WEBSITES
engines to catalogue the site more quickly and efficiently. But search engines keep changing their rules, Google has just brought in two new updates, ‘Penguin’ and ‘Panda’, so SEO is a job that can’t just be done once; it has to be refreshed when updates occur. Because most search engines have a bias in favour of recent content, what’s on the website also needs to be refreshed every month or so, too. Even the simplest content can be made
more search engine friendly. Property descriptions which give the name of the agent, the area, and the road, as well as the type of property, will get more hits than if they don’t; “Bloggs & Co offers a three- bedroom house on Norwich Road, Mulbarton” is good; “a delightful property with deceptively spacious living room” is not going to get you anywhere. Other content besides property
descriptions also helps drive traffic to the website; local news, details of local facilities, and so on. That’s often been provided by someone in the office writing a piece or two, but increasingly, web developers are offering content development as a service, often alongside social media work. Chris Haines is a great believer in “good honest content”, and he points out that this means the modern website needs to include a content management system. Without one, adding content is much more difficult, staff can’t do it themselves, and costly.
You need to be sure to build in a good content management system.’
differentiate between agents in these forums.” Having a website is no use if no one visits it, and driving traffic to the site has become a major concern. There are now many more ways to do it than there were, for instance, including ‘share’ buttons for Facebook and Twitter, which link back to the website. (Tweeting without linking back to the website is a bad mistake.)
CONTENT CONSCIOUS
Agentmedia specialises in social media marketing for the property sector, and quotes figures which show just how much agents stand to benefit from getting social media right, delivering “more leads for less.” An agent with 1,000 followers on Twitter will get ten times more leads, and one with 1,000 fans on Facebook twelve times more leads, than an agent which relies simply on
a passive website. Blogging, too, can more than double the number of leads coming in if it’s well done. On the other hand pay-per-click
advertising, which used to work well for some agents, is rapidly becoming commercially unsustainable, the cost of leads is simply too high, compared to portals or social media. That makes search engine friendliness
far more important. Search Engine Optimisation sounds like a black art, but there are a few basic rules that can help; for instance, not using html tables or frames in the structure of the web pages, not using ‘black hat’ strategies such as hidden text, ‘link farms’, or keyword stuffing, and not using ‘cloned’ content (Google heavily penalises duplicated content). Having a sitemap also helps by enabling search
You need to ask your- self, how will people engage with each other in the online
world of tomorrow?’ DAVE BARTLETT POCKET SIZE MEDIA
PROPERTYdrum JULY 2012 27
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