title link, so it is worth the time spent writing something that will encourage a potential visitor to click on the link.

Page Content

We can advise on how to optimise and structure your page content to maximum effect.

It is important to retain control and ownership of your property details. If your estate agency has gone to the trouble in describing the properties, then it should be your estate agency that benefits from this content. If property details are embedded into the property search pages from companies such as Vebra, you will gain no benefit from this content. The same holds true If your estate agency links to an page on one of the portals that holds your property details. At Property-Mate, the property search pages and property details are on the same server as the rest of the website. This will be to your advantage.

Off Site Search Engine Optimisation

This area of optimising your website is mostly concerned with link building. Google in particular regards a link to your website as a vote for your website from another website. This helps to determine the PageRank* of your pages and is one of the corner-stones of the Google algorithm.

Link Building

It is important to consider the relevance of the websites that link back to your estate agent website - It would help if they are property related. PageRank is also important, there will be little advantage in websites linking to your website that have a PageRank of 0. Ideally, inbound links to your estate agent website should have a PageRank of 3 or more. Link farms should be avoided - ie websites set up for the sole purpose of linking to other websites.

Social Media, Blogs and Press Releases

Blogs can be very attractive to search engines as they are constantly refreshed with new content. It is worth creating accounts for your estate agency with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Uploading blogs on a regular basis, with links back to your website is definitely worth the extra effort.